I might be suited to reply to this because we’ve been trying to be a guiding producer (boas.co) for almost a year. I don’t have a lot of time to reply so this is rather quick and dirty but it’s a result of more than a 1000 hours of work. I’ve also studied economics so I can answer your call for an economist about the economic feasibility but am not going in depth in it now. We even have a research intern who is researching the economic feasibility of our project/guiding producers (research is probably ready in 3 weeks and I’ll share). I’ll try to reply to everything and feel free to DM or email me (vin@boas.co) if anyone wants to discuss further or in person.
The red team and positive points below are either my personal experience, from data we have or they are the experiences or opinions (those that I heard a lot) from others I talked to. I have probably talked to hundreds of people about this subject and this is what I hear and experience the most. Our company is in the process of validating whether this paper has merit and most results so far are positive, but there’s a lot more validation to be done (most importantly how guided consumption translates to purchase intent).
Some, if not most, of these points are addressed at least in part in this paper. I’m merely emphasizing or adding to some based on my experience. I’m talking to Brad West tomorrow and wanted to put my unbiased points here before that conversation.
Red Team Points
Maybe the best founders want to start companies that make them rich, not donate to charities.
Maybe the best “investors” want to make themselves rich, not donate their part of the profits to charities.
The most successful companies usually don’t turn a profit for many years, and require millions to billions in funding. How do guiding companies secure that funding if bullet 1 and 2 are true (successful companies usually have the best founders and investors)?
It’s hard to match the features of the most successful companies if you don’t have bullet 1,2 and 3. Profit destination might only be a deciding factor for purchase decisions if your company at least matches the competition and enables guided consumption as a differentiating factor/USP.
Profits that are donated to charities can’t be reinvested for marketing and R&D. You might reinvest all profits for a long time and donate nothing, but will customers “allow” that or do they demand charitable contributions from the start?
People might object to market or above market rates for employees. There have been many cases where reputations of non-profits have been harmed because executives made 200K USD per year, which is far less than they would make in for-profit organisations. This might also be true for guided producers.
Companies need financial buffers for unforeseen circumstances and crises. We have talked to companies that nearly bankrupted themselves because of their giving.
Guiding companies might have an uphill battle because they can’t secure the best founders and investors. The entire investor infrastructure around guiding companies still has to be built.
The paper assumes people might (start to) care about profit destination, which might not be true. That will make it harder to start guided companies because of the bullets above.
There is a lot of distrust in the world so the authenticating systems you mention are important. Guiding companies should have far more transparency than conventional companies.
If companies donate “some” of their profit and that’s a low percentage of their profit they shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves guiding companies imo as it might be seen as green washing/ethics washing and hurt the overall furthering of guided consumption.
Were incorporated in the Netherlands and some structures exist (e.g. steward ownership) but we can’t be a charity (even though we are like a non-profit) and if we donate more than a couple hundred K we actually need to pay tax on our donations. There is work to be done for guiding companies in terms of tax benefits and the organization structures that currently exist.
How do you balance maximizing profit for designated charities and making that profit in a moral and ethical way. Is it ok to make your money in ways that might harm people and the planet if you give the profits away? How and where do you draw the line? Do you pay your warehouse workers minimum wage (not enough to normally live of off in the US for example) so you can donate more to charities? Do you squeeze suppliers for more profits so you can donate where it’s needed more? The morals and ethics of this need to be developed and there are many opinions.
In my experience people care far more about ineffective charities than effective ones.
So far, EA /Philanthropists and Investors have been skeptical of this idea. Exacerbated by the fact that their returns are probably lower when investing in this kind of thing.
I would be interested in further brainstorming why this idea hasn’t taken off so far. It genuinely surprises me how little karma and interaction this post/idea is getting, even if it’s laid out so clearly in this paper. Are we severely overestimating how much people care? If even EA’s don’t seem to care so much, does the regular consumer?
Positive things, in my experience, about guided consumption
Some of the best people want to work for guided companies because they donate profits. Some of these people are wealthy and only want to work for companies that improve the world and guiding companies are uniquely suited to do so.
Some of the biggest “investors” are philanthropic, if you can convince them of your idea, they could find millions or even billions to take it to the moon.
Being a guiding company can be a competitive advantage in hiring, at least for non-founders. Some of the best people only want to work for “positive” companies. Companies are a product of their people so this might be a huge factor in why guiding companies might win.
