Hello, and welcome

July 9, 2025

It is a challenging time for charities and nonprofits in the United States. This blog is an attempt to help.

To be more specific: charities and foundations are dealing with multiple simultaneous financial, social, and policy crises. In the United States, fewer people are giving to charity, and charitable contributions are struggling to keep pace with inflation. The US Congress just passed a new tax law that trimmed the itemized tax deduction for charitable contributions and imposed substantial new tax changes on universities; the Congress almost passed taxes on foundations and hospitals as well.I’m not including shocks to organizations that are charity-like but are technically part of government, such as public libraries! Nonprofits are also being surprised with cuts to public grantmaking through federal agencies like USAID or national science organizations.

I have thoughts about these sorts of challenges. I am a trained economist with specialization in the history and public policy of charitable giving and nonprofits. I work and teach at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. I have published research in academic economics and nonprofit studies journals, and done funded research with a variety of nonprofit and philanthropic partners. This blog will be my attempt to share some of this expertise in a publicly acessible and friendly place.

What to expect

To be perfectly honest, I am not sure how often I will post here yet. How many ideas will feel worth writing? And will writing here be an effective way to share them?

But what I intend to do is to share the latest insights from economic and social science research for questions that affect the nonprofit sector. That will include summaries of my own work, but also others’. And I will try, whenever possible, to link what research shows to strategies for nonprofits and fundraisers, or to current debates in public policy.

Really? A blog? In 2025?

I know, I know – didn’t the blog die off years ago? Do kids today even know what a blog is?

But blogs are back, even if we don’t call them that anymore. There is waning interest in reading essays broken up into crumbs and carefully threaded (if the poster is lucky) on microblogging services like Twitter.While I don′t tweet anymore, I do post to Bluesky and Mastodon. Feel free to follow me! But I have found no platform is as active and vital as Twitter was in its heyday. Instead, people are increasingly posting their thoughts in suspiciously blog-like newletter platforms, like Substack. And the increasing popularity of those newsletters shows that there is hunger for longer, more thoughtful engagement with ideas than microblogging platforms can support.There is also the remarkable fact that people will apparently pay for Substack subscriptions in meaningful volumes, which seems to hold a lesson for waning traditional media outlets, maybe.

Maybe the question, then, is not “why a blog?” when short-form social media is on the wane, but “why not a newsletter through an established service?” And the answer is that we have seen often over the past decades how creating content through a platform the author does not control can lead to problems when that platform is sold, modified, paywalled, or closed down.

If it works, I hope this blog will last a long time. So I am building it myself, using open-source tools. It’s actually quite easy! I am using Jekyll to create and format these posts. The formatting is derived from Clay Harmon’s Tufte-Jekyll theme, which itself is based on the design language of Edward Tufte. It only took me a few hours to figure out how to set up this system on a local machine, even though I’m not experienced with web engineering or the Ruby language. If you’ve thought about creating a Substack, consider giving Jekyll a try first.