Something that feels so good can't be bad

It seems the come-on line for horny high-school boys everywhere has become the animating moral principle of progressive online charity. Rigorous metrics are essential when evaluating those shopworn traditional charities, but buy a trendy bag on Amazon for $59.95 and wham-o, you've enabled the UN to feed a child for year. Add that to all the rice you magically bought by playing a vocabulary game and you're a virtual Mother Teresa!

O RLY?

Hate to be buzzkill, but damn, people, this is the UNITED NATIONS we're talking about, the veritable poster child for corruption and fraud in humanitarian aid. If efficiency is the touchstone of social enterprise, hooking up with the UN is not exactly the best way to maintain a reputation for unsullied virtue.

And what about the integrity of oft-quoted numbers such as "1 click = 20 grams/rice" or "1 bag = child's food/year? Where do we get these stats? Is anyone checking them? Glibly buying into too-good-to-be-true promises of disproportionate return is a hallmark of a bubble economy, and just because it's social enterprise instead of subprime loans doesn't mean we're immune from collapse.