SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week it's just me uh doing a bit of a deep dive exploration episode. Um and I should say, just for some background context, that I've just come back from uh a week of annual leave for the Easter holidays, and this is my first day back in work, so whether I'm entirely mentally cogent enough to be attempting to uh pull together thoughts in in any sort of systematic way will remain to be seen, but I'm gonna do my best. Um and what I wanted to talk about today is uh philanthropy and disaster relief. Um so this is something that I've obviously been thinking about quite a lot uh at the moment, as I'm sure many other people have, in the context of a number of disasters uh happening around the world. Obviously, very notable the um the situation continuing to unfold in the Ukraine, but also other ongoing disasters around the world in Afghanistan, uh in Tigray and in other places. These are interesting, I think, because they raise all kinds of questions about the philanthropic response that you get to disasters, some of which are sort of specific to disasters as a particular form of philanthropy, and others which are kind of more broadly about philanthropy as a whole, or which kind of tell you something about the way in which these individual episodes of disaster relief philanthropy have played a part in kind of shaping philanthropy more broadly. Um and it's a phenomenon that is as old as the Hills, as we're going to see. Um so what I want to do is take a look first at the history of disaster relief and the philanthropic response to it, then take a bit of a look at some of what current day uh psychology and economics and other sciences can tell us about why we give to particular disasters and and how we do and and kind of the things that shape our decisions, and then relate uh all of that to some of what's going on currently in the last section. Okay, so the place to start then I think in terms of looking at the history is just to think back to what sorts of things we might be talking about if we're talking about disasters, um, and for long periods of history, I mean what we were talking about is a sort of classic, you know, biblical things in a way, um you know, famine, plague, and fires as well. One very notable part of the philanthropic uh landscape for a long time, certainly in the UK stretching back into the fifteenth and sixteenth century, is that there would be very um large fires in towns and cities uh all around the place because obviously houses were closely packed together and made of wood and straw and other sort of flammable materials, and unsurprisingly quite often these would burst into to flames um because people were sort of having fires in houses and that kind of thing. And there are well known examples of these, you know, the obvious one being the Great Fire of London, but there were very regular occurrences of them. And at this point there wasn't really much kind of formalised state infrastructure for dealing with welfare, if any, and there wasn't really much formalized charitable infrastructure, there weren't really any sort of charitable organisations as such. So what form did the kind of disaster relief fundraising take? Well, it took the form of something called a charitable brief, which was a sort of one off fundraising appeal that could be organised either sort of centrally by the government or more often by kind of local government or local mayors or other kind of prominent figures. Um and these would be um essentially kind of issued out calls for people to donate to uh a kind of standalone fund that was set up specifically to deal with you know that particular fire and to gather in money for it that should then be spent by whichever body had uh had kind of raised the the brief in the first place. And then you know, as you move on over time, um what we see is as industrialization kicks in, the nature of the sort of challenges that society is facing alter slightly. I mean, there's still many problems with disease and and uh famine, uh some of which are caused by events overseas, so during kind of various overseas wars they have a real impact on the UK economy and there are some sort of notable famines, or they're caused by things like the um reliance on particular kind of supply chains or industries, so things like the Lancashire Cotton famine, for instance, become, you know, with the result uh or led to really quite significant sort of philanthropic appeals. There's also lots of industrial disasters, so colliery disasters and coal mining become a very big part of the landscape. And then towards the end of the nineteenth century, um you get really sort of the first emergence of a more kind of ongoing uh infrastructure for disaster appeal fundraising and philanthropy in the form of the Mansion House Appeals. So these were organised by the Lord Mayor um of London uh and under the auspices of the Manchin House Um Committee, which was essentially a sort of organisation that could call on the great and the good of London and particularly sort of people from finance, and was able it would issue sort of uh appeals, uh, and there would be an annual appeal, but there would also be one-off disaster appeals, and they would often be linked to big disasters either in the UK or increasingly sort of overseas, and it was quite international in its outlook. Um, and these would raise very large amounts of money which were then sort of given out to those communities affected by these disasters. And this really sort of set the template for what we see more then as we move into the the 20th century, which is the emergence of sort of international NGOs, INGOs and other organizations kind of dealing specifically with disaster relief, um, and also you know, often this going hand in hand with more kind of ongoing humanitarian and development aid. And so you see lots of big organizations like uh Save the Children or Oxfam uh emerging in this period. Then just scooting forward a little bit further in terms of important uh elements of the history, then in the um the 60s in 1963, there's a another layer of centralization among those organizations when it comes to specific disaster relief with the creation of the Disasters Emergency Committee. So it's a sort of that's a f an organization, it's a kind of meta-charity in a way, which represents um somewhere where large uh charities, and I think there's fourteen of them now involved in the DEC in the UK, um, players like Oxfam and Save the Children and Christian Aid and and British Red Cross and others, they all kind of come together when when a specific uh disaster is kind of recognised and a an appeal or a campaign is set up. And the idea behind this being they can all kind of pool their resources so they're not competing for fundraising and also in terms of getting large amounts of money in and then distributing it's uh kind of a mechanism for streamlining that. Um and the the first appeal that they uh broadcast certainly on the BBC was uh in August 1966 for an earthquake in eastern Turkey, um, which raised a record fundraising sum of £560,000. Um and from that point on it's been a huge part of the landscape and really sort of seen as uh you know a great kind of model of of success in disaster appeal fundraising. Um and then the the the other bit that sort of became more prominent um from the 1980s onwards, and I guess is still with us today, although perhaps not as much as it as it was back then in its heyday, is the idea of these sort of one-off disaster uh appeals of the the kind of live aid or band-aid variety with a heavy celebrity element and often linked to kind of fundraising singles or concerts as well. Um and these really sort of um became very much uh a huge part of the landscape in the 1980s and really kind of shaped people's ideas about both kind of famine and poverty, but also about charity and and gave rise to many sort of you know tropes that that still sort of shape people's thinking about charity even today. And I guess what I want to to do now, from having cantered through that history sort of in a slightly linear way, go back and kind of pick out some of what I think are the most interesting themes that tell us something about disaster relief philanthropy today. So