There is nothing stopping customers from buying such supplies during good times. The buyer in option 3 doesn’t need to be a goverment. But if you have a supplier that does do emergency production and a supplier that doesn’t then chances are the on-demand supplier prices are cheaper. A homo economicus could factor delivery dependence to what they are willing to pay. But a real human migth overweight an extra delux food item over nebulous future happenings.
US dismantled its pandemic unit because “it was costing a lot of money” and “we haven’t used it for years”.
Rewarding rushed production also rewards inefficiency. If you stockpile the supplies you can use the low $ per item. Delaying production keeps the resources open to be used and until we have more threats than we can predict that is not a very useful property.
So is there a way to run a charitable organization that accomplishes this?
For example, if an org started ordering respirators to be built to expand capacity starting in January, would that be a good fit for Open Phil funding?
Would LW be able to convince people to move money to it at that point?
There is the style where those who participate in the preparing benenfit from the preparing. A kind of preppers health insurance.
And then there is the version where you would let randoms that have not participated in such bunkers should they need to be used.
You could have middle forms where you don’t require full compensation for the service or let it be contingent on the world not ending etc. You could just make the d equpiment, hand it out, write some sum to be collected in 10 years. Then in normal conditions if you let the pieces of paper lose their meaning it was totally an act of charity, if you expect 100% of them back it’s full price gouging. but you could also count on a partial public payout ie goverment pays whatever it feels like at that time like 15% of the nominal sum as actual money because it would look PR bad to not pay anything kind of like how war debts often get partially forgiven.
It would count on people accepting risk of not getting a properly legally binding assurance just the problems starts to get fixed.
There is nothing stopping customers from buying such supplies during good times. The buyer in option 3 doesn’t need to be a goverment. But if you have a supplier that does do emergency production and a supplier that doesn’t then chances are the on-demand supplier prices are cheaper. A homo economicus could factor delivery dependence to what they are willing to pay. But a real human migth overweight an extra delux food item over nebulous future happenings.
US dismantled its pandemic unit because “it was costing a lot of money” and “we haven’t used it for years”.
Rewarding rushed production also rewards inefficiency. If you stockpile the supplies you can use the low $ per item. Delaying production keeps the resources open to be used and until we have more threats than we can predict that is not a very useful property.
So is there a way to run a charitable organization that accomplishes this?
For example, if an org started ordering respirators to be built to expand capacity starting in January, would that be a good fit for Open Phil funding?
Would LW be able to convince people to move money to it at that point?
There is the style where those who participate in the preparing benenfit from the preparing. A kind of preppers health insurance.
And then there is the version where you would let randoms that have not participated in such bunkers should they need to be used.
You could have middle forms where you don’t require full compensation for the service or let it be contingent on the world not ending etc. You could just make the d equpiment, hand it out, write some sum to be collected in 10 years. Then in normal conditions if you let the pieces of paper lose their meaning it was totally an act of charity, if you expect 100% of them back it’s full price gouging. but you could also count on a partial public payout ie goverment pays whatever it feels like at that time like 15% of the nominal sum as actual money because it would look PR bad to not pay anything kind of like how war debts often get partially forgiven.
It would count on people accepting risk of not getting a properly legally binding assurance just the problems starts to get fixed.