In practice this might look different depending on the scale of implementation (how fine grained are certificates; who are the certificate-issuers).
One extreme is:
You are issued with a certificate whenever you help someone;
There is a liquid market in the certificates;
Helping someone is seen (by the market) as good to the degree to which it benefits them;
Helping two individuals by the same amount is seen (by the market) as equally good.
Then the certificates essentially become a currency system, which has something like a guaranteed basic income built into it (the amount that you can be helped in a given year).
This extreme probably isn’t exactly what you have in mind (for instance, I’m not sure how it would interact with helping future people). But I don’t have a good sense of how far in this direction you’re thinking.
Presumably there is a market for certificates amongst those concerned with e.g. the global poor, and it might function in this way. There is no provision in this system for allowing the beneficiaries to determine the value of these certificates. As with contemporary philanthropy, this responsibility falls to the philanthropists, who may or may not execute it responsibly.
(This judgment would be reflected in the relative prices of “Helped Alice by doing X” and “Helped Alice by giving her $1,” which may have some benefits in terms of transparency.)
Cash transfers are a more direct way to capture these benefits. (After cash transfers are in place, providing goods to the poor can then be a profit-oriented enterprise.) The key question is just whether you think philanthropists or beneficiaries are better at comparing benefits.
In practice this might look different depending on the scale of implementation (how fine grained are certificates; who are the certificate-issuers).
One extreme is:
You are issued with a certificate whenever you help someone;
There is a liquid market in the certificates;
Helping someone is seen (by the market) as good to the degree to which it benefits them;
Helping two individuals by the same amount is seen (by the market) as equally good.
Then the certificates essentially become a currency system, which has something like a guaranteed basic income built into it (the amount that you can be helped in a given year).
This extreme probably isn’t exactly what you have in mind (for instance, I’m not sure how it would interact with helping future people). But I don’t have a good sense of how far in this direction you’re thinking.
Presumably there is a market for certificates amongst those concerned with e.g. the global poor, and it might function in this way. There is no provision in this system for allowing the beneficiaries to determine the value of these certificates. As with contemporary philanthropy, this responsibility falls to the philanthropists, who may or may not execute it responsibly.
(This judgment would be reflected in the relative prices of “Helped Alice by doing X” and “Helped Alice by giving her $1,” which may have some benefits in terms of transparency.)
Cash transfers are a more direct way to capture these benefits. (After cash transfers are in place, providing goods to the poor can then be a profit-oriented enterprise.) The key question is just whether you think philanthropists or beneficiaries are better at comparing benefits.