let's let's think first about the sort of the collection side of things. So the you know, the the appeal for money and kind of getting money in, the the fundraising. So one of the the the kind of big overarching themes here, um, which I think will still resonate very much today, is the sense that um raising money for z for disasters um is different and in some ways easier than it is to raise money for the the kind of ongoing needs of a society. So I think we know this phenomenon well that actually if if a particular story about a disaster really strikes um a chord with people and really kind of uh has an impact and cuts through to them, the amount of money raised from the public can be absolutely astonishing. But then there's almost inevitably people who turn around and then say, well, we all know perfectly well that there are needs going on all the time in terms of poverty or the environment or any other cause you choose to mention. So why is it only that at the point we're presented with you know things in the form of being a single disaster event that we give in this way? And there's an interesting quote here sort of showing that this is not a new phenomenon from David Owen's uh book on English philanthropy uh sixteen sixty to nineteen sixty. He says the Indian Mutiny Relief Fund, for which about four hundred and seventy five thousand pounds was raised in three years, gave further evidence of the immediate and lavish response evoked by distress resulting from service to the nation. Promoters of such efforts were neither the first nor last to discover how much more readily pockets are turned inside out for a dramatic emergency or national crisis than for the year by year requirements of constructive philanthropy. But then I guess the the flip side to this is also to show that actually, whilst that's a frustration, I think, for fundraisers and for organizations in in all fields that are trying to sort of continue to do the ongoing work of philanthropy or civil society and finding that it's you know that much more difficult to get people to to put their hands in their pockets for that often, these disaster events have, when they've they've kind of erupted and resulted in much larger levels of giving, have often shifted things forward or accelerated them um and actually kind of shaped the way in which philanthropy as a whole works. So certainly um another historian, WK Jordan, looking at uh philanthropy um in the sort of Tudor and and Stuart era, um, he makes a big point of the fact that actually the the ongoing impact or the regular recurrence of epidemics and the fact that at a local level this forced um the parish or you know the the city to have to kind of implement the mechanics of the poor laws and also to work out how to efficiently and effectively manage and fundraising and the distribution of money really kind of sharpened people's thinking on what the relative responsibilities of the state versus voluntary giving was and and where philanthropy sort of sat in all of that. So actually it kind of had a pretty big impact, not not just on philanthropy, but also on the whole kind of shape of state welfare subsequently. In terms of other sort of lessons that we can take, there's some interesting things from the kind of techniques that people used to try and drive donations to disasters, you know, things that again will sound very familiar to modern ears. So fundraisers of kind of previous eras were very well aware of the power of social information or kind of peer pressure. So they would they would almost always kind of publish donor lists um of people who had already given uh to a particular disaster relief uh appeal. Uh and sometimes that would be sort of at a local level and it would you know literally be kind of put up outside you know a building or outside the town hall. But they would also increasingly use newspapers, whether those are sort of local or national newspapers. And actually you can look in in national newspapers like the Times and things and and look at pages that have been taken out where they will publish the lists of subscriptions to individual individual kind of uh disasters at sea, so like the Padstow lifeboat uh disaster and all these sorts of things. Um and then you know the idea being that you show who has given to them, and also by implication who has not given to them. So there's an interesting quote here saying, you know, giving to worthy causes played a large role in the Victorian notion of morality, and this notion was incorporated in the social approval attached to giving. To exploit this incentive for keeping up with the Joneses in giving, the local relief committees published each weekly donation list on the front page of the newspaper, listing names in decreasing order of amounts given. Consequently, local residents felt many pressures to donate to charity. And in terms of who was giving those gifts, um there was also an important role, I think, for sort of leadership gifts. So it was often sort of thought that you know those in something like a colliery disaster, for instance, there was a huge kind of social uh onus on the the owners of the colliery to be the ones who give prominent gifts early on and sort of encourage others thereby to to sort of follow their lead. It's also you know the stigma of not giving was notable. So there's um one thing I came across looking at a um a flood in 1912 in uh Norfolk, I think it was, around Norwich. And the the Lord Mayor's Relief Fund there raised um a lot of money, and particularly the local business Coleman's that makes um mustard and still does today, uh, gave quite a large amount of money. But there were lots of other retailers who were notable by their absence from the lists and got kind of boycotted and castigated by local residents. Um so I think you know it's really interesting to see that that actually people were using those tools of kind of social information and peer pressure very astutely and have been doing for a long time. Um another thing I think is really interesting is that it's it's easy sometimes to assume that in the past, because of the limitations of communication and uh transport, that the disaster relief was a much more parochial affair, and that what we're talking about is people raising money and giving money at a very local level for disasters that are sort of directly and tangibly affected them. But that's not really the case. I mean, actually, when you look at lots of different disasters, and particularly into the nineteenth century, when you have you know newspapers and you start to have the beginning of kind of telegraph communication, actually the money raised for things like the Lancashire Cotton Famine, for instance, was money coming in from all over the place. Um, so you know there's reports here of um I found in the the Times newspaper uh a letter from the mayor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, enclosing money uh given to the Lancashire Cotton Famine Relief Fund. And he's saying, although the population of Halifax is small, not exceeding 25,000, and our means are correspondingly limited, I hope that the present remittance will be shortly followed by a further sum, and that the inhabitants of the province of Nova Scotia at large, who are at that moment uh organising plans to follow the example of the capital will still further increase the contributions. And there's lots of other examples of this as as well. The other key lesson I think you can uh determine from looking at how money was collected for uh disasters um historically is that the perception of the disaster itself and of the people who were the victims of it is really important here. Um and this will we'll talk about this more in the section on the sort of psychology and economics, but the whole uh idea of whether victims are seen as uh to some extent to blame for the disaster or whether they're seen as entirely innocent has a huge bearing on people's willingness to give. So it's interesting things, you know, nuggets, historical ones, um, such as in a paper on the uh charitable response to the Great Fire of London in 1666, um it's noted that actually the um there was some uh it says after the civil wars there was a widespread distrust of London, as many royalists saw it as the cradle