I liked your post a lot too, and I think it would be a good starting point precisely because it would be simpler and easier to avoid corruption by creating a safety net with a fixed group of members (people who had submitted evidence of donations) and capped payouts (50% of their total donation amount, or etc), rather than having a charity-style organization that evaluates applications from anyone, like EA Funds.
Mormon/Amish/etc social insurance through church works well because there is a pretty clear, pretty hard-to-fake signal of who’s a community member and who’s not (ie, do you spend every sunday in church or not). Normal insurance companies create a clear distinction between members and nonmembers by requiring everyone to pay a monthly premium. The EA and rationalist communities will probably always be more amorphous and fuzzy than a typical Amish group, but if we just required that everyone pays a monthly premium then it’s unclear how we could do any better than existing insurance companies. So I like the idea of deciding membership based on proof of past charitable donations to EA causes.
I also agree that a service like this (allowing people to “get their donations back” from the community pool if they unexpectedly fell on hard times) might encourage people to donate more or take on more risks in the first place, which would be good for EA overall.
I think it would be good to start experimenting with the service described in your post. Over time, if successful, the insurance pool could try to branch out into other more advanced services—perhaps helping people make risky but high-expected-value career moves by offering them some kind of insurance or support in case their ambitious career move fails. Or doing the kind of community-assistance grantmaking that Ozzie is exploring here.
The biggest wins probably come from finding more good ways to support early-career people facing precarious situations while just getting into EA, exactly like Linch’s story above. The “get back your proven past donations” approach won’t work as well for people in those situations since most of them won’t have made many EA donations yet. But hopefully we could try to build up to that over time somehow.
I liked your post a lot too, and I think it would be a good starting point precisely because it would be simpler and easier to avoid corruption by creating a safety net with a fixed group of members (people who had submitted evidence of donations) and capped payouts (50% of their total donation amount, or etc), rather than having a charity-style organization that evaluates applications from anyone, like EA Funds.
Mormon/Amish/etc social insurance through church works well because there is a pretty clear, pretty hard-to-fake signal of who’s a community member and who’s not (ie, do you spend every sunday in church or not). Normal insurance companies create a clear distinction between members and nonmembers by requiring everyone to pay a monthly premium. The EA and rationalist communities will probably always be more amorphous and fuzzy than a typical Amish group, but if we just required that everyone pays a monthly premium then it’s unclear how we could do any better than existing insurance companies. So I like the idea of deciding membership based on proof of past charitable donations to EA causes.
I also agree that a service like this (allowing people to “get their donations back” from the community pool if they unexpectedly fell on hard times) might encourage people to donate more or take on more risks in the first place, which would be good for EA overall.
I think it would be good to start experimenting with the service described in your post. Over time, if successful, the insurance pool could try to branch out into other more advanced services—perhaps helping people make risky but high-expected-value career moves by offering them some kind of insurance or support in case their ambitious career move fails. Or doing the kind of community-assistance grantmaking that Ozzie is exploring here.
The biggest wins probably come from finding more good ways to support early-career people facing precarious situations while just getting into EA, exactly like Linch’s story above. The “get back your proven past donations” approach won’t work as well for people in those situations since most of them won’t have made many EA donations yet. But hopefully we could try to build up to that over time somehow.
(Just noting general agreement with this)