Even Dolly Parton’s philanthropy was good and efficient. Her Imagination Library mails a free book every month to kids from birth to age 5. Instead of just writing checks, she built infrastructure, kind of like what Andrew Carnegie did with libraries. Her foundation negotiates huge bulk discounts, selects the books, and runs the distribution system, and governments, nonprofits, and local donors help cover the marginal costs. So a book that retails for ~$10-15 can be bought and mailed to a child for roughly $2–3. Good model: use philanthropy to build the machine, then let others fund it at a tiny cost per child. A recent study found participants entered kindergarten about 0.13 SD higher on literacy and were 16–24% less likely to be severely behind... But families self-select into the program, so much of the effect is probably selection bias. I made a donation today: