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Donate Unrestricted

paulgraham.com

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Re: Donate Unrestricted

#131

Post by santoshalper »

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #129

I strongly disagree with this. If I were donating a large sum to a non-profit that helps poor children, I would absolutely earmark it with a stipulation that it must be used to help poor children who grew up as I did (poor, no opportunities for other aid/scholarships because, well we all know why). In any nonprofit or mentorship situation, I always make sure to reach the children who grew up like me because they trul…

From the outside, it really looks like it's more about you than it is about helping anyone else.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#132

Post by santoshalper »

hirundo wrote: post #6

He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money. If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it significantly outweighs the rest.

A lot of restricted donations are more specific than "no stem cell research", which I agree is going to be manageable for most organizations.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#133

Post by remote_phone »

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #84
jasode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. [...] they all had strong opinions on what the money could be spent on. Understand your frustration but the public was outraged when $1 million of a librarian's donation was used for a football scoreboard.[1] Yes, the university did comply to the exact letter of his will (onl…

The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents. OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.

> I could build them one for a few hundred

No, you couldn’t.

It has to keep working for years/decades, be maintainable, survive bad weather conditions, etc. even if you made the scoreboard out of wood and painted it, it would have to be large enough so that the stadium could see, the paint would fade and it would take weeks to make it, etc.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#134

Post by heliodor »

brnt wrote: post #112
ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

Anybody who's discussing the quite unique tax situation around charity in the US, should give Dark Money by Jane Mayer a read. This uniqueness isn't by accident, and only is called charity as a minor, inconvenient side effect.

What uniqueness would that be?

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#135

Post by remote_phone »

santoshalper wrote: post #131
kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #129

I strongly disagree with this. If I were donating a large sum to a non-profit that helps poor children, I would absolutely earmark it with a stipulation that it must be used to help poor children who grew up as I did (poor, no opportunities for other aid/scholarships because, well we all know why). In any nonprofit or mentorship situation, I always make sure to reach the children who grew up like me because they trul…

From the outside, it really looks like it's more about you than it is about helping anyone else.

But the end recipients are getting the money, so who cares?

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#136

Post by furyofantares »

ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

> If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the org stays true to its mission, compensates executives in reasonable proportion to regular employees, etc.

Not sure if I'm missing something, but this sounds totally ridiculous to me.

You give 1M to someone you think is going to spend it well, and they do; why isn't that the end of the transaction? Why do you forever have a gun to their head?

Maybe you've got all the best intentions about what would cause you to call the loan back. But after they've taken donations of this sort, why would anyone continue donating to them? They've built up liabilities to 3rd parties, I'm not interested in potentially paying off their loans instead of doing good work if some of those 3rd parties change their mind.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#137

Post by temp8964 »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #105
lowercased wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math. HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?

HN is unfortunately the extremely wrong place to discuss this :( Language like that can be used by bad-faith folks here to push the (false and ridiculous) idea that the Equitable Math people don’t care about mathematical rigor or logical reasoning. The idea is that those attitudes encourage hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of “inherent ability.”…

You are exaggerating lots of things here.

- The link between “Independent practice is valued over teamwork” to "private tutoring" is very weak.

- The link between “focus on getting the right answer” to "private tutoring" is very weak.

- No. Those measures do not particularly unfairly penalize students from rough backgrounds. No matter what other measures you propose, affluent students can benefit more.

- No. Racism in US teachers is not a big problem.

- Focusing on right answers and using standardized tests actually help students from tougher backgrounds. Not the other way around.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#138

Post by [deleted] »

ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

[deleted]

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#139

Post by doktorhladnjak »

ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

> If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the org stays true to its mission

This flies totally in the face of Paul's post. His point is to donate unrestricted to non-profits you _trust_. If you can't trust the organization or need to put controls in place to prevent them from doing something bad, you should find another organization to donate to or need to check your ego.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#140

Post by superbatfish »

analog31 wrote: post #21
hirundo wrote: post #6

He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money. If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it significantly outweighs the rest.

Indeed, that happened in the state where I grew up. When they started the state lottery, it was with the promise that the money would be spent on "education." Sure enough, the lottery money went to the education fund, and the contribution from the general fund was reduced by the same amount.

I agree that fungibility is a hugely under-appreciated (or cynically de-emphasized) concept when it comes to funding governments via special taxes. (Great example.)

The concept also applies to non-profit donations more broadly, but only under the assumption that the size of the donation is small enough that it doesn't exceed the total amount that the non-profit would have spent on that cause anyway.

If you're donating a large amount that exceeds the current budget for your chosen cause, then your donation does make a difference -- but it's not quite as large as it seems. It might only be the difference between the previous spending level and the new level (after your donation and after some budget refactoring).

To use your example, if the state was spending $1B on on schools previously, then donating less than $1B doesn't necessarily make a difference to school funding -- they can just push money around. But if you donate $1.2B, then you have made a difference -- of $0.2B.

If you're donating to a small non-profit, though, then maybe it's easier to find targets in which you could dwarf the existing spending on your topic of choice. (Not to say that you should, though. I agree with Graham's argument.)

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