Wow. This is a tough crowd. Its not enough to generously give your time and money to charity, you have to have an effective data driven approach to your giving or you suck. And if you can bill at $500 an hour, no helping out at the soup kitchen for you -- that an inefficient use of societies resources. Back to your cubicle, work some extra hours and give it to whatever causes our models say are best. Kind of a cold and sterile way to approach giving.
There's generally two things people want to accomplish out of charitable giving - making the world a better place, and the "warm fuzzies" of helping out.
The fact that getting the warm fuzzies isn't a particularly good way of making the world better doesn't mean that you can't get the fuzzies, too. It just means that there's a tradeoff involved, which means you want to make the best tradeoff you can between the two.
Go ahead and volunteer at the soup kitchen while you make $500, or even $5000 per hour. I particularly encourage it if you find it emotionally rewarding or motivating for the nitty-gritty work of making the world better.
To me it seems selfish to feed 100 people by donating time at a kitchen, instead of working more hours and donating to a charity that might feed 200.
It's as if I want the personal gratification of helping a human being in person as opposed to helping N times as many equally real human beings who I will never meet.
At least with the soup kitchen, you see and feel the results of your input, in real actual people helped, not fractions of a fraction of a number on a report created by a report writer dedicated to presenting an organisation in the best possible light no matter what.
