Consequentialists and EAs have certainly been interested in these questions. We were discussing the idea back in 2009. Toby Ord has written a relevant paper.
I’m not donating to politics, so wouldn’t use it. I would say that if an election costs ~$10B, and you might move 0.1% of that into charities for a cost of $0.25M, that seems like a good deal. The obvious criticism, I think, is: “couldn’t they benefit more from keeping the money?” I think this is surmountable because donating it may be psychologically preferable. Another reservation would be “You should figure out what happened with Repledge before trying to repeat it”, which I think is basically something you should do.
I guess the funding that you initially need is probably significantly less than $250k, so it might make sense to apply for the February deadline of the EA Infrastructure Fund. If you’re trying to do things before November (which seems difficult), then you might apply “off-cycle”. Although there’s a range of other funders of varying degrees of plausibility such as OpenPhil (mostly for funding amounts >$100k), the funders behind Progress studies (maybe the Collisons), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, the Long-term Future Fund etc.
Re choice of charities, well.. we do think that charities vary in effectiveness by many orders of magnitude, so probably it does make sense to be selective. In particular, most people who’ve studied the question think that those that focus on long-term impact can be orders of magnitude more effective than those that don’t. So a lot of EAs (including me) work on catastrophic threats. This would be a good idea if you believe Haidt’s ideas about common threats making common ground, which I think is nice. See also his Asteroids Club. This could support choices like the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Hopkins’ Centre for Health Security, discussed here. To the extent that you were funding such charities, I think the case for effectiveness (and the case for EA funding) would be stronger.
The ideal choice of charities could also depend to some extent on other design choices taken: 1) do you want to allow trades other than $1:$1? 2) do you allow people to offer to do a trade, specific for one particular charity? On (1), one argument in favour would be that if one party has a larger funding base than the other, then a $1:$1 trade might favour them. Another would be that this naturally balances out the problem of charities being preferred by one side more than the other. One argument against would be that people might view 1:1 as fairer, and donate more. (2), arguments in favour would be that diversity can better satisfy people’s preferences, and that you might fund certain charities too much if you just choose one. The argument against would be that people really hate choosing between charities. Overall, for (1) I’d guess “no”. For (2), I’d guess “no” again, although I think it could be great to have a system where the charity rotates each week—it could help with promoting the app as well! But these are of course no more than guesses.
Anyway, those are all details—it seems like an exciting project!
Another relevant post is Paul Christiano’s Repledge++, which suggests some nice variations. (It might still be worth going with something simple to ease communication, but it seems good to consider options and be aware of concerns.)
As one potential problem with the basic idea, it notes that
I’m not donating to politics, so wouldn’t use it.
isn’t necessarily true, because if you thought that your money would be matched with high probability, you could remove money from the other campaign at no cost to your favorite charity. This is bad, because it gives people on the other side less incentive to donate to the scheme, because they might just match people who otherwise wouldn’t have donated to campaigns.
A possible solution is to send only half of any matched money to charity. Then, from an apolitical altruist’s perspective, donating $100 to the platform would cause at most $100 extra to go to charity, and less if their money doesn’t end up matched. (On the other hand, this still leaves the problem of s slightly political altruist, who cares somewhat about politics but more about charity; I don’t know how to solve this problem.)
And yeah, we’ve run into Repledge++ and are trying a small informal trial with it right now!
Thanks! Yup, if we were guaranteed success, I agree it would be worth it. On the other hand, I don’t know how likely that is or how much money we’d attract if we did get off the ground. We’re trying to get people to participate in a rudimentary version of our platform to see how much interest there is in this sort of thing.
Thanks for recommending the funds. I’m not heavily involved in this community (yet) so I wasn’t aware of these; we will definitely look into them!
I’ve thought about allowing matches besides 1:1, but this seems overly complicated. Seems like a much higher barrier to entry if a donor has to make the additional choice of “what ratios am I willing to match my money at.” I agree the idea is appealing in theory though!
It’s good to know that people hate choosing between charities. It seems like a good solution may be to have a default charity (as Sanjay suggested below) but still give people a choice.
The obvious criticism, I think, is: “couldn’t they benefit more from keeping the money?”
You want people to not have the money any more, otherwise e.g. a single Democrat with a $1K budget could donate repeatedly to match ten Republicans donating $1K each.
I’m not sure what the equilibrium would be, but it seems likely it would evolve towards all money being exactly matched, being returned to the users, and then being donated to the parties the normal way. Or perhaps people would stop using it altogether.
Another important detail here is which charities the money goes to—the Republican donor may not feel great if after matching the Democrat’s donation goes to e.g. Planned Parenthood. In the long run, I’d probably try to do surveys of users to find out which charities they’d object to the other side giving to, and not include those. But initially it could just be GiveWell charities for simplicity.
Re choice of charities
It seems pretty important for this sort of venture to build trust with users and have a lot of legitimacy. So, I think it is probably better to let people choose their own charities (excluding political ones for the reasons mentioned above).
You can still sway donations quite a lot based on the default behavior of the platform. In the long run, I’d probably have GiveWell charities as defaults (where you can point to GiveWell’s analysis for legitimacy, and you mostly don’t have to worry about room for more funding), and (if you wanted to be longtermist) maybe also a section of “our recommended charities” that is more longtermist with explanations of why those charities were selected.
Consequentialists and EAs have certainly been interested in these questions. We were discussing the idea back in 2009. Toby Ord has written a relevant paper.