Guiding companies get discounts on marketing, software, recruitment, consultancy etc. because they serve the world, not shareholders. This lowers all sorts of costs and could even help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
Guiding companies might pay lower tax amounts. This could help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
Guiding companies might start talking about the producer surplus of their competitors, creating awareness among the general public that it’s better to buy from guiding companies if they exist.
We compete in the sustainable marketplace sector because it has many competitors and they don’t have clear differentiation, our giving is used as a differentiating factor already and early results indicate that it’s indeed a reason companies partner with us, but we’re not sure about purchase intent on the consumer side, yet.
“Newmans Own” has been discussed in the comments already but I want to mention it too. You make it sound like they weren’t terribly successful, but they donated 500 million USD so far and there’s no reason they won’t go to more than a billion. This is the strongest case in guided consumption we’ve seen so far and I believe our researcher has talked to them so we’ll have some insights from them soon. We have more case studies from companies who are successful in guided consumption (indicating that they are succesful because they give their profits away), but it’s just a few so they might still be outliers.
NCOO’s are only necessary when guiding consumption is still the exception. When it becomes the rule it might no longer be necessary. This is likely to take decades if it ever happens at all.
Guiding companies might benefit from a independent label (similar to B Corp for example) that distinguishes them from normal business and identifies them as true guiding companies.
Our default giving option is to let us decide, which means we donate to the most effective charities (e.g. Maximum impact fund). Consumers can also choose cause areas they like (climate, poverty, animal rights) which are also effective. If they want even more granularity, they can opt for an individual charity. This structure ensures most of the giving is effective (and easy for the consumer) while still enabling choice for the consumer.
We haven’t found that being a guiding producer is costly. The most important thing we did is to just open up our books and having books is a requirement every company has anyways. The cost of opening our books has been close to zero. Creating automated and open infrastructure might be costly but can be shared among the guiding producers and could even be white labeled for additional revenue.
The largest for-profit companies, almost without exception, face expensive litigation because of anti trust and illegal and unethical behavior. These have large direct and indirect (reputational) costs that are likely to be lower for guiding producers.
We believe crypto could be an interesting avenue for raising funds and establishing a community
1 and 2. Sorta beside the point: I can cede the point that becoming rich IS a major motivator for people to work hard, develop innovative ideas, and otherwise do great things that translate into companies that are immensely profitable. But we don’t need to be reinventing the wheel with a brand new invention or innovation (other than Guided Consumption), we can rather just be entering a competitive market equilibrium, buying one of its participants, and disrupting that equilibrium by imbuing it with an almost costless powerful weapon (I say costless because the charitable investor is not paying more than a private investor would to obtain capital, yet has a weapon in its identity that the private investor does not have.) Thus if the pre-acquisition company was worth $100 million, the post-acquisition company would be worth $100 million + X, where X is the value attributable to consumer preference toward the charity. The founder brilliance was probably what allowed that company to get to its pre-acquisition value and had made that founder immensely rich. Essentially, greed being a powerful motivation that enables excellent company performance is wholly compatible with Guiding Producers being incredibly lucrative. These objections sorta presume that the only way Guiding Producers could arise is if we had a game show pitting angelic altruistic entrepreneurs vs. a bunch of Gordon Gekko entrepreneurs.
3. You seem to be presuming again that a Guiding Producer would be a new company rather than an acquired company. I think there might be good reasons to begin new Guiding Companies given a robust social movement having taken off and good market sector research to indicate that a given sector is a robust one, but there is no requirement that a GP would have to start from scratch and could not be the product of a buyout or a leveraged buyout by a group of charitable investors.
4. You could match the features of a successful company by buying it out, keeping its existing features in place, and advertising that you should buy its products because it helps the global poor, for instance. (don’t take these answers to mean that I don’t think starting new Guiding Producers would necessarily be a bad idea- I think in some contexts- like sales- the differentiation that profit destination would provide could be enormous. I think the potential for Guiding Producer Real Estate Agents or Life Insurance Salespeople could be obscenely lucrative).
5. This is a real issue, but one that is almost certainly resolvable through corporate finance. Charities could borrow against their inflated equity to support their projects. There could also be a 5-10% allowance for private ownership for liquidity and price discovery purposes. Furthermore, if Guiding Producers are spread across enough different industries that the risks associated with them are idiosyncratic, they could form insurance pools that facilitates greater leveraging in borrowing, allowing more funds in relation to equity to be available through borrowing. Periodically, debts could be serviced and equity reestablished by dividends.
