{
 "schema": "diditwork.history/v1",
 "url": "https://diditwork.org/history",
 "title": "A short history of trying to do good, and knowing whether it worked",
 "reviewed": "2026-10-24",
 "note": "Historical case studies written by Did it work? Every factual claim cites a source by id; figures are as published by that source and, where they are estimates, are modeled, not guaranteed. These pages do not change any charity ranking, figure or evidence label. There are no numeric ratings: verdicts are words.",
 "dek": "Generosity is ancient. Asking seriously what it achieved is surprisingly recent. Here is how that question evolved, what each era got right, and what it missed.",
 "thesis": "Every era of giving judged something. First the giver's heart, then the recipient's worthiness, then the ambition of the institution, and only quite recently the result itself. Each step moved the judgement closer to what is actually in the glass. That is the whole story of this site in one line: judge the outcome, not the label.",
 "eras": [
  {
   "id": "duty",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#duty",
   "when": "Faith traditions",
   "title": "Giving as duty",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "Several of the world's great faiths made giving an obligation rather than a mood. In Islam, zakat is an obligatory annual alms and one of the five pillars of the faith. [britannica_zakat] In Jewish law, Maimonides ranked eight levels of charity, from giving grudgingly at the bottom to, at the very top, helping someone become self-sufficient through a gift, a loan, a partnership or a job. [jvl_maimonides]",
    "That top rung is worth pausing on. Long before anyone ran a trial, the highest form of giving was defined by its result: a person who no longer needs charity."
   ],
   "learned": "Giving was judged mainly by the giver's manner and intent. But the best of the old thinking already pointed at outcomes.",
   "source_ids": [
    "britannica_zakat",
    "jvl_maimonides"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "parish",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#parish",
   "when": "1601 onward",
   "title": "The parish and the almshouse",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "In England, the 1601 Act for the relief of the poor made each parish responsible for its own poor, paid for by a local rate. It set the able-bodied to work, apprenticed children, and allowed parishes to build dwellings for those who could not work. [statutes_1601]",
    "Charity was local and personal. The giver often knew the recipient by name, which made it easy to see what happened next, and easy to judge people rather than results."
   ],
   "learned": "Proximity gave donors feedback, but the feedback was about people's character, not about whether help worked.",
   "source_ids": [
    "statutes_1601"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "scientific-charity",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#scientific-charity",
   "when": "1869 onward",
   "title": "Victorian “scientific charity”",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "The Charity Organisation Society, founded in London in 1869 and copied in Buffalo, New York, in 1877, set out to coordinate relief, investigate every applicant's “worthiness” and register cases so that help was not duplicated. [vcu_cos]",
    "It was the first serious attempt to bring method to giving, and it pointed its method in the wrong direction. It spent its energy on whether the poor deserved help, not on whether the help made them better off."
   ],
   "learned": "Measurement arrived, aimed at the recipient's worthiness. The lesson: investigate the programme, not the person.",
   "source_ids": [
    "vcu_cos"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "foundations",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#foundations",
   "when": "1889–1930s",
   "title": "Carnegie, Rockefeller and the great foundations",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "In 1889 Andrew Carnegie argued that the rich were trustees of their wealth and wrote that \"the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced\". [gospel] The Rockefeller Foundation was chartered in 1913 \"to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world\". [rf_charter]",
    "Before it, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission surveyed hookworm across the South, found about 40 percent of school-aged children infected, and treated it; economists later showed schooling and earnings rose where the disease had been worst. [bleakley] Julius Rosenwald's programme built nearly 5,000 rural schools for Black children, with gains in literacy and schooling that researchers could still measure decades later. [rosenwald_jpe]"
   ],
   "learned": "Big money began aiming at root causes and building institutions. The best of it surveyed before acting, which is what made the results knowable.",
   "source_ids": [
    "gospel",
    "rf_charter",
    "bleakley",
    "rosenwald_jpe"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "polio",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#polio",
   "when": "1938–1955",
   "title": "Dimes, and a proper test",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later the March of Dimes, turned millions of small gifts into patient care and research. [mod_history] It backed field studies of the Salk vaccine involving about 1.8 million children, and on 12 April 1955 the vaccine was announced as \"safe, effective, and potent\". [cdc_polio]"
