An experiment to evaluate the value of one researcher's work

NunoSempere

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I'm working on something similar. See https://impactlist.xyz/ for a very early demo. Don't take the effectiveness ratings that seriously yet -- I've just done very shallow research using LLMs so far. The aim is not to measure how wealthy people would be if they never donated to charity, but how much good billionaires have done with their charitable donations.

I originally posted about it on this forum a couple years ago (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LCJa4AAi7YBcyro2H/proposal-impact-list-like-the-forbes-list-except-for-impact) but didn't start working on it seriously until this month.

Currently looking for volunteers (researchers and React devs). Here's the discord: https://discord.gg/6GNre8U2ta.

Trym Braathen🔸May 183

I like this! Though I feel like a lot of the numbers are based on long-termist speculation rather than empiricism, which I think could hinder it from being widely adopted. It might also be cool to add how many lives the billionaires could potentially save if they donated most of their wealth.

Thomas Kwa

May 17

I'm a big fan of this. Imagine if this becomes the primary way billionaires are ranked on prestige

See in context

Money Stuff on charity-adjusted billionaire rankings

by JP Addison🔸

May 161 min read 9

88

Effective giving

Frontpage

This is a linkpost for https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-05-15/coinbase-got-hacked-a-little

One reason to make a lot of money is to get a good spot on the league table of rich people. [...] Being the richest person in the world does seem cooler than being the second-richest person on the world, though I doubt that your consumption basket changes much between those two spots. [...] And so you might imagine that the design of the league tables could motivate behavior.
Put another way: Had the Oracle of Omaha held onto his stake through the years, he’d have a net worth of almost $400 billion as of April 30, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s $67 billion more than the fortune of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.
Charity-adjusted billionaire rankings! Why not? [...] When you irrevocably donate your stock to charity, you no longer own it in any legal or practical or economic sense, but should you still own it for league table purposes? Would that incentivize more donations? “You can give away all your money and still be rich (in our rankings)”?

Matt Levine mostly treats this as a joke, but it would be cool if someone put some effort into making a lux-looking billionaire ranking website that adjusted for charity. Matt reads his reader email, so I bet you could get it featured on his newsletter.

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Elliot OldsMay 16*44

Thomas KwaMay 178

I'm a big fan of this. Imagine if this becomes the primary way billionaires are ranked on prestige

Trym Braathen🔸May 183

Denkenberger🔸May 175

This has always been the policy of the Giving Pledge:

Since the very beginning of the Giving Pledge, it has focused on those with a net worth of at least one billion dollars (or who would be billionaires if not for their giving) due to the enormous potential of the resources they can deploy.

Denis May 241

An interesting way to think about this is that when you donate money to a good cause, nobody can ever take that away from you. Not the tax-man, not Trump, not a recession or a stock-market collapse. You will forever have that "credit" in your account.

The idea of this post is so obviously correct that anything else just doesn't make sense. If it's a competition for who has earned / inherited the most money - which sadly for some people it is - then why shouldn't money voluntarily given away be part of the total?

Right now, rich-lists are a contest to find the greediest humans, people who amass but do not share huge fortunes. Maybe calling the the "Forbes Greed list" would help change this??

MefreeMay 221

I like the idea of Charity adjusted rankings rather than current rankings. My thoughts:

It's unlikely to gain significant traction.
Is already done in many ways indirectly including names on schools/buildings/etc, The Giving Pledge and other forms of charitable recognition.
Highlights how much value & prestige we place on money.
Demonstrates why we should work towards a fairer and more efficient economic & monetary system that internalizes externalities so that individual wealth better represents net contributions to society.

Alexander_ZatkoMay 221

The (Nobel laureate) economist Michael Spence also wrote on this topic last year in Project Syndicate. After reading the article, I realized the Merit reward in Rovas (the application I developed) could be a suitable measure for the social impact of the philanthropists he calls for. A list of Merit holders would then be Matt Levine’s league table.

In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.

Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to "prime" the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.

However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.

There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.

Mo PuteraMay 222

I checked out your website thinking I'd find something like this but couldn't. Did you have something different in mind re: league table?

Alexander_ZatkoMay 221

The Merit rank page is here:

https://rovas.app/users-merit-rank

It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.

The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.

The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the "commons" in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).

The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)