6. Hmm it strikes me as rather crazy if there was a CEO of a Guiding Producer for like a an electronics company that made $20 mil/year and a CEO of a competitor normal Producer making $20 mil a year that this umbrage at the Guiding Producer’s CEO’s compensation would cause them to screw over the charity by going with the normal Producer and thus enrich the wealthy shareholders. I think in this conversation, the real villains, if any, would be the Normal Producers.
7. Yes, Guiding Producers would have the same constraints normal Producers would have in this regard. Normal producers sometimes cash out too much to their shareholders/owners and compromise the financial stability of the business. This isn’t really an objection to Guided Consumption so much as a business reality that still applies.
8. Still this thinking that Guiding Producers have to be built from the ground-up… let the founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists do their thing, unless there is a particularly auspicious GC opportunity. Then disrupt established equilibria through the magic of a special investor who magically gets better returns (I say magical because it kind of is in that the same cost investment would yield a different return for charitable investors than other investors).
9. I call it non-psychopathy. The Consumer Power Initiative is trying to get to the point where the consumer has a virtually identical product at an identical price and the only choice is whether to help a worthy charity or line the pockets of an anonymous moneybags.
10. Totally agreed. There needs to be transparency as well as partnerships with those trusted in many communities that Guiding Producers are doing what they say they are.
11. I agree. I think the focus of CPI should be on pure Guiding Producers. There is also a concern that gamesmanship could allow for firms that donate 100% of “profit” to charities, but a deliberate effort to actually distribute almost all the money generated to key employees, with a pittance for the charity they supposedly serve. CPI will have a key role in credentialing for that as well.
12. Definitely needs to be some thought on the tax end of things. Think these issues are ultimately tractable through creative legal forms, etc. Needs to be investigated further.
13. Very interesting issue… I guess if a Guiding Producer needed to adopt the practices in its sector to be competitive, you could argue that it is still better than the counterfactual normal producer in its place. Needs to be grappled with as Guided Consumption develops.
14. Probably people care about certain ineffective and effective charities more than they do normal shareholders. There is an issue that once we reach the Age of Consumer Power, ineffective charities may be competing against effective charities for market share of their Guiding Firms. This is one of the reasons I would be interested in getting the Effective Altruist community in on this new frontier of Consumer Power.
15. They’ll figure it out eventually. I hear they’re supposed to be pretty smart.
16. The problem is that I have very little to effectively signal that I have something to say that is worth spending an hour of one’s time. The analytics page, as of the writing of this post, show that 16 uniqute devices have spent more than 5 minutes on this page. Th
Notes on positive things
Yeah, really could promote a good mission culture. You can be a life insurance salesperson, cashier, etc. any part of a Guiding Producer, big or small, and you’re working for a very noble purpose. I really think this could potentially open the Earning To Give door very widely.
Yeah, once they start to realize what’s going on, I suspect there is the good will among many philanthropists to get the “early phase” going. Once that is wildly successful, it’s going to be the wild west as the wealthy try to weaponize Consumer Power to their will.
Yup.
Exactly, using the prosocial nature of Guiding Producers could give them even unfair market advantages.
Really need to look into the tax stuff at some point. Hopefully some good opportunities.
Exactly… we could have like campaigns about the median wealth or income of investors in the competitor. Do you want to help the 1% or someone who makes less than $2.50/day?
Yeah, in some prosocial industries this could be an even greater superpower.
Yeah, I wasn’t fair to Newman’s Own. It just really gets to me that this ethic of not promoting discussion in the charitable discourse (such as the donative decisions one makes) strikes me as super toxic. I’m glad the EA community is so committed to discussing charity.
Yeah, at the very least NCCO’s jobs will be easier. I still think there will be a function in facilitating the ease of consumers channeling consumption through GCs.
Yep.
I think your method is the most competitive form of GC (capital agnosticism), but I still think that there may be a value in steering consumers toward super effective causes that are still popular. Also, might strengthen the message if the impact is concentrated rather than diffuse against a portfolio of charities.
Agreed
I suppose I would be worried about Guiding Producers creating monopolies in some sectors where there aren’t many other dimensions firms can effectively compete. That would be a nice problem to have.
Yeah, cryptos are fraught with some reputational issues, but there’s definitely some possibilities there.
Anyway, I need to get to sleep for our 7:00 A.M. (my time call)!
