> First, we should expect ordinary people to donate more to politics.
My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door. They hounded her for more donations. She got mailings, phone calls, multiple people at her door. She vowed never to give them another cent.
Perhaps an unusually bad experience, but generally you do get punished this way for donating. I emptied my grandmother's mailbox when she became ill, and due to her charitable giving, it was absolutely crammed with political and charity mailings.
I like to give to charities, but I've built up a couple of rules:
- I won't give you a credit card number, because I've seen too many dark patterns about canceling recurring donations. It stinks for online giving because Paypal is awful, but it's basically the only way I can guarantee that I won't need to make phone calls if my giving habits change.
- You always get a unique email address that I can cancel or sort, no matter who you are. Fastmail thankfully makes this very easy.
- Unless I really trust you not to mail me, I won't give you my real address.
Patreon, for all of its problems, has the right idea here. Donors control their subscriptions, and their addresses/emails aren't shared by default. I'd love a similar service for more conventional giving.
I had the same problem. I got follow on requests flooding, then overwhelming me to the point of frustration and then annoyance.
Much later I listened to a podcast or ted talk of someone who talked about charity. I believe she worked with nonprofits as her day job.
I was listening to her expecting to understand altruism, to find out how and why people donate money, and how they find worthy causes along with decent organizations to donate to.
The one thing that stuck with me was when she asserted that the number one reason people will donate to your charity is: Have they donated before.
This gave me an unexpected glimpse behind the curtain at what motivates organizations to over-contact their previous benefactors.
It made me a little sad too, reminding me a little of the petting zoo. You take a young kid to the petting zoo to interact with the animals. But then they see this tiny child has a handful of food, and you are surrounded by crazy goats that chase the helpless youngster until she throws the food and runs away.
Nearly every time I've donated to something political, it's come to bite me in the ass. Donate to a candidate? They sell/give my info to related PACs and groups (and there's no stopping it, because it's considered political speech to solicit for donations). Last time I gave money to one of the fundraisers with vests that hang around downtown, my credit card got charged at an eastern European online retailer.
I feel the only real way to avoid this is to donate through an anonymous vehicle, but I believe anonymous political donation vehicles and everything that came with the Citizens United decision to be at the core of the rot in our system.
As counterpoint: I've donated to the Great Slate [1], a panel of Democrat long-shots in historically underserved areas. (I'd heard of them in large part thanks to Maciej/idlewords [2])
I've gotten emails, sure, but they respect unsubscribe. From that experience, I'm comfortable donating again through ActBlue [3], the donation platform they used.
Yeah the Bernie campaign sends me what seems like 10 texts per week since I donated, I honestly don’t understand it because it must really fatigue most people. Maybe it optimized donations over some small A/B test but I will absolutely find a way to get off this mailing list ASAP if it continues. Every single ask for more money has some seemingly urgent reason for it but you can’t use that repeatedly over long durations! It reminds me of the story someone once posted here where every task was a P0 for the PM and eventually they started calling things P-1, P-2, etc
Even once a week sounds like a lot but averaging more than one per day is just ridiculous.
It may be a chicken and egg problem but I think in this case the low donations came before the hounding. Political entities hound donors because people do not donate enough, so they have to try too hard to get the funds they need. If they stopped doing that tomorrow and announcing it so everyone knows and acts upon this new information, I expect total donations to go down significantly, not up. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think no entity puts more effort into a goal than necessary. If it were possible to get more donations by doing less, it would have been done already.
For an interview take-home I was asked to slice and dice a voter donation database to find analytics ranging from simple top lists to counts/lists of people who were most likely to donate again (following a given formula). Many of those potential recurring donors were people like this, who had given once and whose other (publicly available) political metrics indicated they were a strong match for donating again if matched.
I'm registered independent, but donated to my first political candidate (ever) recently, and experienced this same hounding, to the point that I ended up blocking/banning/giving fake info just to keep them off my notification screen every day.
I figure these people dont even bother filtering like the work I did above, as I had never once received solicitation for donation before. Now I'm bracing for the inevitable deluge of similar hounding from other candidates in coming years.
I dont give my real address, i use email labels for filtering and have leaf accounts in a forwarding network of emails specifically for crap like this.
I can only wonder how its going to work if the current political campaign "best practices" alienate a large slice of voters just because the current most-active slice is susceptible to that kind of manipulation.
