Here’s my solution to your problem. Small major donors should collectively organize together and make decisions democratically.
I would therefore expand the donor lottery into a democratic committee. Instead of selecting only 1 participant, select ~10 participants, similar to jury duty. With more participants, we enjoy more diverse opinion and a better representative sample (Yes 10 is a terrible sample, but it’s way better than 1. If the number of members in the pool increase, the sample size should be increased). More people also facilitate better deliberative discussion and information sharing.
The rationale of a lottocratically selected committee is also different from a donor lottery. Lottocratic committees have democratic legitimacy (often called “sortition”). They are created similarly to how jury pools are created, with similar democratic credentials.
As the sample size of the committee increases, it becomes more and more legitimate as a representative statistical sample of the donor membership.
The tradeoff is cost. A lottocratic body of 10 is 10 times more costly than a body of 1. But it’s also much more efficient than individual action. Imagine 50 people are in your pool. A lottocratic body of 10 reduces cognitive load by 5x. In my opinion, the body of 10 will also make better decisions than a single temporary dictator.
A variety of reasons why collective decisions are often better include:
The practice of deliberative democracy—Deliberation can produce better informed results.
Division of labor—Effective committees can organize research tasks and divide up cognitive labor to enhance decision making.
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem—Greater number of participants increases decision accuracy.
Median voter theorem—Greater number of participants activate the possibility of tending towards the median preferences of the pool.
A single winner in contrast invites chaos to charitable selections, and is unrepresentative of the whole.
Here’s my solution to your problem. Small major donors should collectively organize together and make decisions democratically.
I would therefore expand the donor lottery into a democratic committee. Instead of selecting only 1 participant, select ~10 participants, similar to jury duty. With more participants, we enjoy more diverse opinion and a better representative sample (Yes 10 is a terrible sample, but it’s way better than 1. If the number of members in the pool increase, the sample size should be increased). More people also facilitate better deliberative discussion and information sharing.
The rationale of a lottocratically selected committee is also different from a donor lottery. Lottocratic committees have democratic legitimacy (often called “sortition”). They are created similarly to how jury pools are created, with similar democratic credentials.
As the sample size of the committee increases, it becomes more and more legitimate as a representative statistical sample of the donor membership.
The tradeoff is cost. A lottocratic body of 10 is 10 times more costly than a body of 1. But it’s also much more efficient than individual action. Imagine 50 people are in your pool. A lottocratic body of 10 reduces cognitive load by 5x. In my opinion, the body of 10 will also make better decisions than a single temporary dictator.
A variety of reasons why collective decisions are often better include:
The practice of deliberative democracy—Deliberation can produce better informed results.
Division of labor—Effective committees can organize research tasks and divide up cognitive labor to enhance decision making.
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem—Greater number of participants increases decision accuracy.
Median voter theorem—Greater number of participants activate the possibility of tending towards the median preferences of the pool.
A single winner in contrast invites chaos to charitable selections, and is unrepresentative of the whole.