[Crossposted from social media, in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week]
After a lot of thinking, I am updating my Giving What We Can🔸10% donation allocation, shifting about a third of my donation portfolio to the Center for Land Economics 🔰.
There are several reasons why I am excited about this donation opportunity.
I believe that Georgism has the potential to radically transform our economy and society. 'Land is a Big Deal', as they say. Raising public funds without deadweight costs is a big part of this. But more fundamentally, by reducing the costs of living and the role of rent-seeking, I hope that it could shift our society from scarcity and zero-sum thinking to abundance and positive-sum collaboration.
Within this cause area, I believe that CLE is the most cost-effective donation opportunity. In their first year, they have achieved much more tangible benefits than I would have anticipated, and seeing this change has made me much more optimistic about the prospects for Georgist reform today than I was a year ago. They combine an incremental approach of giving legislators and tax assessors the tools necessary to improve the situation on the ground, with movement building and consistent high-quality public outreach through the Progress & Poverty Substack. And they have done this with a small but dedicated team, with only 1 funded FTE.
This means that my donations, as a small, private donor, will actually constitute a few percentage points of their annual budget. It is rare to ever have the opportunity to make such a counterfactual difference. We can often have the most impactful donation opportunities in areas where we have access to idiosyncratic information that is not yet widely recognized by the wider 'donation market'. In my case, I think that the world severely under-appreciates the potential of Georgist reform generally, and the work of CLE specifically.
However, such idiosyncratic information can often be connected to unusual interests, which often comes with a risk of motivated reasoning. Maybe I am subconsciously exaggerating the importance of Georgism, due to my own personal involvement in the movement. These risks are a real concern, and it is part of the reason why I split my donation portfolio. But on net, I still see the opportunity as outweighing the risks.
I am posting this in the hope of others sanity-checking my reasoning above, and to inspire others to consider this extraordinary donation opportunity. We can often massively leverage the impact of our donations by also donating publicly. And this is only more true if we have information not yet widely recognized by others. To read more, check out the links below, and please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss this further!

Some resources for those curious to know more:
* CLE's website, where you can also donate.
* Land is a Big Deal, by Lars Doucet. Originally published as an essay series on Astral Codex Ten, and then converted into a book, I think that this provides one of the best contemporary introductions to Georgism. You can find the whole book here, or, if you prefer, in audio format on Spotify. 
* CLE's one-year impact report. 
* The Virtues of Virtue Signalling: A post I wrote some time ago about why I think we should be public about our donation decisions. 
 

Thanks, the comparisons are very helpful. 

I notice that your assessments make the intervention on par with "Securing Scale-up Funding for Alternative Proteins", which passed the bar for being recommended for AIM, which is encouraging. Given the uncertainty in the estimates, there seems to be significant Information Value from trying this at a smaller scale, and seeing what the data says. 

At ~£4-6K it doesn't seem impossible to find a small-grant funder supporting it. Some ideas for alternative or additional funding sources include: 

• If you partner with an existing meal-kit service, they may be interested in co-financing the experiment, since it, as previously mentioned, basically provides them with free advertisements.
• You could also ask people to refer participants in exchange for some co-payment, e.g. 25%. This would enable people to get their friends a month of food at a 75% discount, while also filtering for people who are a bit more invested and likely to be aligned.
• Again, Veganuary might be helpful in finding funding sources or in marketing the project to find suitable referrals.
• Faunalytics may be interested in helping with study design and implementation, and potentially helping find funding sources.
• Since AIM recommended comparable interventions, they may be interested in helping or advising on this project. 

Just getting in contact with these various organizations to bounce the idea would also give you an opportunity for additional feedback! 

Best of luck! 

Thank you for this write-up! It sounds really intriguing. The calculation is a bit beyond my area of expertise, but here are some more general reflections: 

•  If this is done through a fully vegan meal-kit service, it might be useful to also offer it as a long-term paid subscription option. For example, offering the first month for free and subsequent months at low/self-cost.
  • This may increase retention by making it more convenient for people to keep on using the meal kit service, automatically getting vegan meals afterward.
  • This would render the first month a form of philanthropy-funded advertisement for the meal kit service, giving it a great market edge over non-vegan competitors.
  • This might also enable more scale, pushing down per-unit costs.
  • A lot of people, including myself, are very averse to paid subscriptions. But I think that a full month's food budget is a big enough bait to overcome this.
• I would be interested in gifting this type of free initial month to friends and family. Sometimes I've given away vegan cookbooks in the hope that this would make people more comfortable making vegan meals, both for themselves and for me when visiting, and this could have a similar function.
  • Importantly, to me, this would not trade against my donation budget, but against my gift budget, reducing the opportunity cost massively.
  • If this is given as a Christmas gift for someone's January food budget, there would be an obvious opportunity to pair up with Veganuary.
• There may be a good opportunity to bundle meal kits with information campaigns, e.g., using the back side of the recipe to mention some fun (or not so fun) fact of the day, thereby increasing motivation.
  • Since people will already be prompted to think about their food choices, it might give them more food for thought (sorry). Anecdotally, for me personally, I remember taking a much bigger interest in these questions just after transitioning to a vegan diet, likely due to decreasing cognitive dissonance, making me much more receptive to the information.
  • Moreover, since the service is already gathering data on retention, this also creates a great opportunity for RCTs to test which form of information is most useful.
• For interpretation of the results, I wonder if you could also mention what ranges of SADs/$ other promising interventions have. Is 19 a lot or a little, compared to our best options?