of rebellion. R residents of provincial towns may have resented the increasing centralization of the economy of London. And so they were less willing to give to that. They still did give quite significant amounts, but it's notable that actually there was less given by inhabitants around the UK to the Great Fire of London than there were to similar fires in other cities around Europe even. Even more notable though, is the constant recurrence in in all these reports of disasters and the philanthropic response in the past, of the idea that the perception of of the victims and kind of how both both their status at the time of the disaster but also how they kind of um carried themselves in the face of that disaster played a huge role in determining whether people gave to them. It it said, you know, often I mean there's a huge class element to this, so obviously when you're talking about kind of colliery disasters and and things like this, that is disasters that almost exclusively affected the working classes. And often the money that was fundraised was coming from the middle and and upper classes, and the the sort of perception of those working classes in those cases, if they were seen to be sort of uppity or troublesome or demanding um or you know, kind of involved in things like God forbid trade unionism or that kind of thing, they the middle and upper classes would probably be more wary of supporting those disasters. Whereas actually if they were seen as being kind of you know deferen suitably deferential but also kind of hard working and and honest communities, then people would be more likely to put their money in their pockets. It's saying one interesting report saying, you know, people outside of Lancashire became more aware of the workers suffering after a brief series of letters to the London Times from a Lancashire lad, so this was a sort of pseudonym. Um and this Lancashire lad, whether it was one person or not, or whether it was you know just a character created, kind of presented uh, you know, a very desirable kind of ideal of a sort of um s solid and reliable working class individual who was kind of uncomplainingly getting on with things in the face of great adversity, and this really kind of suited the beliefs of the middle and upper classes about you know what they thought the working class should be. And I think this um this whole idea that actually the the way in which the people who are being asked to donate to a particular disaster um relief appeal think about the people who um who have been affected by it, it continues to this day and certainly I think has become more problematic even in the context of sort of international uh appeals, because there are different dimensions there in terms of views of you know race and poverty in other parts of the world. I mean this is you know, this is something that lots of charities have been criticized for, and it's been something that the Disasters Emergency Committee, which we mentioned earlier, um, has at times been kind of criticized for as well, uh of playing into those sort of stereotypes and perceptions of you know starving fly-coloured African children, which were very much the template in the nineteen eighties and before that, and lots of people object to them on the basis that they think they are not an accurate representation of you know countries in Africa and other places, and that they actually kind of unhelpfully perpetuate um a view of um the global south as as kind of um as nations of poor victims and and actually, you know, we should have different, if not necessarily more positive, representations in in the the sense of being sort of happier, because these are places of fli you know often afflicted by significant challenges than ones that are more empowering and less sort of paternalistic. So it's something that very much continues uh to this day. Um and then the the other thing that that we also see from from the history, which again I think resonates very much today when it comes to asking people to donate money uh to disaster appeals, is the dangers of competition and compassion fatigue. So again, you look at the the historical details of disaster relief fundraising in the nineteenth century, and there were lots of different disasters, as we've said, you know, an increasing number of sort of industrial disasters, um, whether those are kind of colliery disasters or railway disasters or others. And and sometimes this would be a problem. So there's certainly reports um that the uh the mansion house appeal um it found um in eighteen seventy-eight um said, you know, it can become far more problematic when, as in eighteen seventy eight, major domestic disasters coincided. In the normal run of things, the capsizing of the Princess Alice pleasure boat on the Thames with the loss of six hundred and forty lives six hundred and forty is a lot, isn't it? On September third, and the loss of two hundred and sixty eight men at a pit explosion in Abacan, South Wales on the eleventh of September would have been prime candidates for individual mansion house appeals, both sufficiently spectacular and heart rending in their effects to draw donations from beyond their localities. The events occurring within days of one another, however, meant that matters were not so cut and dried. The Lord Mayor was initially loath to grant Abacan a mansion house fund, reasoning that it would cut the previously announced Princess Alice appeal in two. He was persuaded to change his mind after announcing his decision, when a delegation pressed the Welsh claims upon him and argued that great claims upon charity do not as a rule reduce subscriptions but increase them, which again is something that we will come on to a little bit later in the economics. Section. This is a really important question. Does disaster relief philanthropy cut into other philanthropies? It's sort of in competition with it and cannibalizing it in some sense. Okay, so let's just shift now to think a bit about the distribution of money. So that kind of once you raise the money for a disaster, getting it out again and what we can learn from this. And again, I think there are some interesting things. So you know, a complaint that you still hear today is that you know money's not getting being got out of the door fast enough. And you see this again and again when people sort of respond to a disaster at a local level, and we saw it during the pandemic, and then people start to get frustrated if they think that their money is not getting to the front line or to where it's needed as quickly as it should. And again, going back to the the Great Fire of London in 1666, this was a something that lots of people were sort of criticizing the the people who organised that charitable brief about. So it said, you know, the the pace of collection and the relative tardiness of its distribution striking. In the first eight weeks after the brief was proclaimed, two thousand three hundred and twenty seven pounds and ninety one pence had been collected. However, only nine pounds and eighty six pence had been spent in this and all of this had been on legal and administrative costs. So you know God knows what the Daily Mail would have made of that in this day and age. Now, often this sort of slow pace in distribution was linked to another kind of key theme that we can see, which is this real desire on the parts of those distributing the money or charged with distributing it to make sure that it goes to those who are the most deserving in some sense. And this is not necessarily deserving in the sense of most affected by the disaster, but it's tied up with the sort of moralistic ideas of the deserving and the undeserving poor that were a huge kind of shaping force and have been for many hundreds of years and unfortunately continue to be today. And so in one of the things you see a lot in in kind of reports of disaster philanthropy in the 19th century is the you know the middle or upper classes who are tasked with the administration of these funds put in place quite punitive rules designed to ensure that what they're not doing is is making anyone better off than they would have been beforehand. So you know they were they were constantly worried about the fact that um you know charity given to