Below is an excerpt from this week’s Mint column “Bare talk” by V. Anantha Nageswaran.

Sreelatha Menon dedicated her column in the Business Standard on 27 September aptly to the Joy of Giving Week that commenced the same day. Her opening salvo was even more apt. She wrote that the Joy of Giving Week (conceived by Give India) wove together thousands of small efforts at charity to make a big difference.

She was right. Small charitable contributions meant for many thousand small efforts make a big difference. In the last several weeks, I have been reflecting on this very topic. Earlier this decade, I had “graduated” from small charitable contributions to helping a small-and- micro-enterprise venture fund come to life. From there, the next milestones in the “public (policy) impact journey” were supposed to be funding and founding a public policy think tank. Then came the realization that op-eds did not bring change (see Bare Talk on 26 May).

Then, Jagdish Bhagwati in his recent lecture in Singapore reminded his audience that public policy impact could take decades to achieve. So one has to keep plugging away without impact. Of course, in some cases, it might be good not to have an impact, especially if one’s thinking is flawed to begin with.

The Undercover Economist gave that reply to a reader who wanted to know how to make as big a contribution to society as possible

Tim Harford wrote that it would be great to make federal policy better; but without proper impact evaluation, one could actually be contributing to making it worse, and that many in Washington, DC, were engaged in doing exactly that. In addition to this warning, he also gave a positive suggestion in favour of modest projects because they gave tangible progress, were easier to evaluate, made us feel better and encouraged us to keep going.

Read the full column here