I’m not donating to politics, so wouldn’t use it. I would say that if an election costs ~$10B, and you might move 0.1% of that into charities for a cost of $0.25M, that seems like a good deal. The obvious criticism, I think, is: “couldn’t they benefit more from keeping the money?” I think this is surmountable because donating it may be psychologically preferable. Another reservation would be “You should figure out what happened with Repledge before trying to repeat it”, which I think is basically something you should do.
I guess the funding that you initially need is probably significantly less than $250k, so it might make sense to apply for the February deadline of the EA Infrastructure Fund. If you’re trying to do things before November (which seems difficult), then you might apply “off-cycle”. Although there’s a range of other funders of varying degrees of plausibility such as OpenPhil (mostly for funding amounts >$100k), the funders behind Progress studies (maybe the Collisons), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, the Long-term Future Fund etc.
Re choice of charities, well.. we do think that charities vary in effectiveness by many orders of magnitude, so probably it does make sense to be selective. In particular, most people who’ve studied the question think that those that focus on long-term impact can be orders of magnitude more effective than those that don’t. So a lot of EAs (including me) work on catastrophic threats. This would be a good idea if you believe Haidt’s ideas about common threats making common ground, which I think is nice. See also his Asteroids Club. This could support choices like the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Hopkins’ Centre for Health Security, discussed here. To the extent that you were funding such charities, I think the case for effectiveness (and the case for EA funding) would be stronger.
The ideal choice of charities could also depend to some extent on other design choices taken: 1) do you want to allow trades other than $1:$1? 2) do you allow people to offer to do a trade, specific for one particular charity? On (1), one argument in favour would be that if one party has a larger funding base than the other, then a $1:$1 trade might favour them. Another would be that this naturally balances out the problem of charities being preferred by one side more than the other. One argument against would be that people might view 1:1 as fairer, and donate more. (2), arguments in favour would be that diversity can better satisfy people’s preferences, and that you might fund certain charities too much if you just choose one. The argument against would be that people really hate choosing between charities. Overall, for (1) I’d guess “no”. For (2), I’d guess “no” again, although I think it could be great to have a system where the charity rotates each week—it could help with promoting the app as well! But these are of course no more than guesses.
Anyway, those are all details—it seems like an exciting project!
Another relevant post is Paul Christiano’s Repledge++, which suggests some nice variations. (It might still be worth going with something simple to ease communication, but it seems good to consider options and be aware of concerns.)
As one potential problem with the basic idea, it notes that
isn’t necessarily true, because if you thought that your money would be matched with high probability, you could remove money from the other campaign at no cost to your favorite charity. This is bad, because it gives people on the other side less incentive to donate to the scheme, because they might just match people who otherwise wouldn’t have donated to campaigns.
Yeah, I agree this would be bad. I talk a bit about this here: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/incentives-in-the-election-charity-platform/
A possible solution is to send only half of any matched money to charity. Then, from an apolitical altruist’s perspective, donating $100 to the platform would cause at most $100 extra to go to charity, and less if their money doesn’t end up matched. (On the other hand, this still leaves the problem of s slightly political altruist, who cares somewhat about politics but more about charity; I don’t know how to solve this problem.)
And yeah, we’ve run into Repledge++ and are trying a small informal trial with it right now!
Thanks! Yup, if we were guaranteed success, I agree it would be worth it. On the other hand, I don’t know how likely that is or how much money we’d attract if we did get off the ground. We’re trying to get people to participate in a rudimentary version of our platform to see how much interest there is in this sort of thing.
Thanks for recommending the funds. I’m not heavily involved in this community (yet) so I wasn’t aware of these; we will definitely look into them!
I’ve thought about allowing matches besides 1:1, but this seems overly complicated. Seems like a much higher barrier to entry if a donor has to make the additional choice of “what ratios am I willing to match my money at.” I agree the idea is appealing in theory though!
It’s good to know that people hate choosing between charities. It seems like a good solution may be to have a default charity (as Sanjay suggested below) but still give people a choice.
Both links go to the same felicifia page. I suspect you’re referring to the moral trade paper: http://www.amirrorclear.net/files/moral-trade.pdf
fixed
You want people to not have the money any more, otherwise e.g. a single Democrat with a $1K budget could donate repeatedly to match ten Republicans donating $1K each.
I’m not sure what the equilibrium would be, but it seems likely it would evolve towards all money being exactly matched, being returned to the users, and then being donated to the parties the normal way. Or perhaps people would stop using it altogether.
Another important detail here is which charities the money goes to—the Republican donor may not feel great if after matching the Democrat’s donation goes to e.g. Planned Parenthood. In the long run, I’d probably try to do surveys of users to find out which charities they’d object to the other side giving to, and not include those. But initially it could just be GiveWell charities for simplicity.
It seems pretty important for this sort of venture to build trust with users and have a lot of legitimacy. So, I think it is probably better to let people choose their own charities (excluding political ones for the reasons mentioned above).
You can still sway donations quite a lot based on the default behavior of the platform. In the long run, I’d probably have GiveWell charities as defaults (where you can point to GiveWell’s analysis for legitimacy, and you mostly don’t have to worry about room for more funding), and (if you wanted to be longtermist) maybe also a section of “our recommended charities” that is more longtermist with explanations of why those charities were selected.
Ryan, could you point me to “the funders behind Progress studies” you mentioned? I wasn’t able to figure out what this refers to by googling. Thanks!
This probably refers to the Mercatus Center / Emergent Ventures / Marginal Revolution / Tyler Cowen. See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/progress-studies-tranche-of-emergent-ventures.html, https://www.mercatus.org/commentary/we-need-new-science-progress
Basically funding connected to this.