people um it kind of bred laziness and and reliance and undermined the will to sort of self-help and industry. So there's a report here about the Hartley Fund, which was in response to the Hartley Colliery disaster. Um it said introducing the proposed permanent scale of payments to the Committee of the Hartley Fund, Hugh Taylor articulated this fear of the unwelcome consequences of too liberal rate of relief. Although arguing that the allowances were generous and that as men were the great spenders, most families were as well off financially as they'd ever been. He believed they had received information to show that if persons of this class had too liberal allowance it led to idleness and neglect of their families rather than to taking advantage of matters for improving their circumstances. The founders of Colliery Disaster Funds were determined to restrict the level of relief to that which they considered adequate to maintain, but not to improve the position of the bereaved. And whilst men were not necessarily trusted to uh to spend that money wisely on their families, it wasn't you know solution wasn't necessarily to give the money to women as well, which you know might have seemed sensible, because in those um situations where it was women who the were the recipients, which often in the case of colliery disaster funds it would be because the widows would be uh the ones who were kind of making a a claim for for money, they often put in place r really kind of extraordinary um demands on finding out about the kind of um the you know the behaviour and the moral status of of these women um that that look kind of shockingly paternalistic uh to us in this day and age. A particular example of this that I think is I mean still continues to shock and is not not necessarily as well known a story as the disaster that um that gave rise to it is the story of the Titanic Relief Fund, which, you know, as the name would suggest was a fund uh set up after the sinking of the Titanic to um to to raise money for the disaster and then kind of distribute that to uh mostly the kind of um the the widows and bereaved families of the victims. But you know, there is a a fascinating paper that I can put links in the show notes to on this, um, and it says women who fell short of the fund administrators' idealised models of propriety and humiliation humility were sometimes held to account by the local committee through visitations, salutary interviews, and if all else failed to turn the recalcitrant onto the right path, financial punishments. Little sympathy was extended, for example, to women with drinking problems. There was also differential rates of um of payment and compensation based not on the circumstances or how badly you'd been affected by the disaster in terms of what you'd lost, but by what your uh social status and class was before the disaster. So if you were seen to be, you know, more towards the middle classes you would be given a higher rate of compensation, um, in the belief that this sort of represented again you know the fact that your expectations, your reasonable expectations of of your kind of situation in life and your needs were different to those of the working classes, and you know, absolutely again one thing the administrators really didn't want to do was to be seen to be responsible for making it possible for people to be better off afterwards through through the the distribution of this philanthropic money than they were before. Uh and that, you know, r really was the the kind of a red line that they'd drawn. Um another uh really interesting example, which is uh too complex probably to go into in in a lot of detail here, but relates to another very well known disaster, um, is the the story of the the Abervan disaster fund. So this was uh you know a hugely publicised disaster at the time in 1966 when a a spoil tip overlooking a mining town in uh in South Wales k collapsed. I mean it sort of slid down onto the town and and engulfed the town, and particularly a a school which was filled with children at the time. Um and this was sort of huge national outpouring of grief and emotion at this. But then in the the story uh about what happened after the disaster is unfortunately much uh much darker, in that the the Abavan um disaster relief fund seems to have essentially kind of taken on board all of the wrong lessons from these previous disaster relief funds. So money started flooding in uh once again, and you know, faced with the usual problems of trying to sort of get it out again. The the committee um that was set up again took a very paternalistic approach. I mean they they for one thing refused to allow anyone from the community who might be a beneficiary of the fund to be involved in the decision making about it. They introduced very sort of paternalistic determinations of who should be allowed to to to benefit from the fund. Uh and even worse, I think, in this case was the fact that the blame for the disaster I think was you know broadly or very very much agreed to be to lie in the hands of the National Coal Board and that they had responsibility not just for dealing with the after effects of the disaster, but for clearing up this this spoil tip that was you know the residents of the town were concerned was going to cause another disaster in the future. And they refused to accept that that liability. And in the end, the the government, along with the National Coal Board and with the involvement of the Charity Commission, diverted some of the money that had been raised for the Abervant Disaster Relief Fund uh into paying for the removal and clear up of that spoil tip, which again, you know, people at the time were sort of outraged about, and it was only um much later in the I think the 1990s that this a very long-running sort of court case around this was eventually settled, although not in a in an entirely satisfactory way. And then just one last bit on the on the history, I think you know, there have been times where the paternalism that's been used in sort of deciding who can or can't benefit uh from uh from disaster relief philanthropy has actually spilled over. So there's an example following the the cotton, uh the Lancashire Cotton Relief uh famine in the late 1800s, um, in the town of Stalybridge, this actually led to to riots where uh local people in the town were so incensed by the uh behaviour of the relief committee and the the way in which they'd been so uh rude and patronizing and and then had lowered the amount of relief that was being paid out. That that actual riots broke out and the riot act was was read. And obviously they were then portrayed in the media in a very different way to the the idea of the sort of hardworking Lancashireman epitomized by the Lancashire lad character that we talked about earlier, and whether in the the long run that sort of helped uh their cause um or made it harder to raise money is difficult to know. But again, they they felt so frustrated at having to rely on charity as a means of getting what they saw as their um kind of just and fair compensation that that they couldn't help but but sort of spill over into violence. Okay, so in the next section we're gonna move on and talk a bit about what uh science has to tell us in the form of psychology and economics about how we make decisions when it comes to dealing with disasters through philanthropy. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