I might be suited to reply to this because we’ve been trying to be a guiding producer (boas.co) for almost a year. I don’t have a lot of time to reply so this is rather quick and dirty but it’s a result of more than a 1000 hours of work. I’ve also studied economics so I can answer your call for an economist about the economic feasibility but am not going in depth in it now. We even have a research intern who is researching the economic feasibility of our project/guiding producers (research is probably ready in 3 weeks and I’ll share). I’ll try to reply to everything and feel free to DM or email me (vin@boas.co) if anyone wants to discuss further or in person.
The red team and positive points below are either my personal experience, from data we have or they are the experiences or opinions (those that I heard a lot) from others I talked to. I have probably talked to hundreds of people about this subject and this is what I hear and experience the most. Our company is in the process of validating whether this paper has merit and most results so far are positive, but there’s a lot more validation to be done (most importantly how guided consumption translates to purchase intent).
Some, if not most, of these points are addressed at least in part in this paper. I’m merely emphasizing or adding to some based on my experience. I’m talking to Brad West tomorrow and wanted to put my unbiased points here before that conversation.
Red Team Points
Maybe the best founders want to start companies that make them rich, not donate to charities.
Maybe the best “investors” want to make themselves rich, not donate their part of the profits to charities.
The most successful companies usually don’t turn a profit for many years, and require millions to billions in funding. How do guiding companies secure that funding if bullet 1 and 2 are true (successful companies usually have the best founders and investors)?
It’s hard to match the features of the most successful companies if you don’t have bullet 1,2 and 3. Profit destination might only be a deciding factor for purchase decisions if your company at least matches the competition and enables guided consumption as a differentiating factor/USP.
Profits that are donated to charities can’t be reinvested for marketing and R&D. You might reinvest all profits for a long time and donate nothing, but will customers “allow” that or do they demand charitable contributions from the start?
People might object to market or above market rates for employees. There have been many cases where reputations of non-profits have been harmed because executives made 200K USD per year, which is far less than they would make in for-profit organisations. This might also be true for guided producers.
Companies need financial buffers for unforeseen circumstances and crises. We have talked to companies that nearly bankrupted themselves because of their giving.
Guiding companies might have an uphill battle because they can’t secure the best founders and investors. The entire investor infrastructure around guiding companies still has to be built.
The paper assumes people might (start to) care about profit destination, which might not be true. That will make it harder to start guided companies because of the bullets above.
There is a lot of distrust in the world so the authenticating systems you mention are important. Guiding companies should have far more transparency than conventional companies.
If companies donate “some” of their profit and that’s a low percentage of their profit they shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves guiding companies imo as it might be seen as green washing/ethics washing and hurt the overall furthering of guided consumption.
Were incorporated in the Netherlands and some structures exist (e.g. steward ownership) but we can’t be a charity (even though we are like a non-profit) and if we donate more than a couple hundred K we actually need to pay tax on our donations. There is work to be done for guiding companies in terms of tax benefits and the organization structures that currently exist.
How do you balance maximizing profit for designated charities and making that profit in a moral and ethical way. Is it ok to make your money in ways that might harm people and the planet if you give the profits away? How and where do you draw the line? Do you pay your warehouse workers minimum wage (not enough to normally live of off in the US for example) so you can donate more to charities? Do you squeeze suppliers for more profits so you can donate where it’s needed more? The morals and ethics of this need to be developed and there are many opinions.
In my experience people care far more about ineffective charities than effective ones.
So far, EA /Philanthropists and Investors have been skeptical of this idea. Exacerbated by the fact that their returns are probably lower when investing in this kind of thing.
I would be interested in further brainstorming why this idea hasn’t taken off so far. It genuinely surprises me how little karma and interaction this post/idea is getting, even if it’s laid out so clearly in this paper. Are we severely overestimating how much people care? If even EA’s don’t seem to care so much, does the regular consumer?
Positive things, in my experience, about guided consumption
Some of the best people want to work for guided companies because they donate profits. Some of these people are wealthy and only want to work for companies that improve the world and guiding companies are uniquely suited to do so.
Some of the biggest “investors” are philanthropic, if you can convince them of your idea, they could find millions or even billions to take it to the moon.
Being a guiding company can be a competitive advantage in hiring, at least for non-founders. Some of the best people only want to work for “positive” companies. Companies are a product of their people so this might be a huge factor in why guiding companies might win.
