Hi All,
I recently read The Business Of Changing The World by Raj Kumar, and was convinced by his arguments that there should be greater scrutiny (ie ‘detailed tracking’) of billionaire philanthropy, and, eventually, scrutiny around the effectiveness of that giving.
I’m thinking of starting a project whereby this data is collected and made available publicly - initially likely just in the form of a table/spreadsheet and potentially later in a more ‘processed’ form, such as a website.
I’m interested in the opinions of the community around:
1. Do you agree this would be overall a good thing? My hope would be it would encourage more billionaires to give to (hopefully) effective causes, and engender a more positive conversation about the philanthropic activities of the ultra-rich, each of whom potentially could have the annual aid budget of a small country. But there are concerns the information could be used negatively, or could have unintended negative consequences.
2. Do you think the data is publicly available? Vox and Forbes among others frequently write articles stating the amount certain billionaires have given away which implies the data is there, but it might be hard to obtain.
3. Would you like to help? If your answer to 1 and 2 is ‘yes’ and you’d like to get involved please let me know!
Thanks,
Rob
Hi Rob,
Sounds like a good idea! In fact, something similar has been proposed by Elliot Olds on the EA Forum: Proposal: Impact List -- like the Forbes List except for impact via donations.
Thanks Vasco! Will reach out to that team.
If you're curious about arguments for (or rather against against) why billionaire philanthropy you might check out this SSC post. This post by Richard Chappell is pretty good too.
Thanks Berke - I broadly agree with those posts, and would hope that this project would engender more discussion of that nature.
I expect much of the data is out there, because the majority of billionaires either want to give publicly, or they need to disclose when they change their shareholdings in their main source of wealth (in the case of the typical company founder) due to regulations, and donating to charity is seen as a good excuse to do this.
It may be rather difficult to gather though, as I don't expect there to be a nice centralised source.
I guess the harder the data is to gather the more valuable the resource would be! If it is actually something people are interested in that is...
I think this is a good idea as a neutral tracking resource, but I might be against it if it had the effect of heaping additional praise on the billionaires. (I don't like Elliot's Impact List idea.) I think transparency is good.
Thanks Sawyer - having read Elliot's post I like the idea but think collecting the data will be very difficult. An advantage of this 'simpler' system is that fewer (although not zero) judgement calls need to be made in the collection/presentation of the data.