It could be interesting to explore/offer funds with different distribution thresholds (for example, saving all funds for 100+ years out versus donating a small percentage every year or nearly every year while still letting assets compound) for donors that have different distribution preferences. Knowing your money will be used to better the world every year in the present while also compounding indefinitely into the future to help future generations may be appealing.
As an alternative to a fixed set of people governing the fund, it could be interesting to consider a model of collaborative democracy/liquid democracy in which donors influence fund decisions and distributions, with each donor’s voting power done via equal weighting, donation weighting, or some other mechanism. Succession could be easily incorporated into such a system, with one’s votes being distributed in an even or preference-weighted fashion to living donors/stakeholders.
Having the fund structured as a corporate entity could be an interesting possibility as well; it seems some corporations have lasted for over 1,000 years. It should also be possible to set up different legal entities in different countries for maximum continuity (which also easily supports donors from different countries).
The fund could have staff that explore impact investing, such as directly funding high-impact startups or impacting the direction of corporations (private equity, shareholder activism, etc), so that the assets can be used to do good even as they compound indefinitely.
Edit to include a recent EA Forum post I wrote: Having the long-term investment fund be hosted within a more generalized entity (ideally one that is controlled by or aligned with the fund management), such as a provider of donor-advised funds, might increase the chances of the fund surviving into the far future due to it having a lot more assets and also a lot more living stakeholders at every point in time.
It could be interesting to explore/offer funds with different distribution thresholds (for example, saving all funds for 100+ years out versus donating a small percentage every year or nearly every year while still letting assets compound) for donors that have different distribution preferences. Knowing your money will be used to better the world every year in the present while also compounding indefinitely into the future to help future generations may be appealing.
That indeed sounds like a valuable idea to me.
Personally, my current best guess is that EA should move more in the direction of “patient philanthropy”, and that it makes sense for most of my own giving to take that form, at least until research into and debate on that topic has progressed further. But I also quite like giving some amount now. So I’m continuing to give at 10% per year—as per my Giving What We Can pledge, which I took before learning about the arguments for patient philanthropy, but I think I’d like doing that anyway. And then I try to save and invest a lot beyond that, so that I can hopefully eventually do something like a “backdated” Further Pledge, in which I’ll ultimately give as much as I earned from ~2019 onwards beyond ~15-30k USD per year.
Maybe this is actually the optimal strategy, for reasons such as giving each year helping me avoid value drift, or me having taken the pledge already and it being a good general principle to stick to one’s promises (see also). But I think I’d like doing this even if it wasn’t optimal.
So I imagine many other people would also find it appealing to have the option of getting to feel that they’re doing good each year. And it seems plausible to me that making that option available, alongside arguments for mostly taking the “patient” approach, would actually increase the total funding allocated to the “patient” approach.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I think that making some fund distributions in the present also serves to demonstrate the decision making and grantmaking capabilities of the fund’s grantmakers. Some donors might consider it an uncertainty to donate to a fund that has not made any grants for, say, three decades, whereas having the fund make microgrants or having a version of the fund that makes grants demonstrates that the fund has been and will continue to make a positive social impact.
Here are a few ideas that come to mind.
It could be interesting to explore/offer funds with different distribution thresholds (for example, saving all funds for 100+ years out versus donating a small percentage every year or nearly every year while still letting assets compound) for donors that have different distribution preferences. Knowing your money will be used to better the world every year in the present while also compounding indefinitely into the future to help future generations may be appealing.
As an alternative to a fixed set of people governing the fund, it could be interesting to consider a model of collaborative democracy/liquid democracy in which donors influence fund decisions and distributions, with each donor’s voting power done via equal weighting, donation weighting, or some other mechanism. Succession could be easily incorporated into such a system, with one’s votes being distributed in an even or preference-weighted fashion to living donors/stakeholders.
Having the fund structured as a corporate entity could be an interesting possibility as well; it seems some corporations have lasted for over 1,000 years. It should also be possible to set up different legal entities in different countries for maximum continuity (which also easily supports donors from different countries).
The fund could have staff that explore impact investing, such as directly funding high-impact startups or impacting the direction of corporations (private equity, shareholder activism, etc), so that the assets can be used to do good even as they compound indefinitely.
Edit to include a recent EA Forum post I wrote: Having the long-term investment fund be hosted within a more generalized entity (ideally one that is controlled by or aligned with the fund management), such as a provider of donor-advised funds, might increase the chances of the fund surviving into the far future due to it having a lot more assets and also a lot more living stakeholders at every point in time.
That indeed sounds like a valuable idea to me.
Personally, my current best guess is that EA should move more in the direction of “patient philanthropy”, and that it makes sense for most of my own giving to take that form, at least until research into and debate on that topic has progressed further. But I also quite like giving some amount now. So I’m continuing to give at 10% per year—as per my Giving What We Can pledge, which I took before learning about the arguments for patient philanthropy, but I think I’d like doing that anyway. And then I try to save and invest a lot beyond that, so that I can hopefully eventually do something like a “backdated” Further Pledge, in which I’ll ultimately give as much as I earned from ~2019 onwards beyond ~15-30k USD per year.
Maybe this is actually the optimal strategy, for reasons such as giving each year helping me avoid value drift, or me having taken the pledge already and it being a good general principle to stick to one’s promises (see also). But I think I’d like doing this even if it wasn’t optimal.
So I imagine many other people would also find it appealing to have the option of getting to feel that they’re doing good each year. And it seems plausible to me that making that option available, alongside arguments for mostly taking the “patient” approach, would actually increase the total funding allocated to the “patient” approach.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I think that making some fund distributions in the present also serves to demonstrate the decision making and grantmaking capabilities of the fund’s grantmakers. Some donors might consider it an uncertainty to donate to a fund that has not made any grants for, say, three decades, whereas having the fund make microgrants or having a version of the fund that makes grants demonstrates that the fund has been and will continue to make a positive social impact.