Guiding companies get discounts on marketing, software, recruitment, consultancy etc. because they serve the world, not shareholders. This lowers all sorts of costs and could even help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
Guiding companies might pay lower tax amounts. This could help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
Guiding companies might start talking about the producer surplus of their competitors, creating awareness among the general public that it’s better to buy from guiding companies if they exist.
We compete in the sustainable marketplace sector because it has many competitors and they don’t have clear differentiation, our giving is used as a differentiating factor already and early results indicate that it’s indeed a reason companies partner with us, but we’re not sure about purchase intent on the consumer side, yet.
“Newmans Own” has been discussed in the comments already but I want to mention it too. You make it sound like they weren’t terribly successful, but they donated 500 million USD so far and there’s no reason they won’t go to more than a billion. This is the strongest case in guided consumption we’ve seen so far and I believe our researcher has talked to them so we’ll have some insights from them soon. We have more case studies from companies who are successful in guided consumption (indicating that they are succesful because they give their profits away), but it’s just a few so they might still be outliers.
NCOO’s are only necessary when guiding consumption is still the exception. When it becomes the rule it might no longer be necessary. This is likely to take decades if it ever happens at all.
Guiding companies might benefit from a independent label (similar to B Corp for example) that distinguishes them from normal business and identifies them as true guiding companies.
Our default giving option is to let us decide, which means we donate to the most effective charities (e.g. Maximum impact fund). Consumers can also choose cause areas they like (climate, poverty, animal rights) which are also effective. If they want even more granularity, they can opt for an individual charity. This structure ensures most of the giving is effective (and easy for the consumer) while still enabling choice for the consumer.
We haven’t found that being a guiding producer is costly. The most important thing we did is to just open up our books and having books is a requirement every company has anyways. The cost of opening our books has been close to zero. Creating automated and open infrastructure might be costly but can be shared among the guiding producers and could even be white labeled for additional revenue.
The largest for-profit companies, almost without exception, face expensive litigation because of anti trust and illegal and unethical behavior. These have large direct and indirect (reputational) costs that are likely to be lower for guiding producers.
We believe crypto could be an interesting avenue for raising funds and establishing a community
Red Team Responses:
1 and 2. Sorta beside the point: I can cede the point that becoming rich IS a major motivator for people to work hard, develop innovative ideas, and otherwise do great things that translate into companies that are immensely profitable. But we don’t need to be reinventing the wheel with a brand new invention or innovation (other than Guided Consumption), we can rather just be entering a competitive market equilibrium, buying one of its participants, and disrupting that equilibrium by imbuing it with an almost costless powerful weapon (I say costless because the charitable investor is not paying more than a private investor would to obtain capital, yet has a weapon in its identity that the private investor does not have.) Thus if the pre-acquisition company was worth $100 million, the post-acquisition company would be worth $100 million + X, where X is the value attributable to consumer preference toward the charity. The founder brilliance was probably what allowed that company to get to its pre-acquisition value and had made that founder immensely rich. Essentially, greed being a powerful motivation that enables excellent company performance is wholly compatible with Guiding Producers being incredibly lucrative. These objections sorta presume that the only way Guiding Producers could arise is if we had a game show pitting angelic altruistic entrepreneurs vs. a bunch of Gordon Gekko entrepreneurs.
3. You seem to be presuming again that a Guiding Producer would be a new company rather than an acquired company. I think there might be good reasons to begin new Guiding Companies given a robust social movement having taken off and good market sector research to indicate that a given sector is a robust one, but there is no requirement that a GP would have to start from scratch and could not be the product of a buyout or a leveraged buyout by a group of charitable investors.
4. You could match the features of a successful company by buying it out, keeping its existing features in place, and advertising that you should buy its products because it helps the global poor, for instance. (don’t take these answers to mean that I don’t think starting new Guiding Producers would necessarily be a bad idea- I think in some contexts- like sales- the differentiation that profit destination would provide could be enormous. I think the potential for Guiding Producer Real Estate Agents or Life Insurance Salespeople could be obscenely lucrative).
5. This is a real issue, but one that is almost certainly resolvable through corporate finance. Charities could borrow against their inflated equity to support their projects. There could also be a 5-10% allowance for private ownership for liquidity and price discovery purposes. Furthermore, if Guiding Producers are spread across enough different industries that the risks associated with them are idiosyncratic, they could form insurance pools that facilitates greater leveraging in borrowing, allowing more funds in relation to equity to be available through borrowing. Periodically, debts could be serviced and equity reestablished by dividends.
