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Donate Unrestricted

paulgraham.com

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Re: Donate Unrestricted

#61

Post by geofft »

sjg007 wrote: post #51
bradleyjg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't you rather the $1 you donate generate leverage in new donations? It depends on where the money is coming from. Suppose I donate $100 to a cystic fibrosis charity and using that money they convince 10 people to donate money to their charity instead of the muscular dystrophy foundation. I wouldn’t consider that an effective use of my donation. On the other hand I have no idea how you’d measure that.

It's measured as overhead and/or donation acquisition expenses. It's never 100%. You can assume some percent of that money goes to such expenses vs actual research (which I guess is where you'd want the money to go, or maybe to outreach or supporting individuals with cf).

I think the question above is whether nonprofits are playing a zero-sum game - if donors have set aside some budget, and you "acquire" a donation by competing another equally worthy non-profit (instead of competing against the donor's savings account), it's not clear that this is good for the high-level goals of society.

In the long run, it will turn into the same arms race as political donations. At the end of the day, every candidate is trying to win over the same voters, so the net effect of Party X spending $100 million on ads and Party Y spending $50 million isn't terribly different from Party X spending $10 million on ads and Party Y spending $5 million - it certainly does not yield an election that is ten times better at reflecting the voters' preferences. And it may well yield an election that's about how well the parties can market themselves and not how well they can govern.

If cystic fibrosis is a problem that needs ten times the spending of muscular dystrophy, but the muscular dystrophy folks are ten times better at fundraising, the effect of that is to divert funds from cystic fibrosis into getting them to be one hundred times better at fundraising than they used to be.

(I don't have an answer here, any more than I have an answer to how to curtail campaign spending.)

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#62

Post by danans »

latchkey wrote: post #52

This article touches on non-profits, but I feel it comes from a deeper well. We are wired in our culture around how we give donations. We only give money to people who we think would spend it most wisely. We walk past all the people in San Francisco on the street because we know that if we give them money it will only go to more drug use. We drive past the person on the left turn lane because we don't want to encoura…

> little kids in the middle of nowhere would run up to me and say hey DOLLAR, give me DOLLAR. They were trained for that.

And why not? It seems like rational behavior on the part of the kids/families given their circumstances and their incentive systems.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#63

Post by kevmo »

This is why billionaire philanthropy is such a scam. It's just a tax-free way for oligarch to create societal infrastructure that further entrenches their hegemony.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#64

Post by cldellow »

amelius wrote: post #24

I stopped donating (with a few exceptions) because of the general lack of transparency in where your money really goes, and the stories of fraud, absurd salaries of CEOs/management and cold-calling which turns out to be so expensive that the first 1 or 2 years you are effectively paying for the call center. Etc. etc.

My wife and I have given reasonably large donations to various groups and told them we're not interested in getting push communication from them. We'll donate again if and when we can.

The orgs that don't respect that (Medecins sans Frontieres comes to mind--multiple glossy mailings per year) get removed from the list. It's kind of harsh, but there are plenty of deserving orgs to support who are compatible with this stance. I understand why, in general, such outreach makes sense, but in my specific case, I find it annoying and it doesn't motivate me.

I've found the Against Malaria Foundation to be stellar in this regard. They were very responsive in getting set up to accept Canadian stock when I inquired about it. They did one unexpected followup communication, but it wasn't a solicitation. Instead, they were considering changing how stock donation would work in Canada in order to minimize their fees, and wanted feedback on whether it would be a good or bad change from the perspective of a donor. They were explicit that the feedback was optional, and that they weren't soliciting a donation, just effectively doing market research.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#66

Post by scythe »

temp8964 wrote: post #28

The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…

>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/

In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing these up pretty much every week.

With that said, this website is extremely discouraging. There are five "steps" on the front page but no specifics, and buzzwords everywhere, suffused with no-duh filler content and paraphrased repetition.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#67

Post by temp8964 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #58
temp8964 wrote: post #28

The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…

Most startups fail, and we often talk about how that's a good thing. Absent capital constraints, why is that different for charitable initiatives? Gates is devoting resources towards nuclear (Terrapower) and nuclear has a terrible track record in effeciency (LCOE) and generation as a total percent of fleet capacity. Should he stop trying there? I would argue it isn't. I would argue the same for trying to improve educ…

Not the same.

Try failed engineering wouldn't harm anybody (except wasting money).

Try bad social policy, could harm people you experimented on. It also has broad impact on the society.

Quote: "..., there is nothing inherently wrong with trying a reform and having it fail. The key is learning from failure so that we avoid repeating the same mistakes. It is pretty clear that the Gates effective teaching reform effort failed pretty badly. It cost a fortune. It produced significant political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising efforts. And it appears to have generally done more harm than good with respect to student achievement and attainment outcomes."

https://www.educationnext.org/gates-effective-teaching-initi...

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#68

Post by jmkd »

Am mid-founding a startup which will give 5% of its profits to charity from day 1. Customers won't have a choice about this - either the amount or the charities chosen - so this will be intrinsic to doing business with us. Trade with us if you like that, don't if you don't. Will be on a tiny scale compared to the donations PG refers to, but customers (who are donating indirectly) will have to trust us, while we trust the charities we give to. There's no meddling or options to choose from, by design, for the same reasons PG describes.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#69

Post by Kevin_S »

amelius wrote: post #24

I stopped donating (with a few exceptions) because of the general lack of transparency in where your money really goes, and the stories of fraud, absurd salaries of CEOs/management and cold-calling which turns out to be so expensive that the first 1 or 2 years you are effectively paying for the call center. Etc. etc.

You should examine the nonprofit's Form 990 if you have concerns or look at their page on Guidestar.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#70

Post by flaque »

temp8964 wrote: post #28

The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…

The tone of these articles is really unfortunate.

Very much positions the donors as bad guys, their own admission of failure as proof that they’re bad guys, and that the problems are fundamentally unsolvable and that we shouldn’t do anything.

It’s fine to note programs that don’t work; but schadenfreude in fully-funded experiments with the goal to help children is counter-productive.

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