Same experience for me, but mine was for donating blood, not money to politics. After a few years of repeatedly saying no they finally backed off and left me alone, but I haven’t donated since. I don’t want to be hunted down like that. It’s a shame, really. If I could donate and be guaranteed to never be contacted I totally would.
Perhaps things are different in Canada, but I've donated both to political parties and to multiple charities for various causes, and I've never been 'hounded' as I would describe it. I've received mail, but any time I've asked to be removed from their mailing list, that's the end.
Many years ago when I thought this was funny, I had a friend who would donate $10 in cash to Focus on the Family, Southern Poverty Law Center, DNC, RNC. For $40 they would get a deluge of mailers, calls, even visits. My friend feels bad to this day because the spam continues 30 years later.
I had this done to me many addresses ago and it’s bizarre how many mailers say something like “donate now so we can raise more donations because of terrible thing C”
I think the issue not covered in the nice article is that it’s not just coordination it’s competence. I think the reason why smart people don’t donate is that there’s not something to buy. If you have almond industry level funds to a cause it would like just result in a bunch of marathons and commercials. Smaller amounts, well placed seem much more effective.
"My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door"
I don't get why this is normalised. If fraudsters aren't doing this I'd be amazed. How hard is it to mock up an ID badge, get a clip board and start taking 'donations'.
The same for alumni donations for my former university. Donate even a small amount once and they'll ramp up future requests by an order of magnitude (a Global 50 university, Top 10 by some rankings, not short of cash).
Yeah. I feel like my modest one-time donations to Oxfam and cancer foundations have already been matched by all the mail they've sent me over the years since. Makes me less likely to donate again.
I don't think that's unusually bad. I'm especially annoyed once they seem to have spent more than I gave them just on postage to me. I don't understand it.
i'm not sure if gmail is evil but it does filter most of these to a secondary inbox for me. such little gratitudes add up to me staying on the platform.
The other sad thing about charities is they take so much money in overhead. Plus the wealthy use it as a vehicle for tax avoidance - would you rather pay $500k in taxes or have your brother in law make a Save the Children charity and give it to him? Then the tax is written off and your brother in law gets a salary, plus his charity can spend the rest on socialite parties I mean fundraisers.
>If everyone who cared about homelessness donated $100 to the problem, homelessness would be solved. Nobody does this, because they know that nobody else is going to do it, and their $100 is just going to feel like a tiny drop in the ocean that doesn’t change anything. People know that a single person can’t make a difference, so they don’t want to spend any money, so no money gets spent.
I wonder if something like the National Popular Vote compact could work here.
It works like this: state legislatures pass a law that says if enough states sign onto the compact to pass 270 electoral votes, their electors are automatically assigned to the winner of the popular vote. In this way, nothing changes and no one has to sacrifice anything until enough states agree to actually effect a change, and then they act together to effectively obviate the Electoral College.
Sure, if I donate $100 to a homelessness charity, it'll feel like a drop in the bucket. But if some charity starts an initiative to take my credit card information and only charge it once enough people donate to end homelessness, I might be more inclined to do it. Either the threshold is reached and homelessness ends, or I get a feeling of altruistic pride for doing nothing. Everyone wins!
The writer is very quick to assume Exxon Mobil's own figure for political spending is disingenuously low, but very quick to countenance the idea that the total amount of spend on political influence is publicly available. Maybe more money is being spent nontransparently? For example, it's a common practice in the UK to hire former (or current!) politicians for sinecure positions at greatly inflated salaries. I doubt anyone admits to these quasi-bribes as being political spending.
I'm sure they don't report such things as political spending.
But it also seems hard to me to imagine that adding up to very much. There are what, each year maybe a few hundred politicians who leave office and might be up for such patronage? If all of them get a million dollars, that's a few hundred million dollars a year. The movers and shakers of Washington DC are also... I mean, a lot of them become lobbyists or media people, and while they probably get good deals in doing that, it's hard to argue that a former congressional committee chairperson is going to be a bad lobbyist or whatever.
I think that actually, the people who become movers and shakers in government tend to not have a ton of trouble getting enough money to live solidly upper-class lifestyles, and they have self-selected as people who value having influence more than money.
I posted something similar on the author’s site, but I wonder if this is just “revealed preference.”
Perhaps people don’t really care nearly as much about the outcome of elections as they say they do.
I think most people suspect the outcome of an election won’t affect their lives nearly as dramatically as people claim, there’s too much inertia in the system.
