This is an interesting idea, but I don’t know how feasible or realistic it is. I find it really helpful to think of EA as a marketplace for maximum impact goods and services. Like your local farmers’ market, but instead of selling fruit and vegetables, people are offering charities, charity recommendations, and so on. (I’ve been reflecting on this for a while, and might write it up as a standalone post). The analogy doesn’t have to be perfect to be informative. In this framing, what we’d want, presumably, is for there to be lots of competition and choice, so that consumers get a better deal. You don’t want there to be just one guy that sells fruit, and only sells oranges, for example.
The challenge for EA is that one buyer dominates the market: Open Philanthropy is, I think, 50+% of total. In effect, you’re going to get about as much variety as OP wants, when they do their own ‘shopping’: if OP wants to buy your fruit, you’re in business; if they don’t, it’s much harder to survive in the market. If they want there to be a greater variety of sellers, they can create demand for them—equivalent to saying “hey, if you start selling apples in the market, we’ll buy 10 crates” or whatever. But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want. It puts the new vendors in an odd, risky position too if they only exist because they have one, questionably enthusiastic consumer. They could see it as a good use of money: they’d be subsiding the creation of products in the hope of creating demand and bringing other people into the market. Hence, it’s not obvious the main buyer in a marketplace would want to creat variety vs just seek out the specific things they want.*
*Mutatis mutandis, there are the same issues if major funders engage in regranting, which is like giving your friends some of your money and asking them to buy stuff in the market. If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want
I’m thinking more about separating existing markets, or perhaps setting up new orgs to catch the overflow from when existing ones expand. Fwiw FTX Foundation explicitly wanted to do this—they had a category for ‘competition to existing EA orgs’. This could have been because as a different org they were sceptical of OP’s priorities, though this seems unlikely given the substantial overlap between the people involved, so it seems more like a genuine desire for a better marketplace.
If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
This seems too simplistic and worrying if we genuinely think this is how OP think. Most people recognise that there’s a wisdom in crowds, and epistemic advantage to a diversity of thoughtful viewpoints.
This is an interesting idea, but I don’t know how feasible or realistic it is. I find it really helpful to think of EA as a marketplace for maximum impact goods and services. Like your local farmers’ market, but instead of selling fruit and vegetables, people are offering charities, charity recommendations, and so on. (I’ve been reflecting on this for a while, and might write it up as a standalone post). The analogy doesn’t have to be perfect to be informative. In this framing, what we’d want, presumably, is for there to be lots of competition and choice, so that consumers get a better deal. You don’t want there to be just one guy that sells fruit, and only sells oranges, for example.
The challenge for EA is that one buyer dominates the market: Open Philanthropy is, I think, 50+% of total. In effect, you’re going to get about as much variety as OP wants, when they do their own ‘shopping’: if OP wants to buy your fruit, you’re in business; if they don’t, it’s much harder to survive in the market. If they want there to be a greater variety of sellers, they can create demand for them—equivalent to saying “hey, if you start selling apples in the market, we’ll buy 10 crates” or whatever. But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want. It puts the new vendors in an odd, risky position too if they only exist because they have one, questionably enthusiastic consumer. They could see it as a good use of money: they’d be subsiding the creation of products in the hope of creating demand and bringing other people into the market. Hence, it’s not obvious the main buyer in a marketplace would want to creat variety vs just seek out the specific things they want.*
*Mutatis mutandis, there are the same issues if major funders engage in regranting, which is like giving your friends some of your money and asking them to buy stuff in the market. If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
I’m thinking more about separating existing markets, or perhaps setting up new orgs to catch the overflow from when existing ones expand. Fwiw FTX Foundation explicitly wanted to do this—they had a category for ‘competition to existing EA orgs’. This could have been because as a different org they were sceptical of OP’s priorities, though this seems unlikely given the substantial overlap between the people involved, so it seems more like a genuine desire for a better marketplace.
This seems too simplistic and worrying if we genuinely think this is how OP think. Most people recognise that there’s a wisdom in crowds, and epistemic advantage to a diversity of thoughtful viewpoints.