All of Kyle Schutter's Comments + Replies

Great question. Often we say DALY averted, but saved works too and maybe is more intuitive.

Yes, to determine the DALYs saved we would need to have an RCT. This would be to establish the methodology. Once the methodology is established then other organizations can apply to have their credits verified under the same methodology. For example, if we show that bednets prevent malaria and thus save DALYs in an RCT then there is no need to have every organization do an RCT, only that they prove how many people are using bednets and the base rate of malaria in the area.

Does that help?

Cool. I just minted my Save the Whales NFT on your prototype site. :-)

This is excellent. I'm wondering, how has your thinking on this evolved since you wrote it?

I've been tinkering with a similar idea: tradable Impact Credits. The idea is that a big corporation might have an oil spill and want to buy lots of impact today and they are willing to pay top dollar for it and they need it fast. They don't want to fund something that may or may not save 10,000 acres of Amazon forest in 5-10 years. They need verified impact and they need it now. Meanwhile, an angel donor might be rather patient and willing to donate to a cause that ... (read more)

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RowanBDonovan
2y
This post gives an overview of the general vision.
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RowanBDonovan
2y
Cool, thank you for the comment! Sorry about the late reply; I didn’t get a notification. I’m part of a team now, and we have a big post coming out, hopefully in a few days. Then you can check there how your model compares to ours, and maybe we can synthesize the best of both! Would you be interested in joining our Impact Markets Discord server? With carbon credits you have governments forcing companies to either stay below pollution limits or buy carbon credits on the market. So to force companies to buy other, maybe generalized moral credits, we’d first have to get buy-in from governments or otherwise exert sustained pressure on them. That will probably take a while to set up, but I’m no policy expert. Otherwise I totally agree on the first point. We have a list of benefits and a matrix of market donations and funder temperaments because not all benefits apply under all conditions. But the reduced need for due diligence (I’ve been looking for a good term for this!) is probably a major benefit for any impact-minded, hits-based investor in a relatively large space. The continuous funding trades off against incentives for seed funders. One of our ideas is a Harberger tax type of auction that would have that property (there’s even a prototype already), but the greater the share that the issuer receives, the smaller the share that the investor receives (of all profits). Since investors have to do all the due diligence,  they may just figure that it’s not worth it for them if the share is too high. Our post will have more considerations on this point. By and large we lean towards giving issuers the choice between different auctions and then to double-down on whichever is most popular. The urgency is a good idea! That’s a benefit that hadn’t occurred to me. Some people are now using normal tokens as fractional NFTs. Dunno, whatever works, I suppose. Maybe we can even do these markets while completely cutting the concept of the impact certificate as separate entity.