Equal Hands — 2 Month Update
Equal Hands is an experiment in democratizing effective giving. Donors simulate pooling their resources together, and voting how to distribute them across cause areas. All votes count equally, independent of someone's ability to give.
You can learn more about it here, and sign up to learn more or join here. If you sign up before December 16th, you can participate in our current round. As of December 7th, 2024 at 11:00pm Eastern time, 12 donors have pledged $2,915, meaning the marginal $25 donor will move ~$226 in expectation to their preferred cause areas.
In Equal Hands’ first 2 months, 22 donors participated and collectively gave $7,495.01 democratically to impactful charity. Including pledges for its third month, that number will likely increase to at least 24, and $10,410.01
Across the first two months, the gifts made by cause area and pseudo-counterfactual effect (e.g. if people had given their own money in line with their voting, rather than following the democratic outcome) has been:
* Animal welfare: $3,133.35, a decrease of $1,662.15
* Global health: $1,694.85, a decrease of $54.15
* Global catastrophic risks: $2,093.91, an increase of $1,520.16
* EA community building: $319.38, an increase of $179.63
* Climate change: $253.52, an increase of $16.52
Interestingly, the primary impact has been money being reallocated from animal welfare to global catastrophic risks. From the very little data that we have, this primarily appears to be because animal welfare-motivated donors are much more likely to pledge large amounts to democratic giving, while GCR-motivated donors are more likely to sign up (or are a larger population in general), but are more likely to give smaller amounts.
* I’m not sure why exactly this is! The motivation should be the same regardless of cause area for small donors — in expectation, the average vote has moved over $200 to each donor’s preferred causes across both of the first two months, so I w