Puerto Rico, today, is in the worst crisis that America has seen in living memory. Millions of Americans on the island are struggling desperately with no electricity, few public services, and severe shortages of food, potable water, medicine, and shelter. It’s a humanitarian disaster, and it’s being woefully…

I spent Tuesday at a fascinating conference* in Silicon Valley, which came complete with roughly the level of inchoate enthusiasm about things like blockchain technology that you might expect. (Note to techno-utopians: No, bitcoin is not obviously helpful in Venezuela right now. Even if everybody in the country had a…

What would you say if I were to tell you that you could make the world a better place by spending an extra $1,500 a year at the grocery store? Perhaps you would say that, for all that you believed in the cause, you really didn’t have $1,500 to spend supporting it. Which is fair enough: That’s a substantial chunk of…

Matt Levine really likes the Cliff Asness take on socially responsible investing. Which, in short, says that if virtuous people avoid a stock, then the price of that stock will fall, thereby increasing the returns reaped by the people who aren’t virtuous and who buy it.

Giving cash to the needy is the simplest and most effective form of charity – one which has stood the test of millennia. Gussied up as “unconditional cash transfers,” it’s now changing the world of development and philanthropy, and being embraced by the likes of the International Rescue Committee and many others.

There’s a disaster in the world, so, sure as night follows day, the Red Cross fundraising machine has groaned back into action, helped by millions of well-meaning individuals on various social media platforms. The pictures of devastation are all over the TV, people want to Do Something, and all too often the first and…

The Berkshire Museum is still not getting back to me, sadly, but the museum did respond on Facebook to my last post about its financials:

I just spent a lovely weekend in the Berkshires, which included (of course) a stop at the Berkshire Museum. My trip coincided with the publication of an open letter from the museum’s president, Buzz McGraw, where she says that while she understands the “shock, sadness and anger” which greeted her decision to sell of…

Matt Levine makes a very interesting point in his newsletter this morning:

The US government is going to give $51.8 billion to charity this year. Not directly: it doesn’t have an army of technocrats deciding which charities get $1,000 and which get $100 million. Instead, it just has the charitable tax deduction.

The Berkshire Museum has now hired extra crisis-PR help. So here are a few ideas about what it should do next, on the messaging front. The tl;dr: try engaging your critics a little bit, and being much more honest about the realities you’re facing and the trade-offs you are making.

Ingredients:

Back in May, Kriston Capps ripped into the Little Free Libraries movement, with some decent arguments on his side.

Wanna read a new scientific paper about deforestation? Two brand new ones came out on Thursday.

My Twitter followers are a very smart bunch, in general, and so I expected the wisdom of crowds to win out when I put this question to them on Monday.

When museums sell off their treasures, one jargon word is unavoidable: “deaccession”. The thing to look out for is how many other jargon words there are. As ever, more = worse.

Never let it be said that nothing substantive ever comes out of expense-account boondoggles like the Black Corporate Directors Conference. Every so often, a well-placed question can result in positive changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Rich people often target their philanthropic donations in the direction of other rich people. Warren Buffett gives billions to Bill Gates; Reid Hoffman gives millions to Mark Zuckerberg. When it’s done well (and Buffett has done it well), this can be an extremely effective exercise in allocative efficiency.