Published on November 6, 2024 2:30 PM GMT
Open Philanthropy (OP) is the largest grantmaker who is moving money to thethings I think are most valuable, including (disclosure!) my work at the NAO. There'sbeen a lot of discussion in the effective altruism community aboutwhere this leaves smaller donors, and where they might have a comparativeadvantage. For example:
OP recentlyannounced that due to changes in GoodVentures' (GV) strategy that they'd be recommending less fundingin several areas. This seemsto have included work on wild animal welfare, invertebratewelfare, digital minds, and gene editing, though I'm not aware of apublic list. If you trust OP's prioritization more than GV's and/oryou think these are valuable neglected areas, you could help make upfor this shortfall.
Some kinds of work offer PR risks, either to OP or to OP'sother grantees. Many individuals are better placed to take on theserisks.
Money donated directly to US political candidates is restrictedon a per-person level, and goes farther than unrestricted "Super PAC"donations. Individual donors have a strongadvantage here.
Some kinds of policy work don't have regulations that restrictfunding, but are still restricted in practice. For example, anadvocacy organization could be more effective when it can demonstratebroad-based support, or could be tarred by the support of billionaireslike Moskovitz and Tuna.
For policy and politics in other countries the effect is evenstronger: in some cases it's illegal for OP to make these kinds ofgrants, while in others it's just politically counter-productive. Onthe other hand, small-scale donors contributing to political effortsin their own countries is generally seen as the way politics issupposed to work.
This is not a complete list [1] but I do think it has the biggestreasons. Overall it seems to me that if an independent donor isfunding something OP would be happy to fund, ideally the donor wouldfind somewhere they could do better.
Despite all this, I've generally not felt like our family's donationshave taken advantage of our position as independent donors. Mostlywe've contributed to Funds, and while some of these relativeadvantages don't apply there (they don't need to convince GV to makegrants) most still do.
I think the main reason we haven't done better here is thatinvestigating and comparing donation opportunities is a lot of work.Julia and I both work full time on things we think are prettyimportant, and this is the kind of question worthy of significantthought. Sometimes people suggest donorlotteries as an improvement here, but aside from my generalqualms I think even if we won we wouldn't want to take time awayfrom our full-time work to get into grantmaking. [2]
If you're giving away extremely large amounts of money it makes senseto hire full-time grantmakers to allocate it (which is essentiallywhat OP is). If you're a bit smaller than that but still quite largethen there are multiple efforts (ex: Founders Pledge, Longview) that offer customizedadvice. But I'm not aware of any projects that aim to advise what wemight call "Small Major Donors": people giving away perhaps $20k-$100kannually. I think this segment is primarily people earning to give,but it would also include some people (hi!) who see most of theirimpact as coming via their work but still significant a signficantportion of their income.
This would need to be a model with lighter-weight advising than wouldmake sense in targeting larger donors, and getting the balance rightwould be tricky. You could end up with people feeling like with thescale of their giving they ought to be getting significant customresearch, not understanding how much that research costs. On theother hand, to be worth running it would need to be able toout-perform funging against OP or donating to Funds.
Does something like this exist, and I just don't know about it?(Which would be bad, since the target market isn't all that largeand would include me.) Alternatively, does this seem like somethingthat would be worth someone starting? I'd love to have something torecommend to people earning to give, and to use in thinking throughmy own giving.
[1] Another thing I considered adding is that you may know aboutespecially strong opportunities in your personal network. Whether thespecific people running a project are the right ones for the effort isa critical judgement in funding early-stage work, and grantmakersoften have much less information than you do. But grantmaker-granteerelationships, including and perhaps especially prospective ones, arequite fraught, and I (weakly) think that overall the social effects ofturning so many personal and professional relationships intoprospective grantmaker-grantee relationships is harmful on balance.
[2] There's also a significant difference between the ideal of a donorlottery and donor lotteries in practice. The standard argumentassumes that money you might win in the lottery is as unrestricted asthe money you put in, but actually whatever organization sponsors thelottery needs to agree that your donation is appropriate. Since manythings worth doing are 'weird' (grants to individuals, investments infor-profit enterprises, funding your own charity, actions with PRrisks, ...) this can significantly reduce the upside of winning adonor lottery.
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