   ],
   "learned": "Ordinary donors funded a large, public test before the public was asked to trust the result. That is still the gold standard.",
   "source_ids": [
    "mod_history",
    "cdc_polio"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "science-at-scale",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#science-at-scale",
   "when": "1943–1980",
   "title": "Science at scale: wheat, smallpox, salt and sugar",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "A Rockefeller Foundation programme in Mexico, begun in 1943, bred the wheat varieties that helped launch the Green Revolution, and Norman Borlaug won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for it. [rac_map] [nobel_borlaug] Researchers estimate that high-yielding varieties raised food-crop yields by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010. [gollin]",
    "In 1967 WHO launched its intensified campaign against smallpox; in 1980 the disease was declared eradicated. [who_smallpox_40] [wha33] In 1978 The Lancet called the science behind oral rehydration \"potentially the most important medical advance this century\", and BRAC went on to teach it to mothers in about 12 million Bangladeshi households. [lancet_ort] [cash_ort]"
   ],
   "learned": "When the outcome can be counted directly, such as cases, harvests or children rehydrated, steer by it. The biggest wins in history were the most measurable.",
   "source_ids": [
    "rac_map",
    "nobel_borlaug",
    "gollin",
    "who_smallpox_40",
    "wha33",
    "lancet_ort",
    "cash_ort"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "global-health",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#global-health",
   "when": "1999–2003",
   "title": "The global health machine",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "A $750 million pledge from the Gates Foundation in 1999 helped launch Gavi, the vaccine alliance. [gates_gavi_1999] The Global Fund followed in 2002 and the US government's PEPFAR in 2003. [gf_2025] [pepfar_state] Each now publishes large estimates of lives saved: 70 million for the Global Fund since 2002, by its own count, and 25 million for PEPFAR, by the State Department's. [gf_2025] [pepfar_state]"
   ],
   "learned": "Pooled funds brought scale and annual results reports. Their headline numbers are modeled and the credit is shared, so read them as careful estimates, not counts.",
   "source_ids": [
    "gates_gavi_1999",
    "gf_2025",
    "pepfar_state"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "randomistas",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#randomistas",
   "when": "2003–2019",
   "title": "The randomistas",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "In 2003 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan founded J-PAL at MIT to test anti-poverty programmes with randomised trials. [mit_jpal] In 2019 Banerjee, Duflo and Michael Kremer shared the Nobel prize in economics \"for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty\". [nobel_2019]",
    "Trials revealed what good intentions could not. Cash transfers did measurable good. [haushofer] Free laptops did not raise test scores. [olpc_peru] And taking young people on prison visits to scare them straight made offending more likely, not less. [campbell_scared]"
   ],
   "learned": "The question became counterfactual: compared with what would have happened anyway? That one question retired more bad ideas than any scandal.",
   "source_ids": [
    "mit_jpal",
    "nobel_2019",
    "haushofer",
    "olpc_peru",
    "campbell_scared"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "evaluators",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#evaluators",
   "when": "1972–today",
   "title": "Evaluators and effective altruism",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "In 1972 Peter Singer argued that if we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to. [singer] In 2007 two people who had worked in finance founded GiveWell to research where donations do the most good. [givewell_story] Animal Charity Evaluators followed for animal welfare, and the Happier Lives Institute, founded in 2019, began comparing charities by their effect on wellbeing. [ace_about] [hli_faq] In 2025 Open Philanthropy, a major funder in this tradition, renamed itself Coefficient Giving as it began working with more donors. [coefficient]",
    "The movement's great contribution was cost per outcome and room for more funding: not just whether a programme works, but how much good the next dollar does. Its great embarrassment was the FTX collapse in 2022, which showed that judging where money goes is not enough if you never ask where it comes from. [ftx_resign]"
   ],
   "learned": "Compare cost per outcome, ask what the next dollar does, and stay humble about your own models.",
   "source_ids": [
    "singer",
    "givewell_story",
    "ace_about",
    "hli_faq",
    "coefficient",
    "ftx_resign"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "giving-machine",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#giving-machine",
   "when": "Recent decades",
   "title": "The modern giving machine",
   "opinion": false,
   "body": [
    "Donor-advised funds made giving easy to start and easy to postpone. Almost 2 million people now give through them. [dafrc]",
    "The plumbing of giving has never been better. The plumbing of knowing has barely changed. A donor can move money in seconds and still have no idea, a year later, whether it did anything."
