I’m a theoretical CS grad student at Columbia specializing in mechanism design. I write a blog called Unexpected Values which you can find here: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/. My academic website can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/ericneyman/.
Eric Neyman
Karma: 1,294
Getting money out of politics and into charity
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—that was really helpful! The 4x rule of thumb you mentioned makes sense and is good to know. We may contact you about collaborating; we’re probably not yet at the stage where we’ll be making this decision, but we’ll keep you posted! And your “nudging” suggestion makes sense, especially in light of what Ryan Carey said about people hating choosing between charities.
I did find one thing you said a bit odd, which is that veterans’ charities strike you as political. To me they seem fairly apolitical, as people all across the political spectrum support veterans (even if Republicans tend to feel more positively). I don’t think a Democrat would feel negatively about someone donating to a veterans’ charity. But I’m curious whether other people think veterans’ charities are political. (Because I do think that we will ultimately need to make a concerted effort to appeal to Republicans, and this feels to me like a way to do that without alienating Democrats.)
Thanks! But yeah, I don’t think we could get political parties to like us. Because ultimately parties do prefer that they and the opposing party have a billion dollars than they they both have no money, if only because the employment of party operatives depends on it.
Thanks, this is my biggest concern. I agree that this sort of platform is less likely to work now than a decade ago when the U.S. was less polarized. I don’t really have strong counter-evidence to point to; but we are running some rudimentary informal trials to see if we can muster up any interest from donors on both sides. If those are successful, that will give me hope that this can work at scale.
If we find such wealthy donors, we could match them against each other instead! But I suppose it’s possible that we’d find donors who’d be willing to match with each other up to however much is contributed to the platform, as a way of raising interest. Like how cool would it be if Sheldon Adelson and George Soros agreed to this sort of thing? (I’m not even remotely optimistic though :P)
Thanks for the thoughts. I agree that the first thing you point out is a problem, but let me just point out: in the event that it becomes a problem, that means that our platform is already a wild success. After all, I’d be very happy if our platform took out single-digit millions of money out of politics (compared to the single-digit billions that are spent). If we become a large fraction of all money going into politics, then yeah, this will become a problem, perhaps solvable in the way you suggest.
Regarding your thoughts on ads, that seems like a plausible hypothesis. But regarding matching funds going toward anti-polarization organizations: well, I’d be quite interested in that if there were effective anti-polarization organizations. And maybe there are, but I’m not aware of any, and I’m not super optimistic.
Thanks! I agree we should talk to an expert on these sorts of things. Probably “sociologist or psychologist” isn’t the right category though? I’d guess that talking to someone who specializes in political ads, voter turnout, etc. would be the right person to talk to. I’m curious what other people think.
Thanks. Basically the way I’m thinking about this in my head is: we have some effective charities, and some charities that are meant to encourage people to participate. If we end up getting 10 million in donations, only a quarter of which goes to effective charities, I think that would be a bigger success than getting 1 million in donations, all of which goes to effective charities. I’m thinking about the most effective way to get the platform off the ground, because if it doesn’t get off the ground then no money will be sent to charities anyway, and at least my intuition is that it may be helpful to have some charities that are not effective but appealing. (On the other hand, what some people have said about people not wanting to choose between charities and being okay with whatever has made me update against this.) Do you think this strategy would be misguided?
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!
Status update: Getting money out of politics and into charity
I believe the general name for this sort of thing if “moral trade”; see this paper by Toby Ord: http://www.amirrorclear.net/files/moral-trade.pdf. But yeah, this is something we’ve struggled with a bit, including trying not to use the word “matching” in our emails describing the concept. I think the best donor-oriented framing we have right now is “making a deal” with a donor for the other side. So maybe “political donation dealmaking”? But that sounds someone clunky to me.
This definitely sounds like it’s worth trying, and it turns out that there’s at least one prominent politician who’s a fan of this idea. I do have the intuition that almost none of them would actually do it, because having more money directly benefits their staff.
This is a cool idea that we hadn’t considered. Thank you!
We want a Republican on our team; unfortunately in our experience Democrats are pretty disproportionately interested in the idea—and this is in addition to the fact that our circles already have very few Republicans. (This could be a byproduct of how we’re framing things, which is part of why we’re trying to experiment with framing and talking to Republican consultants.) So we’ve been unsuccessful so far, but I agree that this is important.
Yeah, there are various incentives issues like this one that are definitely worth thinking about! I wrote about some of them in this blog post: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/incentives-in-the-election-charity-platform/
The issue you point out can be mostly resolved by saying that half of a pledges contributions will go to their chosen candidate no matter what—but this has the unfortunate effect of decreasing the amount of money that gets sent to charity. My guess is that it’s not worth it (though maybe doing some nominal amount like 5% is worth it (so as to discourage e.g. liberals who care mostly just about charity from donating to the Republican candidate).
Yeah—I think it’s unlikely that Pact would become a really large player and have distortionary effects. If that happens, we’ll solve that problem when we get there :)
The broader point that the marginal dollar might be more valuable to one campaign than to another is an important one. You could try to deal with this by making an actual market, where the ratio at which people trade campaign dollars isn’t fixed at 1, but I think that will complicate the platform and end up doing more harm than good.
Cool idea! Some thoughts I have:
A different thing you could do, instead of trading models, is compromise by assuming that there’s a 50% chance that your model is right and a 50% chance that your peer’s model is right. Then you can do utility calculations under this uncertainty. Note that this would have the same effect as the one you desire in your motivating example: Alice would scrub surfaces and Bob would wear a mask.
This would however make utility calculations twice as difficult as compared just using your own model, since you’d need to compute the expected utility under each model. But note that this amount of computational intensity is already assumed by the premise that it makes sense for Alice and Bob to trade models. In order for Alice and Bob to reach this conclusion, each needs to compute their utility under each action in each of their models.
I would say that this is more epistemically sound than switching models with your peer, since it’s reasonably well-motivated by the notion that you are epistemic peers and could have ended up in a world where you had had the information your peer has and vice versa.
But the fundamental issue you’re getting at here is that reaching an agreement can be hard, and we’d like to make good/informed decisions anyway. This motivates the question: how can you effectively improve your decision making without paying the cost required by trying to reach an agreement?
One answer is that you can share partial information with your peer. For instance, maybe Alice and Bob decide that they will simply tell each other their best guess about the percentage of COVID transmission that is airborne and leave it at that (without trying to resolve subsequent disagreement). This is enough to, in most circumstances, cause each of them to update a lot (and thus be much better informed in expectation) without requiring a huge amount of communication.
Which is better: acting as if each model is 50% to be correct, or sharing limited information and then updating? I think the answer depends on (1) how well you can conceptualize your peer’s model, (2) how hard updating is, and (3) whether you’ll want to make similar decisions in the future but without communicating. The sort of case when the first approach is better is when both Alice and Bob have simple-to-describe models and will want to make good COVID-related decisions in the future without consulting each other. The sort of case when the second approach is better is when Alice and Bob have difficult-to-describe models, but have pretty good heuristics about how to update their probabilities based on the other’s probabilities.
I started making a formal model of the “sharing partial information” approach and came up with an example of where it makes sense for Alice and Bob to swap behaviors upon sharing partial information. But ultimately this wasn’t super interesting because the underlying behavior was that they were updating on the partial information. So while there are some really interesting questions of the form “How can you improve your expected outcome the most while talking to the other person as little as possible”, ultimately you’re getting at something different (if I understand correctly) -- that adopting a different model might be easier than updating your own. I’d love to see a formal approach to this (and may think some more about it later!)
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.