I gave to charity for eight years before asking if it worked

In 2007, the year our first child was born, I set up a direct debit to Cancer Research UK. It felt meaningful. I had no way of knowing whether it was. That question would take me the better part of a decade to begin answering properly.

Over the years that followed, the portfolio grew the way most people's giving grows: incrementally, emotionally, and without much strategy. A colleague mentioned a charity. A news story prompted a one-off donation. Each choice felt right at the time of making. None were made on the basis of any clear idea what the money was actually achieving. This is, I suspect, how most people give. The intention is genuine. The method is essentially nonexistent.

What changed things was a single short essay, written in 1972, that I heard mentioned on a podcast at roughly the right point in my life.