Thank you again for your work on this, and best of luck with it! I hope to be able to gift a subscription soon! 

I am happy to continue brainstorming! Here are a handful of quick ideas: 

• I really liked the idea of getting a donation-matching award when reaching milestones!
• Perhaps you could add this project itself as one of the donation options? These funds would be used for operation costs and milestone awards. Of course, it is a bit speculative how effective it will be, but once it has been in use for some time you might be able to estimate its multiplier. It also sounds like a good idea to seek some seed grants from a larger funder.
• I know that Clearer Thinking has done some research on habit formation and daily rituals that might be useful in designing the app. They often discuss and promote EA ideas, so it could be a good idea to reach out to them directly for advice! 

• I also like the idea mentioned by Charlotte in another comment of building virtual rewards, similar to 'Forest'. This could help people stay motivated over time, but could also be really useful for dramatically visualizing the differences in scope, and incentivize users to aim for more impact. If you are building your virtual chicken farm, you will be able to clearly see the difference between a charity that is 10x as effective as another, and be properly motivated to maximize the number of chickens per donation. 

  Also, feel free to reach out to me by direct message if you want to bounce ideas. This is not my area of expertise, but I am happy to help if there is something I can do!

I really like this idea! Personally, I am rather susceptible to gamification and tend to think of effective donations as a major "hobby"^[1], so this is right up my alley. 

One additional function that I believe would be really valuable is to be able to give gift vouchers to other app users. I like the general idea of donations-as-gifts, since it is often more valuable than the options and because it enables you to introduce friends and family to effective giving. However, merely donating in someone else's name can be a bit tricky, since it sometimes feels like you are just doing whatever you wanted to do with the money, and sticking their name on it as an afterthought. I believe that giving gift vouchers for this type of project would give the gift receiver more autonomy in deciding how to use the funds, and thus feel more like a genuine gift. It would also give them an opportunity to read and learn about a few different effective projects and decide what is most closely in line with their values. Moreover, giving through this app would ensure that they are not only exposed to effective giving once but repeatedly, thereby having a larger chance of becoming habit-forming. So it would make it much easier for effective donors to also share these ideas with others, and might be an effective way to increase the pool of donors. 

Building even more on this idea, one could perhaps also use donation matching to incentivize even further donations. So rather than giving you X dollars, I offer to automatically match any donations you make through the app up to X dollars. 

Finally, the idea of giving many small donations to different organizations might also be useful to help people become less attached to a single cause area and more dedicated to effective giving generally.

I wish you the best of luck with the project and look forward to seeing how it progresses!

1. ^{^}

   With "hobby" I do not mean something that is trivial or non-mandatory, but rather something that I really enjoy spending my free time thinking and reading and talking about. So being prompted to learn more about it once a day would be more enjoyable than annoying.

That is great to hear David, thank you for your kind comment! 

And I agree with you that if a moral action is costly, then this seems to make it more praisworthy to perform it. Additionally, if these costs are shared between many people, it also seems solidaristic to take on part of these costs, and making it easier for others. 

However, interestingly, I also believe that it is less costly to be public about donations if one can give some explanation or justification for this. If others perceive the reason for being public as a desire to inspire others, rather than bragging, then it will also be met with much less annoyance. So sharing this essay was not only a way for me to explain why one should take on this cost, but also a way to reduce the cost themselves. 

I think that this also connects to your post, which I just read! If you decide to reach out to your clients, and also give some explanation or context for doing this, I think that they would be less inclined to react negatively to it. I am really happy that the essay was helpful for your question, and inspired you to also take the pledge! Thank you for letting me know that, and good luck with the holiday gift package! 

Thank you for such a nice comment! I am very happy to hear that you found it clarifying! 

Hello everyone! 

I am a political theorist at Uppsala University, Sweden. Similarly to how I am interested in niche ethical ideas like EA, my research is focused on rather neglected (or weird) political ideas. In particular, I am interested in ‘geoism’ or ‘Georgism’, which combines the economic idea that unequal landownership is a root cause of many social problems with the normative idea that such landownership is unjustified since land was not created by anyone. Hence, geoists argue that taxes should be shifted to land and other naturally occurring resources. Earlier this year I defended my Ph.D. thesis on the relationship between geoism and anarchism. I recently received a postdoc grant to keep on researching geoist political theory in the coming years, being partly based in Oslo and Blacksburg, VA. 

In terms of cause area, I really appreciate the wide diversity within EA. But perhaps due to my interest in political theory, I have an extra soft spot for questions concerning institutional and systemic change. This is presumably where my own comparative advantage is, but I also think that it matters massively in terms of ripple effects and global capacity growth. At some point, I want to write up an exploration of land reform as a potential high-impact cause area, and the use of community land value trusts as a way to implement these ideals. The final chapter of my thesis explores some related ideas.

I was first introduced to EA ideas in a university philosophy course in 2018. My New Year's resolution for 2022-23 was to try donating 10% of my income to effective causes for at least a year. I had previously found that smaller trials, like Veganuary, are much more doable than any permanent commitment. During this time I also thought a lot about whether to take any public pledge or just to keep on donating anonymously. I eventually became convinced that the potential social contagion effects provide a really important reason to be public with pledges. I wrote some of these considerations down in this essay, which was published at GWWC last month. I also used this occasion to sign the 🔸 10% Pledge. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and thank you all for the good that you do!