   ],
   "learned": "Convenience is not impact. Money parked for good is not yet doing good.",
   "source_ids": [
    "dafrc"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "agents",
   "url": "https://diditwork.org/history#agents",
   "when": "Now",
   "title": "AI agents at the table",
   "opinion": true,
   "body": [
    "When someone asks an AI assistant where to give, the assistant reads what the evaluators publish, and what we publish, and then answers with great confidence. It can make good evidence available to everyone, or launder a guess into a fact at enormous scale.",
    "That is why everything on this site carries its source and its date, labels estimates as modeled, not guaranteed, and keeps a dated record we check again later. We built it for people first and machines second, and we hold both to the same rule."
   ],
   "learned": "The next era will be judged on whether machines quote evidence honestly. We intend to make that easy.",
   "source_ids": []
  }
 ],
 "takeaways": [
  "Judge the outcome, not the label. Fame, overhead ratios and moving stories are all labels.",
  "Ask \"compared with what?\" before \"how much?\". Most failures on our wall of shame skipped it.",
  "Measure the baseline before you spend. The best campaigns in history surveyed first.",
  "Prefer things that can be counted directly, and be honest when they can't.",
  "Give while you can still watch it work, and change course when it doesn't.",
  "Delight is allowed. When something works, say so loudly, and fund more of it."
 ],
 "sources": [
  {
   "id": "britannica_zakat",
   "title": "Zakat",
   "publisher": "Encyclopaedia Britannica",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://www.britannica.com/topic/zakat"
  },
  {
   "id": "jvl_maimonides",
   "title": "Eight levels of charitable giving (Maimonides)",
   "publisher": "Jewish Virtual Library",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/eight-levels-of-charitable-giving"
  },
  {
   "id": "statutes_1601",
   "title": "1601: 43 Elizabeth I c.2, Act for the relief of the poor",
   "publisher": "The Statutes Project",
   "year": "1601",
   "url": "https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/seventeenth-century/1601-43-elizabeth-c-2-act-for-the-relief-of-the-poor/"
  },
  {
   "id": "vcu_cos",
   "title": "Charity Organization Societies: 1877–1893",
   "publisher": "Social Welfare History Project, VCU Libraries",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/charity-organization-societies-1877-1893/"
  },
  {
   "id": "gospel",
   "title": "The Gospel of Wealth",
   "publisher": "Carnegie Corporation of New York",
   "year": "1889",
   "url": "https://carnegie.org/publication/the-gospel-of-wealth/"
  },
  {
   "id": "rf_charter",
   "title": "The Rockefeller Foundation charter",
   "publisher": "Rockefeller Foundation",
   "year": "1913",
   "url": "https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Rockefeller-Foundation-Charter.pdf"
  },
  {
   "id": "bleakley",
   "title": "Disease and Development: Evidence from Hookworm Eradication in the American South (Bleakley)",
   "publisher": "Quarterly Journal of Economics",
   "year": "2007",
   "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3800113/"
  },
  {
   "id": "rosenwald_jpe",
   "title": "The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement (Aaronson, Mazumder)",
   "publisher": "Journal of Political Economy",
   "year": "2011",
   "url": "https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/662962"
  },
  {
   "id": "mod_history",
   "title": "History of March of Dimes",
   "publisher": "March of Dimes",
   "year": "2010",
   "url": "https://www.marchofdimes.org/about-us/mission/history/history-march-dimes"
  },
  {
   "id": "cdc_polio",
   "title": "50th anniversary of the first effective polio vaccine",
   "publisher": "CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report",
   "year": "2005",
   "url": "https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5413a5.htm"
  },
  {
   "id": "rac_map",
   "title": "The Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Agriculture Program, 1943–1965",
   "publisher": "Rockefeller Archive Center",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-foundations-mexican-agriculture-program-1943-1965/"
  },
  {
   "id": "nobel_borlaug",
   "title": "Norman Borlaug: facts",
   "publisher": "NobelPrize.org",
   "year": "1970",
   "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/facts/"
  },
  {
   "id": "gollin",
   "title": "Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution (Gollin, Hansen, Wingender)",
   "publisher": "Journal of Political Economy",
   "year": "2021",
   "url": "https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/714444"
  },
  {
   "id": "who_smallpox_40",
