Proposal: Pay someone with a ‘donation gift card’ or ‘donation credits’
Details and rationale:
Often, when I work on a project approved by EAs, I don’t necessarily want to be paid as much as I want to be able to have people work on my EA projects in the future.
Imagine you have a Donor Advisor Fund called the Altruist Bank which emits one Altruist Credit per USD you put into it. The Altruist Credit can be spent by saying to which charity you want the DAF to send a USD. The Altruist Credit can also be given to other people directly.
My hope was that accepting to be paid with altruist credits would be a strong signal of alignment on altruism, and altruistic people might perform better at altruist projects (as their incentives are more aligned). A discounted wage might also act as a signal, although maybe it can also attract less qualified people (?)
It might also encourage a culture of more donations.
And **maybe** be simpler than everyone individually opening a DAF.
Avoiding possible problems:
If we can somehow make it illegal to sell, that would be useful because otherwise anyone can sell their Altruist Credits to altruists for just slightly less than 1 USD each, at which point you’re just back with USDs
If it became massively used, then it could start to being used just as a currency (as long as everyone expect others to accept it) (although this seems unlikely to happen)
Additional note:
I think parallel economies, such as Simbi, are bad for basic Econ 101 reasons, but here maybe the altruistic signaling is of sufficient additional value (?)
Altruist credits
Epistemic status: not sure if the idea works
Category: meta
Proposal: Pay someone with a ‘donation gift card’ or ‘donation credits’
Details and rationale:
Often, when I work on a project approved by EAs, I don’t necessarily want to be paid as much as I want to be able to have people work on my EA projects in the future.
Imagine you have a Donor Advisor Fund called the Altruist Bank which emits one Altruist Credit per USD you put into it. The Altruist Credit can be spent by saying to which charity you want the DAF to send a USD. The Altruist Credit can also be given to other people directly.
My hope was that accepting to be paid with altruist credits would be a strong signal of alignment on altruism, and altruistic people might perform better at altruist projects (as their incentives are more aligned). A discounted wage might also act as a signal, although maybe it can also attract less qualified people (?)
It might also encourage a culture of more donations.
And **maybe** be simpler than everyone individually opening a DAF.
Avoiding possible problems:
If we can somehow make it illegal to sell, that would be useful because otherwise anyone can sell their Altruist Credits to altruists for just slightly less than 1 USD each, at which point you’re just back with USDs
If it became massively used, then it could start to being used just as a currency (as long as everyone expect others to accept it) (although this seems unlikely to happen)
Additional note:
I think parallel economies, such as Simbi, are bad for basic Econ 101 reasons, but here maybe the altruistic signaling is of sufficient additional value (?)