At Meeting of Industrial Leaders in Washington, here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion that because a man has made a fortune, that his opinions on any subject are valuable. Don't be fooled by believing because a man is rich, it is necessarily rich. There is ample proof to the contrary.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Okay, we're back. Uh and in this section, as I said before the short break, um just want to look at some of what psychology and economics and other sciences can tell us about disaster giving and our response to disaster appeals. Um and there's a few interesting findings here, you know, some of which, as ever, with these things are slightly conflicting and contradictory, and we have to be careful, as ever, particularly with economics, where we're talking about uh laboratory experiments versus things that actually happen in the field, because uh, in order to create many of those laboratory experiments, we sort of control variables and set up artificial situations in a way that mean that you have to be careful about reading directly across to real life situations, but there's definitely some interesting stuff there. One very well known uh sort of phenomenon is with multiple different things, there are different sort of aspects to it, but is the idea that actually in talking to people about disasters, the scale of the disaster and how the information is presented can have a huge impact on people's response to it. So there's a thing particularly known as the identifiable victim phenomenon, which is um, as the name would suggest, essentially the idea that people are much more likely to respond positively to an appeal that's framed in terms of a single identifiable victim or a group of victims, and they can kind of understand their stories and understand the effect on their lives. But when you shift beyond that to start talking at a statistical level about you know large numbers of people being effective, it's actually less effective, even if it shows that the scale of the problem um is worse because people, our brains essentially aren't really hardwired to respond well to statistical information, whereas if you actually kind of you know see a picture of somebody and are able to look them in the eyes, that means that it triggers empathy and is more likely to result in you being likely to give. Um, related to that, I think there's also actually, you know, often it's thought with philanthropy or fundraising, you know, the best thing to do is to give people more and more information about a situation so that they will understand how bad it is or how serious it is, and then they'll be more likely to donate. But actually it's been found that certainly when it comes to disasters, there's a real risk of um information overload. So there's an inf uh interesting paper looking um at uh an experiment designed to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on uh levels and patterns of charitable contributions of donors. So they looked at um measures of charitable giving to sort of three big US charities involved in that disaster response, um, and they found that actually if people were given more information about the situation around Hurricane Katrina and the sort of uh cleanup efforts afterwards and the disaster response, they were less likely to give or they would give less when they did give, and and so actually kind of giving that much more information was found to be counterproductive. Some of these ideas are also occasionally framed um around the idea of sort of psychic numbing, which again is sort of similar to the identifiable victim phenomenon, uh, and also combines that information overload, which is essentially the idea that if you s give people um information about large numbers of deaths or kind of you know how tragic the impact of of something can can be, we reach a sort of threshold after which our empathy and our moral imagination fails to operate operate properly, and it's easier in some ways for us to kind of switch off and disregard that that information. And again, you know, this is something I think fundraisers have long known, and it's probably why actually disaster response uh fundraising efforts have tended to return to an imagery that, whilst problematic, so in some cases does focus on kind of you know individuals and sort of telling individual stories as a way of giving people a window into you know the realities of a situation and and tries to kind of trig trigger that empathetic response that leads them to give. But as I say, it kind of raises a lot of its own ethical questions. There's also findings showing um that actually our kind of perceptions of the the scale of a disaster um has an impact on our willingness to give or the amounts that we give. Um so it's been found that actually the the the understanding of the scale in disaster, particularly as measured by you know the the number killed, which is not necessarily always the most accurate measure of the severity, but but it's the one that's sort of taken in this particular experiment. It's found um that actually this provides a reasonably good measure of our assessment of the severity of the disaster, and actually the amounts people give kind of correlate quite strongly with with that uh assessment. So actually, kind of we are more likely to give to disasters when we perceive them as being more severe in terms of the number of people being killed. Linked to that, I think, is how we come by that information. So again, there are other experiments looking at the role that media coverage plays. Now we've already said that too much information can be problematic if sort of people are overloaded with statistics and that sort of thing. But but information up to a point, and particularly information provided in uh through platforms and through media where people are likely to see it, actually does have a huge positive uh effect. So um in one study they found that actually looking they were looking at um donations on the internet after the 2004 tsunami and they were measuring the impact that additional minutes of media coverage uh had on their levels of giving, and they found um quite uh quite sort of significant uh impact. And then even when they controlled for all of the possible variables, uh they found that an additional minute of news coverage raises don raised donations by about 2.5%, which is you know statistically significant, certainly. There are other things though as well that come into play here. Um one is the idea of the bystander effect, which is which is interesting. So this is something that you see elsewhere in in economics and psychology, but it's essentially the idea that if people are presented with information about a disaster and asked to give when they are on their own, they're more likely to do that than if they are asked when they are in a group, because essentially there's a sort of diffusion of responsibility in that situation, so people kind of assume either explicitly or or kind of subconsciously that somebody else will probably deal with the problem to some extent, whereas actually if you're asked and it's only you being asked, you feel a much greater burden of responsibility and you're more likely uh to give to that um appeal. Then some of the other findings that are really relevant, I think, are uh about that question of the effect of disaster giving on other giving, which we talked about earlier as being uh sort of one of the big questions that that kind of overarches the whole history of this topic, which is, you know, do responses to disasters and the the sort of philanthropic um appeals made on behalf of them drive more giving and sort of leads to uh more generosity overall, or do they take away from other generosity because people's sort of capacity to give is used up in responding to these sort of disaster appeals and there's therefore less money left over for the kind of ongoing business of giving to charity. And there's this is a question that hasn't really been settled, I don't think, by economics, but there are some interesting findings. And one of them was um a paper that was done, actually I was sort of tangentially involved in it when I worked at Charities Aid Foundation. A group of economists used data that CAF was involved with on appeals to the DEC, uh the Disasters Emergency Committee, over a number of years, and then looked at the um what happened to more standard donations through CAF following those disaster appeals, and actually they found that you know, perhaps counterintuitively or perhaps kind of confirming the suspicion of uh some people who've suggested this in the past, that instead of decreasing the overall amount of giving, actually in the short term, disaster appeals resulted in there being more giving overall in other areas. So essentially that thing of you know people had been prompted to think about charity and to to have an empathetic response because of a disaster, and that had led them to give more to other causes as well. Although interestingly that effect was relatively short-lived, and then when the the levels of giving