Yep, it's currently tracking how much money was raised. I think this isn't a useless signal, because big funders are evaluating projects' impact when deciding how much to fund them, but it's definitely not the only signal we want. I think a cool next step (for Manifund or for anyone else, and hopefully in the long term to be done by many people) would be to do some rough cost-effectiveness analyses of these orgs and then make markets around those estimates.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! You and Austin already covered a lot, so I won't respond to everything.
On your point (2), I agree this is a strong point in favor of nonprofits. But I'm unsure how much to expect the future you describe--grantmaking way faster and higher volume, funding ambitious nonprofits and allowing them to grow aggressively--in some default world where a ton of new philanthropic capital gets put into CG, Longview, and similar orgs.
Is the limiting factor in grantmaking at these places not having enough money? Or is it more like wanting to avoid funding things that are net negative or flood the ecosystem with low-quality projects? I would have guessed more the latter, and in that case getting more money won't particularly help things like speed and funder chicken.
I'm sure you don't want to speak for either of those orgs, just speculating.
Yep, it's currently tracking how much money was raised. I think this isn't a useless signal, because big funders are evaluating projects' impact when deciding how much to fund them, but it's definitely not the only signal we want. I think a cool next step (for Manifund or for anyone else, and hopefully in the long term to be done by many people) would be to do some rough cost-effectiveness analyses of these orgs and then make markets around those estimates.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! You and Austin already covered a lot, so I won't respond to everything.
On your point (2), I agree this is a strong point in favor of nonprofits. But I'm unsure how much to expect the future you describe--grantmaking way faster and higher volume, funding ambitious nonprofits and allowing them to grow aggressively--in some default world where a ton of new philanthropic capital gets put into CG, Longview, and similar orgs.
Is the limiting factor in grantmaking at these places not having enough money? Or is it more like wanting to avoid funding things that are net negative or flood the ecosystem with low-quality projects? I would have guessed more the latter, and in that case getting more money won't particularly help things like speed and funder chicken.
I'm sure you don't want to speak for either of those orgs, just speculating.