6. Hmm it strikes me as rather crazy if there was a CEO of a Guiding Producer for like a an electronics company that made $20 mil/year and a CEO of a competitor normal Producer making $20 mil a year that this umbrage at the Guiding Producer’s CEO’s compensation would cause them to screw over the charity by going with the normal Producer and thus enrich the wealthy shareholders. I think in this conversation, the real villains, if any, would be the Normal Producers.
7. Yes, Guiding Producers would have the same constraints normal Producers would have in this regard. Normal producers sometimes cash out too much to their shareholders/owners and compromise the financial stability of the business. This isn’t really an objection to Guided Consumption so much as a business reality that still applies.
8. Still this thinking that Guiding Producers have to be built from the ground-up… let the founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists do their thing, unless there is a particularly auspicious GC opportunity. Then disrupt established equilibria through the magic of a special investor who magically gets better returns (I say magical because it kind of is in that the same cost investment would yield a different return for charitable investors than other investors).
9. I call it non-psychopathy. The Consumer Power Initiative is trying to get to the point where the consumer has a virtually identical product at an identical price and the only choice is whether to help a worthy charity or line the pockets of an anonymous moneybags.
10. Totally agreed. There needs to be transparency as well as partnerships with those trusted in many communities that Guiding Producers are doing what they say they are.
11. I agree. I think the focus of CPI should be on pure Guiding Producers. There is also a concern that gamesmanship could allow for firms that donate 100% of “profit” to charities, but a deliberate effort to actually distribute almost all the money generated to key employees, with a pittance for the charity they supposedly serve. CPI will have a key role in credentialing for that as well.
12. Definitely needs to be some thought on the tax end of things. Think these issues are ultimately tractable through creative legal forms, etc. Needs to be investigated further.
13. Very interesting issue… I guess if a Guiding Producer needed to adopt the practices in its sector to be competitive, you could argue that it is still better than the counterfactual normal producer in its place. Needs to be grappled with as Guided Consumption develops.
14. Probably people care about certain ineffective and effective charities more than they do normal shareholders. There is an issue that once we reach the Age of Consumer Power, ineffective charities may be competing against effective charities for market share of their Guiding Firms. This is one of the reasons I would be interested in getting the Effective Altruist community in on this new frontier of Consumer Power.
15. They’ll figure it out eventually. I hear they’re supposed to be pretty smart.
16. The problem is that I have very little to effectively signal that I have something to say that is worth spending an hour of one’s time. The analytics page, as of the writing of this post, show that 16 uniqute devices have spent more than 5 minutes on this page. Th
Notes on positive things
Yeah, really could promote a good mission culture. You can be a life insurance salesperson, cashier, etc. any part of a Guiding Producer, big or small, and you’re working for a very noble purpose. I really think this could potentially open the Earning To Give door very widely.
Yeah, once they start to realize what’s going on, I suspect there is the good will among many philanthropists to get the “early phase” going. Once that is wildly successful, it’s going to be the wild west as the wealthy try to weaponize Consumer Power to their will.
Yup.
Exactly, using the prosocial nature of Guiding Producers could give them even unfair market advantages.
Really need to look into the tax stuff at some point. Hopefully some good opportunities.
Exactly… we could have like campaigns about the median wealth or income of investors in the competitor. Do you want to help the 1% or someone who makes less than $2.50/day?
Yeah, in some prosocial industries this could be an even greater superpower.
Yeah, I wasn’t fair to Newman’s Own. It just really gets to me that this ethic of not promoting discussion in the charitable discourse (such as the donative decisions one makes) strikes me as super toxic. I’m glad the EA community is so committed to discussing charity.
Yeah, at the very least NCCO’s jobs will be easier. I still think there will be a function in facilitating the ease of consumers channeling consumption through GCs.
Yep.
I think your method is the most competitive form of GC (capital agnosticism), but I still think that there may be a value in steering consumers toward super effective causes that are still popular. Also, might strengthen the message if the impact is concentrated rather than diffuse against a portfolio of charities.
Agreed
I suppose I would be worried about Guiding Producers creating monopolies in some sectors where there aren’t many other dimensions firms can effectively compete. That would be a nice problem to have.
Yeah, cryptos are fraught with some reputational issues, but there’s definitely some possibilities there.
Anyway, I need to get to sleep for our 7:00 A.M. (my time call)!