sort of ducked back down again, they dipped back below the level that they they were before until they sort of normalized again, and then this was a pattern that you see repeated. And then finally, the uh the other sort of finding that I think is particularly interesting is about the perceptions of the nature of disasters. So we've already talked about perceptions of the sort of scale and severity of disasters, and we talked in the section on history about the perception of the victims of those disasters and whether they were seen to be uh sort of deserving of pity or support. And whilst we sort of try not, I guess, as best as possible to talk in those moralistic ways um these days, although I'm not sure we're always successful, I think it it's clear from the economic evidence that there are still a lot of sort of subconscious processes going on that affect how we give in response to disasters. And particularly there is um you know a whole phenomenon of what's known as uh victim blame. So this is essentially it's not it's not overt in that we're not always overt, in that we're not sort of saying, oh, these people don't deserve our our pity or support because they're they're responsible. But it's the the sense that to some extent we have uh underlying beliefs about whether or not people are to some extent kind of responsible for the disaster that's befallen them, and this differs according to the nature of that disaster. So for instance, there's there have some researchers have found a pretty significant difference between responses to what are perceived as truly sort of uh natural disasters or what might have been called kind of acts of God uh and man-made disasters. And you know, this this is sort of obvious in in the sense of things like people's perception of uh famines caused by um you know failed crops or kind of floods or tsunamis versus um you know uh the the impacts of war or civil war or other things like this, where again, even if even if people and particularly sort of you know civilians and women's and women and children are are innocent victims of those uh those tragedies, there's a certain kind of sense in which people feel as though oh everybody you know in in that country is is kind of you know it's inevitable that that was going to happen because that's just sort of the way that these things go. And I think people find it harder to empathize or to put themselves in those shoes of somebody who's who's suffering in that war zone because they sort of think, well, um, you know, that could never happen here, whereas they find it easier to understand the impact of something where people seem truly blameless, like a kind of natural disaster, particularly where there are people from a similar background to them who have been victims as well. So this was the case in the 2004 uh tsunami uh over in Thailand, where there was a a big philanthropic response to it and it it garnered lots of headlines, um, at least in part because there were quite a few sort of Western tourists caught up in it. And so I think people's ability to sort of think, oh, you know, there, but for the grace of God go I was that much greater. But but we even see this this sort of um difference uh of perception and the impact that it has on people's willingness to give in a much more fine grained way as well. So there's been um some experiments where researchers, economic researchers, have presented people with an appeal uh about a disaster and they have they've explained the situation in subtly different ways. So, for instance, there's one where they talked about um a flood. And people being affected by a flood. And in one of the versions of the experiment, they explain it in simply in terms of being a natural phenomenon. And in the other, they make one sentence's worth of mention of a dam or like a failure of a dam. And just the introduction of this concept of a man-made structure lessened people's willingness to give because it sort of triggers that underlying mechanism of thinking about, oh well, you know, the infrastructure in the country is probably problematic, and maybe there are issues around corruption and all this sort of thing. And so actually that kind of reduces people's willingness to give. And I think you know, we'll come on to this in a in a minute in the final section. But this is very interesting in terms of that question of whether there is a kind of tendency or an incentive for people when trying to fundraise for disasters to downplay those political elements of them or sort of pretend in some sense that situations that are overtly political are actually apolitical because they're worried that if they they do present them in those terms, people will be less likely to respond positively to those fundraising asks. And this is certainly a criticism that organizations like the Disasters Emergency Committee and many other aid agencies have been subjected to over years, which is you know a sense that they're kind of uh either either ignoring or sidelining some of the political uh realities of situations in in a desire to kind of remain neutral, and that actually not only is it is it disingenuous is maybe a harsh word, but maybe kind of unrealistic to do that, but actually um you know it's kind of counterproductive in the long term because they are not allowing the the sort of fundamental issues to be dealt with, and instead they are focusing uh attention uh only on kind of sticking plasters or dealing with the symptoms uh of of uh of the problems. Um okay, so that's just a quick canter through some of what sort of psychology uh economics can tell us uh about the responses to disasters. In the final section, I just want to come on and think a little bit about the current context around philanthropy and disaster relief, so stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_02 46:15

Yet today is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was leave for him to administer during life, will come away.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

Okay, so we're back for the final section. I'll try and keep this relatively brief. I just wanted to give a few thoughts on how some of what we've thought about so far about the history and about what kind of economics and psychology can tell us about disaster relief uh and philanthropy in response to it, uh, how that relates to some of what's going on in the world today. Uh and I guess the first thing to say about is about the situation in Ukraine and the response to that. Um not because this is you know by any means the only disaster at the in the world at the moment, um in fact, you know, it very much isn't, but because it's a particularly prominent one and I think there are some particularly interesting things about the ways in which people uh have responded to it. So I guess you know it it it's undeniably a terrible situation and there are people suffering um awfully. But one of the questions I guess that people have raised is why it is that the response to this and the sort of prominence of it in the news has been so much greater than many of the other situations uh and disasters that are already happening in the world today. For instance, uh the situation in Tigray or the situation in Afghanistan. And there have been certainly been suggestions that actually there is an element of this that that contains kind of relatively unpleasant sort of um you know racial biases or prejudices, and essentially that you know people in the West look at the pictures of people in Ukraine on the television and they they look like them, they have the same skin colour, they dress similarly, they live in you know houses that look similar and they dress drive the same cars, whereas when they look at people in Tigre or Afghanistan, they look other or foreign in some sense. Um and you know, this I think has definitely been reflected in some of the media coverage of uh the situation in Ukraine, which was pretty overtly making points like, you know, oh this is different because this time we're looking at people who look like us, and and sort of you know saying this this stuff pretty openly. And certainly this led the head of the World Health Organization quite recently to suggest um that actually, you know, in his question he said whether the world