Interesting post. It seems to intertwine multiple issues:
Should the tax structure be changed so the wealthy pay a different share of taxes, or pay them in different ways?
Should the overall level of taxes be changed?
Should the distribution of government spending be changed?
The three questions above should be addressed separately, then brought together into a more coherent view. I wish a presidential candidate would actually do that and relate it to their policy preferences, but I doubt most will.
I’m cautious about arguments to simply increase taxes to spend more on good causes because governments tend to implement ineffectively. I’m also cautious about arguments to increases taxes for the rich or corporations, as they usually don’t address the potential for higher taxes to create a drag on broader economic growth.
It took me a while to finish reading this report, so I know I’m joining this comment thread late. There were lots of good thoughts shared in other comments, so I’ll try to focus my thoughts are areas that are different:
---There could be a donor coordination problem for this particular opportunity. Donational might not be able to do a pilot with less than $40k, and anything over $40k would be more than needed. How do donors know if they are fully funded?
---Have you seen the write-ups of ImpactMatters (https://www.impactmatters.org/)? If not, it may be worth looking at them. That organization was founded by Dean Karlan, who is one of the top economists doing randomizes controlled trials of development programs.
---In terms of the write-up, there was some discussion of certain key points not coming through strongly. To address this, one idea would be to put a lot of the details from the main body into an appendix.
---This report focuses a lot of the sample evaluation of Donational, but the summary of Rethink Grants suggests that it is trying to do more than just evaluate opportunities and promote the good ones. If I’m understanding correctly that Rethink Grants is also doing things to try to make the underlying organizations better, then it might be great to have more details on that.
It’s great to see more efforts to evaluate and promote top giving opportunities. Rethink Grants seems promising and I’m interested in seeing where it goes.