If the goal is a feedback loop/virtuous cycle**, something built for it might do a better job. This may already exist. (In places you haven’t seen/heard of, and it might take some looking to find.)
in order to force the people on the ground to behave the way we prefer?
Force?
Suppose someone made a bet with you at the start of the year, that you would not in fact create that new habit of (doing X), that you had set a new year’s resolution to do. Suppose they were so certain, they offered a bet at 1:0 odds—if you proved them wrong, they’d give you $X, and if you didn’t they wouldn’t get anything at all.
This doesn’t sound quite like what you’re looking for.
Transfer of money is a temporary, low friction way to motivate unidentified strangers to preform an action.
(There’s an unstated assumption here that the motivation is to do something they wouldn’t have done anyway This assumption may very well be correct.) This sounds like a possible flaw in how things work, even if they don’t work quite like that.
Do we have any evidence that it can create channels of behavior that are self-sustaining?
Well the system where people donate money (and the money is presumably used to do good) doesn’t seem to feed back into itself. Convincing other people to donate seems less suspect than donated money being used for advertising, and we don’t expect people who receive money from give directly to immediately donate all of it to charity. One could tell a story about how maybe people who are better off may one day be in a place to give to others/donate to charity...though:
a) there’s flexibility around things being improved (if all the charities with Purpose X or Y finished up and closed down, I can imagine the world still have good things happening after that problem has been eliminated. Likewise, there’s a lot of ways people in a better place might be both good (in and of itself) and lead to more good.)
b) If the goal is a feedback loop/virtuous cycle**, something built for it might do a better job*
*This may already exist. (In places you haven’t seen/heard of, and it might take some looking to find.)
**Or something that grows and feeds in to other things.
(There’s an unstated assumption here that the motivation is to do something they wouldn’t have done anyway This assumption may very well be correct.) This sounds like a possible flaw in how things work, even if they don’t work quite like that.
Very good point—I hadn’t considered this aspect in my original question. Cash donations may not ONLY cause a behavior that wasn’t previously motivated by the recipient, it may also act via a mechanism of letting the recipient follow their preferences (which they’ve shown to be aligned with your altruistic desires) with fewer outside constraints.
Donating money to a food bank may not (only) motivate employees to distribute food any more than they otherwise prefer; it may make them more able to focus on their preferred amount of food-distribution.
Put another way, some of it may be more like UBI for people performing activities you support, than for direct motivation of those activities.
Patreon*, Pay what you want, and maybe Humble bundle are sometimes an example of this.
*Though occasionally, it is argued that such means may have negative effects on production or quality/bias/etc., in general or in specific cases, sometimes relating to rewards.
TL:DR;
If the goal is a feedback loop/virtuous cycle**, something built for it might do a better job. This may already exist. (In places you haven’t seen/heard of, and it might take some looking to find.)
Force?
Suppose someone made a bet with you at the start of the year, that you would not in fact create that new habit of (doing X), that you had set a new year’s resolution to do. Suppose they were so certain, they offered a bet at 1:0 odds—if you proved them wrong, they’d give you $X, and if you didn’t they wouldn’t get anything at all.
This doesn’t sound quite like what you’re looking for.
(There’s an unstated assumption here that the motivation is to do something they wouldn’t have done anyway This assumption may very well be correct.) This sounds like a possible flaw in how things work, even if they don’t work quite like that.
Well the system where people donate money (and the money is presumably used to do good) doesn’t seem to feed back into itself. Convincing other people to donate seems less suspect than donated money being used for advertising, and we don’t expect people who receive money from give directly to immediately donate all of it to charity. One could tell a story about how maybe people who are better off may one day be in a place to give to others/donate to charity...though:
a) there’s flexibility around things being improved (if all the charities with Purpose X or Y finished up and closed down, I can imagine the world still have good things happening after that problem has been eliminated. Likewise, there’s a lot of ways people in a better place might be both good (in and of itself) and lead to more good.)
b) If the goal is a feedback loop/virtuous cycle**, something built for it might do a better job*
*This may already exist. (In places you haven’t seen/heard of, and it might take some looking to find.)
**Or something that grows and feeds in to other things.
Very good point—I hadn’t considered this aspect in my original question. Cash donations may not ONLY cause a behavior that wasn’t previously motivated by the recipient, it may also act via a mechanism of letting the recipient follow their preferences (which they’ve shown to be aligned with your altruistic desires) with fewer outside constraints.
Donating money to a food bank may not (only) motivate employees to distribute food any more than they otherwise prefer; it may make them more able to focus on their preferred amount of food-distribution.
Put another way, some of it may be more like UBI for people performing activities you support, than for direct motivation of those activities.
Patreon*, Pay what you want, and maybe Humble bundle are sometimes an example of this.
*Though occasionally, it is argued that such means may have negative effects on production or quality/bias/etc., in general or in specific cases, sometimes relating to rewards.