only uh whether the world really gives equal attention to black and white lives. Um and his his pretty firm conclusion was that it doesn't, and that actually, you know, whilst the situation in Ukraine was terrible, the situation in Tigray was equally, if bad, if not worse, in terms of the risk to to human life, and that it's only by devaluing uh black lives um in favour of white lives that that it we're able to understand why it is that people respond uh in that way. I think there's something else interesting here though, uh because thinking about what we talked about in the last section about the perception of the nature of disasters, obviously um the the situation in Ukraine is very much, you know, a man-made disaster uh rather than a natural one. So in some ways you would expect people to be less willing to give to that. So what is it that's counteracting that effect in this this case? I mean, is it that there is that sort of racial element and people in the West are more easily able to empathise or to sort of put themselves in those people's shoes and therefore sort of respond in a more visceral way? Or is it actually to do with the particular nature of the situation in Ukraine, which is I think unlike almost any war, certainly that I can remember in my lifetime, it doesn't feel like there's any element of it being a situation where you know it's two sides and there have been provocations on both sides, it certainly feels like a kind of unprovoked invasion and attack. And so perhaps it's easier for people to be shocked and to sort of see the the people in Ukraine as the the victims of that that situation. I think also going back to some of what we uh talked about in the historical section, the reaction of people in Ukraine and the way in which they've responded, I think over time has led people to uh to respond, you know, even more in terms of wanting to support them, because I think their kind of resilience and courage in the face of of the of Russian aggression certainly has struck a chord with people and and the ways in which they've been able to present that resilience and to tell individual stories again, I think has been very cleverly done, and the use of social media and other tools has been very smart. And so actually the Ukrainians themselves, in in sort of you know, presenting their response in that light and doing it through individual stories, I think have tapped into some of the key things that we've seen actually engender a positive response towards disasters uh from the point of view of philanthropy. Um I think another thing that's been interesting about Ukraine is it's sort of highlighted again that sometimes the there is a mismatch between people's uh response and their willingness to give and their generosity and what is actually best to do in terms of sort of addressing the the needs that the situation brings to light. Um so what I'm thinking about here is I think in the the first few weeks of the Ukraine um crisis there were lots of people sort of fundraising for clothing and food and other goods, um, you know, uh direct uh donations of those kinds rather than money. I think because people in some cases prefer giving those things because they seem more tangible. I think they also overcome any concerns people have that by giving money you kind of you don't know exactly where it's going, and it's easier for some of that money not to end up going to the the perceived front line. In some cases also, you know, we're we're suffering a cost of living crisis here in the UK and the economic situation is not good, so maybe it's easier for people to feel comfortable giving goods rather than giving money. And uh all of those you know are sort of valid reasons, but lots of organizations and big aid charities had to sort of gently push back and say i it would really be better if you just gave money because that is the best way of getting assistance to uh the people on the ground in Ukraine. Actually, you know, your ability to determine what goods they need is pretty limited, and the difficulties from a logistical point of view in terms of getting goods uh over there are pretty massive. And also certainly if you're talking about anything perishable, you know, why would you collect it over here in the UK and then attempt to get it over to a to a war zone in a different part of Europe? Um so I think people have sort of, you know, over time the message has got through that actually the best thing you can possibly do is just give to you know money directly to the organizations that are able to kind of distribute what is needed on the ground. Um I think it's also raised, you know, thinking about the types of donations, really interesting questions that are quite, you know, difficult ethical ones. In the case of of Ukraine, because we're talking about uh a war situation and sort of resistance to foreign in uh aggression, rather than people, you know, suffering uh just immediate needs of sort of hunger or or having their homes destroyed, although obviously that's a big part of the situation too. Part of the the question of you know, the demand or the ask from Ukraine is not just for for sort of humanitarian supplies, but also for weapons, for arms and those sorts of supplies. And this raises an interesting question about if you are triggered to respond uh to the situation in Ukraine in a philanthropic sense, does you know sending money to support the purchase of arms or even sending arms directly count as philanthropy in any sense? Or, you know, if understood in its traditional etymological terms as love of humanity, does giving people guns uh count as philanthropy? I I don't have a good answer to that question. Um I you know from a professional point of view I think it's very interesting, but I I struggle with the ethics of it if I'm entirely honest. I think there are other interesting aspects to the situation in Ukraine as well, which are not unique to it these days, but but we've seen kind of come to particular prominence. And this is things like uh the increasing ability for people to give directly to people in in those in the countries that are affected by disasters, rather than having to go through the traditional mechanisms of sort of uh INGOs or or kind of groupings of INGOs like the Disasters Emergency Committee. So this is part of a sort of wider trend of you know disintermediation within the world of philanthropy and a sort of shift towards people giving money directly. And in the case of Ukraine that may be sort of giving you know cash donations um via platforms that allow you to do that, although I think the ability to do that is is somewhat limited. So people have had to sort of work around that in other ways, and there have been you know interesting examples like Airbnb becoming a platform where people would essentially make sort of URSAT donations by booking with hosts in Ukraine and then you know never intending to obviously to go and stay in in those countries, but it was a way of just sort of transferring resources into the country. Um and similarly there's been quite a lot of prominence given to whether cryptocurrency is being used um as a way of getting money to people in Ukraine as well. Now this is interesting for in a few ways, um, because one of the the sort of concerns without going into too much detail about cryptocurrency philanthropy or crypto philanthropy uh for the last few years has been that its its u utility is sort of limited by the fact that people can't necessarily use the money on the ground, so there's always a kind of big last mile problem. You can you can send the money up to a certain point, but then if it just sits there and people can't actually use it to purchase the things they need, what good does it do? This might not be so much of a problem in Ukraine, because it's actually got a very s sort of healthy healthily developed crypto economy, so it must be it would be quite a lot easier, I think, for people to actually use any cryptocurrency that was sent over there. But it also, I think, that disintermediation, particularly around crypto, raises real concerns about the increased risk of fraud and people kind of fraudulently uh asking for donations, and particularly where that is not organizations and it's not going through the