WHAT: A book like "Strangers Drowning", but focused on the "E" of EA rather than the "A" of EA.
WHY: narrative can be such a tremendous force in changing people's lives. It's often more powerful than argument (even for brainy people).
There's already a lot of world literature and newspaper stories on people who have been tremendously altruistic. There is much less literature about people who have been tremendously altruistic and -- this is key -- have been motivated by their altruism to care about effectiveness and listen to the evidence.
I'd love to have a book with biographies or stories that traces -- in narrative rather than argument -- people whose love for others has pushed them to care about effectiveness, care about evidence, and generally care about a results-oriented outlook that focuses on what 'really works at the end of the day'. (Note that the book should not generally be about people who care about effectiveness and evidence -- but only about people who have deliberately chosen to do so out of altruism (rather than, say, out nerdiness)).
Possible biographies could include: Florence Nightingale, Ignaz Semmelweis, Deng Xiaoping, figures from EA and utilitarianism, some theologians in the 2nd world war who pragmatically looked towards ending the killing (Bonhoeffer, Barth, etc?), etc. Not vouching for this list of examples at all -- it's more to give an idea.
By the way, creating such a book could be a project for EAs with a different skillset than the cliché EAs.
Philanthropy tax / Giving your 2 percents
Meta-proposal: Research what would be the consequences of implementing the proposal.
Proposal: Give the ability to citizens to decide where X% (say 2%) of their tax goes directly (it can be a charity or a government program)
Details: Of course, government can rebalance the rest of its budget in such a way that there's no counterfactual changes. But maybe it would still make a change. If not, then maybe the X% has to go to a charity. Or maybe the donations could be made for more specific governmental projects.
Reasoning: Maybe individuals have specific insights that the government doesn't have when it comes to public good, but altruism aside, individuals don't have an incentive to finance public goods. Empowering citizens to directly decide where part of their taxes goes would help with that.
Extra: Mayyybe their could be a way to certified some charities as efficient, but that's dangerous of going full circle, and having the government once again making the decisions, but their might be some in-between that would be superior. Maybe there should be a restriction to charities working on public good.
Thought on impact: Maybe philanthropists would give X% less to charities given they would have this mechanism to direct money to charities they want to support. If that's true, then increasing income taxes by X% would sort of be going full circle, except now everyone would be giving X% to charity.
Name: Calling it the "philanthropy tax" might confuse the concept with "taxing philanthropy". I'm definitely open to hearing other suggestions for names.
Update: Not surprisingly, other people have had similar ideas. For example, see Robert Lee's Facebook post.