Also, maybe, just maybe, people are subconsciously more intellectually humble than they let on, and realize that predictions about the impact of policy and elections are notoriously unreliable.
Taking a political position can serve to identify yourself with a certain social group, or as part of your personal identity, or if you are feeling somewhat metaphysical it can indicate the structure of your ethical system.
In all of those cases there is no need to actually spend money to achieve the goal.
If I am an “Apple person” I need to spend $1,000 on a phone to demonstrate this.
But if I’m a Sanders supporter I can do all this signaling by expressing outrage on Facebook and at dinner parties without spending a dime.
If this theory is correct, a political movement that could somehow get people to feel they have to contribute money to be a “real” supporter with associated social status would be drowning in contributions.
> The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year.
How much of that is actually from sales in the US vs. exports? In 2018, California produced 80% of the worldwide almond crop and exported 70% of it. Americans aren't quite as hungry for almonds as the author assumes.
I was curious, so I looked into it - apparently the US exported $4.5 billion worth of almonds 2017, with Spain being the largest consumer ($0.5 B). Also learned that the US imports almost exactly as many pecans as it exports.
Seems like they may have included it based on export percentages.
If I had to guess why there's so little money in politics I'd guess it's because there are more efficient ways to spend the money.
Political contributions right now seem to function mostly as a tax avoidance strategy. These donations are effectively free. A company or wealthy individual can either pay taxes or donate the money to a "non-political" think tank to promote policies they'd like to see.
Convincing someone to influence elections is easy if they'd pay it in taxes anyways. I'm guessing it's difficult to convince someone that their post tax money is most efficiently spent influencing the political system.
One last note, there's also many other types of interactions companies have with the government. There's state level, regulatory bodies, local and county influences. Companies interact highly with the government at the local levels because they're easier to manipulate than the federal government.
> These donations are effectively free. A company or wealthy individual can either pay taxes or donate the money to a "non-political" think tank to promote policies they'd like to see.
That's not how deductions work. A donation costs the donor much more than the tax reduction. All a deduction does is reduce your adjusted gross income, not literally offset the nominal sum you pay in taxes.
Say my top marginal tax bracket is 20%. If I donate $100 then it's costing me precisely $100. If I don't donate then I'm on the hook for $20 ($100 * 20%) in tax. $100 > $20. This presumes the $100 is earned income, and that the donation is in fact tax deductible. If neither of those hold then the relation is $100 > $0.
Not sure about companies, but as an individual, political contributions are NOT tax-deductible.[1]
On a personal note, I like Andrew Yang's approach to wash out special interest groups and lobbyist with "democracy dollars" [2] of $100 for every citizen. Apparently it's been working in Seattle, but would love to hear from any Seattlites on the progress of the program.
It sounds like you're suggesting that every dollar donated to a non-profit entity results in a dollar less of payable taxes -- I'm not aware of a country with a tax/donation trade-off like that, but would be interested to hear about it if you do.
The best deal that I'm aware of is a reduction in your reported taxable income equal to the donation, resulting in a savings of the affected tax bracket rates * the dollars donated per bracket, but even that kind of thing is somewhat limited as far as I'm aware (eg up to x% of income is allowed per year).
I might have just misunderstood you -- either way, curious if you know something about donations I don't or had a different idea in mind!
Isn't this just a way of saying that effective governance in a representative democracy is a public good, and that thus we should expect it to be underproduced?
> Most research (plus the 2016 results) confirms that money has little effect on victory
Maybe money in the form of "contributions", okay. But having money is still the largest predictor for policy direction.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence"[0]
One of the ideas that I cherish is radical transparency. It would be better to see exactly what each company wants to donate to and how money is being spent.
You basically do get that, but it's hard to work around indirections. If I'm in company A and I give money to an industry lobbying group X (and so do companies B, C, D, and E), and then industry lobbying group X gives money to super-PAC alpha, and then super-PAC alpha donates to politicians Bob and Fred, then... how does that become digestible to the public? Some amount of "Company A's" money went to Fred, but it's gone through several fungible buckets since then, and you can't necessarily draw a clean link.
Informally, it may (or may not!) be that Fred was told by someone that his continuing to get these kinds of checks was dependent on him doing a specific favor for company A, but probably not everyone who receives some money that was originally sourced at company A did.