auspices of NGOs, um, I think it's you know where it's individuals asking for money and people are able to do that in in the form of a cryptocurrency. Um, the the chances of people sort of giving money and then finding out after the event that that they've been duped are that much higher. And whilst you know people have for the last few decades grumbled and had concerns about mismanagement and the high costs of uh of giving through large international charities or about kind of misgovernance or fraud or corruption in in aid and development, you know, if you go all the way to the the other side of that spectrum and you just kind of give directly uh to individuals, then you you face a whole different set of problems around having trust that those individuals are who they say they are and knowing that the money that you're giving is actually uh going to have any impact. And I guess that just brings us finally on to you know how that relates to some of the sort of wider issues about uh disaster response uh philanthropy, um, which is you know this question about the the disintermediation of philanthropy and how that that relates to disasters is one that sort of resonates much more widely, I think. I think one thing that we increasingly see these days whenever there is a disaster, um, you know, certainly I guess perhaps less the the huge international global disasters, which are still largely kind of mediated by INGOs or governmental agencies. But where there are national or domestic disasters of the sort that you know historically would have been the kind of collery explosions and all these sorts of things that we looked at in the history section, these days, you know, charities and NGOs will be involved in raising some of that money, but more and more what we're seeing is people, individuals or s or groups that are set up, and they will raise money via crowdfunding platforms directly. And and again, this is sort of interesting in that this the the ability to tap into uh the emotional side or the empathetic response is often much greater with these organizations. And if they're able to kind of tell a compelling story and present it in in an individual form, they tap into that psychological bit and they're able to raise large amounts of money very quickly. But then when it comes to the other side of the coin, the distribution bit, which we saw again has historically had its brought its own problems, they run into many of those issues in that that often the infrastructure is lacking to actually get that money out again, you know, unless they just end up giving the money to you know a traditional charity that's working in the area anyway, in which case, you know, what was the the point of setting up uh that that sort of that separate appeal? Um there have been quite a number of instances where people have given large amounts of money to crowdfunding campaigns, only to then subsequently find that there wasn't really much of a plan for distributing that money, uh, and people then get quite angry about the fact that their money has been sort of taken in a way that they feel not to have been um particularly honest. So I think that's something that we will see more and more uh happening. Um I think the other things that um that are kind of worth uh thinking about in terms of the situation around disaster uh response philanthropy, again, I think that that overarching issue um that we talked about in terms of the relationship between disaster response philanthropy and just kind of ongoing causes that require the support of philanthropy remains hugely important. Um, particularly, I think, in the context of there being sort of ongoing disasters essentially, uh particularly the climate crisis, which don't necessarily uh filter into the public consciousness in the same form because they are ongoing, and actually the slow pace of them again maybe sort of doesn't trigger the same kind of responses. And again, uh the the climate crisis perhaps suffers from the fact that it doesn't have identifiable victims, or at least it's often not presented in that way, and it's presented in a sort of statistical sense which doesn't resonate with people. And maybe there are things to be learned from the way in which you know the the urgency and the kind of individual nature of many disasters uh have been framed that that could benefit in terms of getting more attention and more money going towards addressing the climate crisis. I think similarly there's an interesting question about the the sort of depoliticization of disasters, and as again, as we've seen, uh historically that's been something that's been very tempting to do because the more that you kind of depoliticise these situations, the more likely you are to be able to get people to feel comfortable giving to them, and the less likely they are then to fall into that trap of sort of subconscious victim blaming or assuming to some extent that the victims of a situation are culpable for for their own um uh for their own misfortune. But I think you know, actually, do we need to push back on that in some ways and and kind of reframe our understanding of disasters uh and be more willing to kind of engage with the political side of disasters if we're genuinely going to address uh the root causes of them. And I think that brings us to to the final point, which is the holy grail of most organisations involved in disaster prevention is in disaster relief is is to get away from ever having to respond to disasters at all. It's certainly one area in which you know the purpose of of that charity should really be to sort of make it self-redundant. Um, but the challenge there is that shifting from disaster response and relief to kind of prevention or long-term development is very difficult because you fundamentally shift from that sort of asking people about responding in a short-term, urgent way to a specific situation to can you give in a longer-term, regular way to support these sort of ongoing needs. And that's a real challenge for most aid and development organizations, and they're always trying to find ways round this, because the point they always make is you know, it not only would it mean that we were hopefully not suffering the effects of all of these disasters so much, but it's actually a much more effective way of dealing disasters when they do happen. Because if you've put in place all of the infrastructure and development work that is that is required, when disaster, you know, some disasters inevitably do strike, the chances are they will have a much you know less serious effect than they would have had otherwise. So even then you're having to ask for less money philanthropically um in order to respond to the disaster itself. But doing that, I think, is much easier said than done, and is you know a challenge that remains for many organizations out there.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:48

Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist! Genius. Genius. Genius.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

Okay, well that brings us to the end of that episode, a sort of slightly meandering look through uh disaster response and philanthropy. I'll put some links in the show notes to places where you can find more information on stuff I've been talking about, about the history and the psychology and the economics and that kind of thing. Um if you're interested more broadly in topics around philanthropy and civil society, uh do follow me on Twitter at Rodri underscore H underscore Davis or at philiteracy if you like stuff more about the kind of history and theory of philanthropy. Um check out the website for this podcast, uh philanthropisms.com to find all of the back episodes which are now mounting up there, and an email address where you can get hold of us if you've got ideas for topics we could cover or people I could interview in the future. If you've enjoyed this episode, do drop me a line on social media if you want to kind of pick up on any issues or start a bit of a debate, and I love that kind of thing. Other than that, like, subscribe, uh, do tell all the friends about it, and if there's anyone in particular that you think might find uh this interesting, uh do let them know. Uh, and I will see you next time. Bye.