Within EA, I’ve seen a couple of examples of limited voucher systems (or systems with some similar properties):
Giving Games give people the chance to allocate funding to one charity out of a small group (usually 2-5)
I’ve personally run a limited “donation voucher” system on Facebook before, offering to donate a small amount ($50, IIRC) to any GiveWell charity on behalf of the first X people who took the offer (I think X = 5, but only three people actually asked)
I’d worry about what the existence of a voucher system might mean for charities that take more risks; if it were sufficiently well-funded, it could increase the attention paid to the philanthropic sector and lead to many more fights over controversial organizations like Planned Parenthood (or even someplace like MIRI).
I also suspect that much of the best philanthropy happens through large donations to lesser-known organizations from people who have the time and money to conduct research (e.g. the kind of work Open Phil does), and that people with less knowledge making smaller donations might not make high-impact choices. (I think it’s very likely that a voucher system would increase the correlation between charities’ spending on marketing and their donation revenue.)
That said, if someone were to propose a bill in the House that redistributed $25 billion in the form of $100 vouchers to every American adult for charitable giving, I might support it, assuming that the costs of the redistribution/vouchering process weren’t too high. The average charity people chose to support (e.g. “buying food for hungry people”) might still have more impact on total welfare than the average use of government funds.
Within EA, I’ve seen a couple of examples of limited voucher systems (or systems with some similar properties):
Giving Games give people the chance to allocate funding to one charity out of a small group (usually 2-5)
I’ve personally run a limited “donation voucher” system on Facebook before, offering to donate a small amount ($50, IIRC) to any GiveWell charity on behalf of the first X people who took the offer (I think X = 5, but only three people actually asked)
I’d worry about what the existence of a voucher system might mean for charities that take more risks; if it were sufficiently well-funded, it could increase the attention paid to the philanthropic sector and lead to many more fights over controversial organizations like Planned Parenthood (or even someplace like MIRI).
I also suspect that much of the best philanthropy happens through large donations to lesser-known organizations from people who have the time and money to conduct research (e.g. the kind of work Open Phil does), and that people with less knowledge making smaller donations might not make high-impact choices. (I think it’s very likely that a voucher system would increase the correlation between charities’ spending on marketing and their donation revenue.)
That said, if someone were to propose a bill in the House that redistributed $25 billion in the form of $100 vouchers to every American adult for charitable giving, I might support it, assuming that the costs of the redistribution/vouchering process weren’t too high. The average charity people chose to support (e.g. “buying food for hungry people”) might still have more impact on total welfare than the average use of government funds.