   "title": "WHO: Commemorating the 40th anniversary of smallpox eradication",
   "publisher": "World Health Organization",
   "year": "2020",
   "url": "https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2020/05/08/default-calendar/commemorating-the-40th-anniversary-of-smallpox-eradication"
  },
  {
   "id": "wha33",
   "title": "WHA33.3: Declaration of global eradication of smallpox",
   "publisher": "World Health Assembly",
   "year": "1980",
   "url": "https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHA33-3"
  },
  {
   "id": "lancet_ort",
   "title": "Water with sugar and salt (editorial)",
   "publisher": "The Lancet",
   "year": "1978",
   "url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(78)91698-7"
  },
  {
   "id": "cash_ort",
   "title": "Using Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in the Community (Cash)",
   "publisher": "Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease",
   "year": "2021",
   "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8261626/"
  },
  {
   "id": "gates_gavi_1999",
   "title": "Gates Foundation announces $750 million gift to speed delivery of life-saving vaccines",
   "publisher": "Gates Foundation",
   "year": "1999",
   "url": "https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/1999/11/global-alliance-for-vaccines-and-immunization"
  },
  {
   "id": "gf_2025",
   "title": "Global Fund reports 70 million lives saved, but warns progress is at risk",
   "publisher": "The Global Fund",
   "year": "2025",
   "url": "https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/news/2025/2025-09-10-global-fund-reports-70-million-lives-saved-but-warns-progress-is-at-risk/"
  },
  {
   "id": "pepfar_state",
   "title": "About PEPFAR",
   "publisher": "U.S. Department of State",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://www.state.gov/about-us-pepfar"
  },
  {
   "id": "mit_jpal",
   "title": "How J-PAL thinks globally and acts locally",
   "publisher": "MIT News",
   "year": "2017",
   "url": "https://news.mit.edu/2017/j-pal-antipoverty-program-users-guide-0628"
  },
  {
   "id": "nobel_2019",
   "title": "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019: press release",
   "publisher": "Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences",
   "year": "2019",
   "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/press-release/"
  },
  {
   "id": "haushofer",
   "title": "The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya (Haushofer, Shapiro)",
   "publisher": "Quarterly Journal of Economics",
   "year": "2016",
   "url": "https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw025"
  },
  {
   "id": "olpc_peru",
   "title": "Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program (Cristia et al.)",
   "publisher": "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics",
   "year": "2017",
   "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fapp.20150385"
  },
  {
   "id": "campbell_scared",
   "title": "'Scared Straight' and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency (Petrosino et al.)",
   "publisher": "Campbell Collaboration",
   "year": "2013",
   "url": "https://www.campbellcollaboration.org/review/juvenile-delinquency-scared-straight-etc-programmes/"
  },
  {
   "id": "singer",
   "title": "Famine, Affluence, and Morality (Singer)",
   "publisher": "Philosophy & Public Affairs",
   "year": "1972",
   "url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052"
  },
  {
   "id": "givewell_story",
   "title": "Our story",
   "publisher": "GiveWell",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://www.givewell.org/about/story"
  },
  {
   "id": "ace_about",
   "title": "About",
   "publisher": "Animal Charity Evaluators",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://animalcharityevaluators.org/about/"
  },
  {
   "id": "hli_faq",
   "title": "Frequently asked questions",
   "publisher": "Happier Lives Institute",
   "year": null,
   "url": "https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/faqs/"
  },
  {
   "id": "coefficient",
   "title": "Open Philanthropy is now Coefficient Giving",
   "publisher": "Coefficient Giving",
   "year": "2025",
   "url": "https://coefficientgiving.org/research/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving/"
  },
  {
   "id": "ftx_resign",
   "title": "The FTX Future Fund team has resigned",
   "publisher": "Effective Altruism Forum (statement by the Future Fund team)",
   "year": "2022",
   "url": "https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned"
  },
  {
   "id": "dafrc",
   "title": "Research and publications",
   "publisher": "Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative",
   "year": "2026",
   "url": "https://www.dafresearchcollaborative.org/research"
  }
 ]
}