What If You Could Save the World in Your Free Time?
If you want to save the world in your professional life, go to 80,000 hours. And if you want to save the world with money you generate from your profession, go to GiveWell. But what if you want to save the world on the weekend? Or on a Wednesday night, instead of watching The Princess Bride for the 37th time?
The Problem
Volunteering is a hallowed part of our altruistic culture, and like our altruistic culture more generally, it often is sub-optimal. For practical reasons, direct-intervention volunteering focuses on the local, such as volunteering in a soup kitchen or cleaning up a local trail. And volunteering focused on raising money rarely capitalizes on the market value of the volunteer’s free time; think: lawyers raising money through a bake sale.
What Is the Value of One’s Free Time?
The simplest answer is the market rate for whatever one does for a living, e.g., web development, financial advice, legal advice, personal training, writing, editing, translation, etc. Some people have even more-valuable talents that do not lend themselves to a full-time career. If you have ever attended a charity auction, you likely have seen examples of these types of talents.
Potential Solutions
Work longer hours and donate the earnings to effective charities. Most salaried employees do not have the option to work more hours at their job and collect a proportionately larger paycheck.
Sell one’s services on an existing website like Craigslist. Although possible in theory, there is not (as far as I know) a market for regular people to sell a few hours of their time in this manner.
Proposal: Create a New Market
Another solution would be to create an online marketplace in which people could sell their time at its most-valued rate and give all, or a published percentage, of the proceeds to a designated charity. The idea would be to create a market that does not presently exist in which people could efficiently convert free time into money. Participants on both ends of a transaction would be contributing to charity, thereby creating an extra-market reason for consumers to purchase services on this site, even if the same service is available for the same price elsewhere. Think of it as an effective bake sale.
How It Might Work (Just Spitballin’ here)
The site would allow individuals to offer services and request services. Service providers would register an account and would receive ratings and reviews. The goal would be to create a genuine, competitive market without substantial barriers to entry. Ideal services would be those that could be provided remotely, such as the services mentioned above. But as mentioned above, because the proceeds go to charity, I suspect markets for unusual services would emerge that would not ordinarily exist.
Where would the money go? The site would promote EA-endorsed charities, but ultimately service providers would be able to choose the recipient of their funds. All payments would be through the site and would go directly to the designated charity. The site would publish how much money it moves to designated charities.
Do All Proceeds Go to Charity? Giving all proceeds to charity has a compelling simplicity to it. That said, I am drawn to the idea of creating a market that encourages for-profit, EA-oriented businesses. I could imagine a commercial niche developing for individuals (or even small companies) who give 30% of their revenue to charity. Indeed, the site might even be able to fund some or all of its own costs by taking a percentage of the for-profit revenue.
Potential Impact
First, it would capture some portion of current, sub-optimal volunteering and convert it into much more effective volunteering.
Second, it would generate more volunteering. We all waste time. While saving the world is a better use of time than watching bad television, converting bad-television time into world-saving time is unfortunately not that simple. The goal of this site would be to make it simpler.
Third, it would be a potential source of PR and information for EA thinking and EA causes.
Lastly, it would be a means of widely teaching one of the most important and poorly understood EA concepts: trade-off costs.
Feedback
So, what am I missing?
(Friendly reminder that another great place to use your spare time to do good is .impact, an EA volunteering group.)
Yes, I meant to include a shout-out to .impact. Consider this a belated one.
I think my fundamental initial objection is that I don’t understand the value that “effective altruism” brings to this compared to existing commercial marketplaces.
If you have a skill that is well understood and tractable to an internet based market place—there is a powerful incentive for people to create commercial market places for those skills. Indeed—commercial market places for such skills are THE hot silicon valley startup at the moment (” look at how many startups are being called the uber of X”).
If there is value in a more generalised market place—I think all the EA angle does is massively restrict the pool of potential buyers and sellers to people who understand what EA is. (possibly some reputation effects? but only if the community is very very small)
As a commercial proposition this seems like an ambitious but dubious and very vague plan. As an EA idea it seems hopeless. Don’t worry though—good to spitball ideas like this in public and shows a great deal of bravery and a commendable attitude to do so. A character flaw in myself is that I shoot down my own ideas far too readily I think rather than trusting in others to reach out and see what they think.
I appreciate the feedback. I also shoot down most of my ideas, but I thought this one was worth sharing. I don’t want to be in the position of “defending” the viability of the idea, but I will at least attempt to clarify it:
I did not imagine this ultimately catering primarily to the EA community, which is why I didn’t think of .impact or impact certificates as alternatives. I imagined a widely used site like Craigslist on which people advertised random skills and needs. I didn’t imagine an explicit “EA angle” other than that the goal was to get the most out of people’s time and encourage them to direct the proceeds to the best charities.
The idea behind creating a new site was twofold: First is that my perception (which might well be wrong) was that there is not presently a market for people to sell a few hours of their time a week. There is certainly a market for people who want to sell their talents as a closer-to-full-time profession. And there might be a market for people who want to sell a few hours on the weekend for certain services. But I didn’t think what I envisioned existed. Again, I could be wrong (and it might be that voolla.org is trying to do exactly that).
Second is that I thought it at least possible that the site might develop momentum as a consequence of the charity angle. In other words, if the same service is offered for the same price on a regular commercial site and on this site, why not use this site and help the world at the same time? Relatedly, users of the site would be able to signal their charitable work.
A promising idea.
They’re not seriously damaging omissions, but things you might want to address are:
How is this better than people just spending their time then claiming impact certificates? Should marginal resources just be spent on scaling up that?
How can you attract non-EA users? Scaling beyond our limited community is a critical challenge for a project that relies on its network of users, and this has been too tricky for other .impact projects in the past.
Do we gain that much by making it for charity? Presumably most people are more motivated by just having cash, and you could take some nominal cut. If you take out the charity part, it starts sounding more like Mechanical Turk, the already-thriving marketplace for low-skilled online work. What is our value add over and above that?
How can we get people to be paid for their full-value? I guess we want to distance it from cheap outsourcing like Mechanical Turk, because that’s low paid. So somehow, you want to make it have more of a ‘consulting’-like feel. But a big challenge in consulting is that it’s mostly selling to large business that are choosing based on reputation, or personal knowledge of a boutique consultant.
So would it be better to start an actual consultancy, and then use the work of a small handful of trusted professionals?
I think using these resources is important, so hopefully these comparisons and challenges lead to some fruitful thinking.
Not exactly what you describe, but pretty close: http://www.voolla.org
(Disclosure: an advisor to my organization is the founder of Voolla) Voolla turns volunteer skills into money for charities. We do this by providing an online marketplace where Service Providers with skills are matched to buyers of those skills, with a portion of the project fee going to charity.
Yeah there’s actually more than just that. There’s a decent few in this space.
This IS quite similar! Thanks. Will look further into it.
One could also use elance.com. The money doesn’t go directly to charity, but it would be easy enough to donate the money once you receive it. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty disappointed in elance: many of the jobs advertised are just content farming.