Good point, Tom. Of course, even better than picking something completely arbitrary would be to steer the money towards the causes that matter most. Off the top of my head I would say SIAI, the Methuselah Foundation, and the Lifeboat Foundation. Unfortunately I don’t think any of these would be able to attract 50,000 supporters, but maybe there’s some way we could package them with other charities.
Sadly, I don’t think existential risk reduction is sufficiently sympathetic to the general population (and we do need them on board for this to work). And if you have a large basket with stuff like the Methuselah foundation in it, you’re likely to have people wondering why they can’t put in “The Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies”.
Ideally, you’d pick something simple and widely acceptable. Obviously, it would be difficult to find a single charity that could productively use a billion extra dollars per year. But the basket should be as simple and uncontroversial (and obviously, productive) as possible).
Edit: Thinking about it, using a trusted intermediary might make the most sense. Using a grant-making agency avoids the appearance that we’re funneling the money to our pet causes, it reduces the marketing/lobbying incentives (though it doesn’t eliminate them) and it makes the money relatively productive (if we choose a good agency). Givewell may be a poor choice, due to the Metafilter flap, but we could specify, say the MIT Poverty Action Lab or something.
Obviously, we’d need the organizations cooperation, or at least permission.
I would like to see this bundled with a Rational Charity meme. Let’s be frank here: if this ends up going to the Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies, it wasn’t worth LW’s time. If we can manage to get some money to things that actually matter, it was.
Trying to get something worthwhile done, as opposed to “making a billion dollars go to charity”, might make the whole project fail because of that added extra inconvenience. So what?
If you wanted to boil it down to a meme, it would be “Do something effective for a change”. Supposing you actually can generate a billion dollars, that’s enough for ten million dollars for one hundred charities. “Ten million dollars apiece for one hundred unusual and effective charities.” Like that.
In the past, you’ve pointed out that it can never be more efficient to split a small donation between two charities than to give all to the best bet, even if you are uncertain which is best. So I take it the advantage of lots of charities here is a political one, that we can include some sops to fuzzy-purchasing, lots of GiveWell-ish charities whose efficiency we can calculate, and perhaps one or two x-risk charities which we consider to be very efficient but which most people aren’t sold on?
True :-) But is it really so much that in order not to reach diminishing returns on an individual charity, it has to be split 100 ways? Even splitting it five ways would seem to be enough to offset that effect.
As long as some amount of it goes to worthwhile charities, I think the whole thing would be worthwhile. I think we’d be hard pressed to lose control of the meme such that of a billion dollars at least 10 million didn’t go to charities that we would want to support.
I think it ought to be something unimaginative but reliable, like clean water or vaccines to third world countries. I can’t find it at the moment but there’s a highly reputable charity that provides clean drinking water to African communities. IIRC they estimated that every $400 or so saved the life of a child. A billion dollars into such a charity—saving 2.5 million children—isn’t a difficult PR sell.
The problem is not finding an effective, productive, and reputable charity. There are plenty out there (even if a majority are not). It’s finding a charity than can effectively and productively use an extra billion dollars. Many charities don’t have the oversight and planning infrastructure to use a windfall of that size.
Most of that is given to churches, hospitals, rich-country education, etc. Much, much less is given to overseas public health aid, and less of that to efficient programs.
Mimicking the Gates Foundation grants to GAVI could absorb a lot, but would risk missing a lot of the potential to use this to promote more efficient giving.
I was thinking yesterday about what I’d do if I won the lottery. Then I recalled that Robin Hanson gave the best version of the “What I’d do with a million” story I’ve yet heard, so I figured I’d give it to him. I don’t know what he’d do with a billion, but I’d still point to his plan as one of the top ways to increase efficiency through spending money.
Good point, Tom. Of course, even better than picking something completely arbitrary would be to steer the money towards the causes that matter most. Off the top of my head I would say SIAI, the Methuselah Foundation, and the Lifeboat Foundation. Unfortunately I don’t think any of these would be able to attract 50,000 supporters, but maybe there’s some way we could package them with other charities.
Sadly, I don’t think existential risk reduction is sufficiently sympathetic to the general population (and we do need them on board for this to work). And if you have a large basket with stuff like the Methuselah foundation in it, you’re likely to have people wondering why they can’t put in “The Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies”.
Ideally, you’d pick something simple and widely acceptable. Obviously, it would be difficult to find a single charity that could productively use a billion extra dollars per year. But the basket should be as simple and uncontroversial (and obviously, productive) as possible).
Edit: Thinking about it, using a trusted intermediary might make the most sense. Using a grant-making agency avoids the appearance that we’re funneling the money to our pet causes, it reduces the marketing/lobbying incentives (though it doesn’t eliminate them) and it makes the money relatively productive (if we choose a good agency). Givewell may be a poor choice, due to the Metafilter flap, but we could specify, say the MIT Poverty Action Lab or something.
Obviously, we’d need the organizations cooperation, or at least permission.
I would like to see this bundled with a Rational Charity meme. Let’s be frank here: if this ends up going to the Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies, it wasn’t worth LW’s time. If we can manage to get some money to things that actually matter, it was.
Trying to get something worthwhile done, as opposed to “making a billion dollars go to charity”, might make the whole project fail because of that added extra inconvenience. So what?
If you wanted to boil it down to a meme, it would be “Do something effective for a change”. Supposing you actually can generate a billion dollars, that’s enough for ten million dollars for one hundred charities. “Ten million dollars apiece for one hundred unusual and effective charities.” Like that.
In the past, you’ve pointed out that it can never be more efficient to split a small donation between two charities than to give all to the best bet, even if you are uncertain which is best. So I take it the advantage of lots of charities here is a political one, that we can include some sops to fuzzy-purchasing, lots of GiveWell-ish charities whose efficiency we can calculate, and perhaps one or two x-risk charities which we consider to be very efficient but which most people aren’t sold on?
We’re not talking about a small donation.
True :-) But is it really so much that in order not to reach diminishing returns on an individual charity, it has to be split 100 ways? Even splitting it five ways would seem to be enough to offset that effect.
Unless one of the charities is SingInst.
As long as some amount of it goes to worthwhile charities, I think the whole thing would be worthwhile. I think we’d be hard pressed to lose control of the meme such that of a billion dollars at least 10 million didn’t go to charities that we would want to support.
I think it ought to be something unimaginative but reliable, like clean water or vaccines to third world countries. I can’t find it at the moment but there’s a highly reputable charity that provides clean drinking water to African communities. IIRC they estimated that every $400 or so saved the life of a child. A billion dollars into such a charity—saving 2.5 million children—isn’t a difficult PR sell.
The problem is not finding an effective, productive, and reputable charity. There are plenty out there (even if a majority are not). It’s finding a charity than can effectively and productively use an extra billion dollars. Many charities don’t have the oversight and planning infrastructure to use a windfall of that size.
There is an obvious solution to this: fund multiple charities.
Philanthropy by Americans alone is about $300 billion per year. The guesstimated annual cashflow here is less than one-thousandth of that.
Most of that is given to churches, hospitals, rich-country education, etc. Much, much less is given to overseas public health aid, and less of that to efficient programs.
Mimicking the Gates Foundation grants to GAVI could absorb a lot, but would risk missing a lot of the potential to use this to promote more efficient giving.
I was thinking yesterday about what I’d do if I won the lottery. Then I recalled that Robin Hanson gave the best version of the “What I’d do with a million” story I’ve yet heard, so I figured I’d give it to him. I don’t know what he’d do with a billion, but I’d still point to his plan as one of the top ways to increase efficiency through spending money.