TL;DR: It's hard to build consensus out in the open. Consensus requires the ability to apply positive and negative pressure to get followers to agree to things that are in the general interest but aren't in their interests. Radical transparency cuts down on the levers to build that consensus and makes it harder to pass budgets and other necessary laws.
This has seriously got to be the dumbest, most uneducated piece of writing I have ever read. Yes, lets all just throw money at a broken problem, that'll make it better. "Politics" as the author refers to it as, needs the opposite of funding, it needs to be cut off entirely from donors to see who still stands. The US Government, will have a fund where it gives a set number to each candidate for campaigning purposes and that is ALL that can be used. Already own a private jet? Tough shit, cant use it for campaigning! Already a millionaire with lots of millionaire friends? Sorry charlie!
That is the only way we will get back to grass roots form of electing. Simply throwing money at something rarely fixes a problem.
> I don’t want more money in politics. But the same factors that keep money out of politics keep it out of charity too.
And if "throwing money at something rarely fixes a problem" then what is a better way? Relying on volunteers? What are you donating all your time to day after day for no money? How do you think you incentivize people to spend the majority of their waking hours on something you think is important?
I don't think we should necessarily put more money into politics. I know that will only further consolidate power in a given country. But I'm not sure that was the point of the article either. It points out that it _seems_ like the rational thing to do would be for those with money, especially corporations with vast sums of it, to spend more on their candidate of choice. Yet they don't, at least not as much as the author expects, or expects us to expect. I didn't get the feeling it was saying the only way to save things is to throw more money at it, I think it's asking what is the underlying force that's keeping everyone from doing that? If we can figure that out, maybe we can understand some latent properties of the system we're in with regards to the charity parts.
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door. They hounded her for more donations. She got mailings, phone calls, multiple people at her door. She vowed never to give them another cent.
Perhaps an unusually bad experience, but generally you do get punished this way for donating. I emptied my grandmother's mailbox when she became ill, and due to her charitable giving, it was absolutely crammed with political and charity mailings.
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
I like to give to charities, but I've built up a couple of rules:
- I won't give you a credit card number, because I've seen too many dark patterns about canceling recurring donations. It stinks for online giving because Paypal is awful, but it's basically the only way I can guarantee that I won't need to make phone calls if my giving habits change.
- You always get a unique email address that I can cancel or sort, no matter who you are. Fastmail thankfully makes this very easy.
- Unless I really trust you not to mail me, I won't give you my real address.
Patreon, for all of its problems, has the right idea here. Donors control their subscriptions, and their addresses/emails aren't shared by default. I'd love a similar service for more conventional giving.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
Much later I listened to a podcast or ted talk of someone who talked about charity. I believe she worked with nonprofits as her day job.
I was listening to her expecting to understand altruism, to find out how and why people donate money, and how they find worthy causes along with decent organizations to donate to.
The one thing that stuck with me was when she asserted that the number one reason people will donate to your charity is: Have they donated before.
This gave me an unexpected glimpse behind the curtain at what motivates organizations to over-contact their previous benefactors.
It made me a little sad too, reminding me a little of the petting zoo. You take a young kid to the petting zoo to interact with the animals. But then they see this tiny child has a handful of food, and you are surrounded by crazy goats that chase the helpless youngster until she throws the food and runs away.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|6 years ago|reply
Nearly every time I've donated to something political, it's come to bite me in the ass. Donate to a candidate? They sell/give my info to related PACs and groups (and there's no stopping it, because it's considered political speech to solicit for donations). Last time I gave money to one of the fundraisers with vests that hang around downtown, my credit card got charged at an eastern European online retailer.
I feel the only real way to avoid this is to donate through an anonymous vehicle, but I believe anonymous political donation vehicles and everything that came with the Citizens United decision to be at the core of the rot in our system.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|6 years ago|reply
I've gotten emails, sure, but they respect unsubscribe. From that experience, I'm comfortable donating again through ActBlue [3], the donation platform they used.
[1] https://techsolidarity.org/resources/great_slate.html
[2] related: https://idlewords.com/2019/05/what_i_learned_trying_to_secur...
[3] https://secure.actblue.com/
[+] [-] opportune|6 years ago|reply
Even once a week sounds like a lot but averaging more than one per day is just ridiculous.
[+] [-] smnrchrds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oriel|6 years ago|reply
I'm registered independent, but donated to my first political candidate (ever) recently, and experienced this same hounding, to the point that I ended up blocking/banning/giving fake info just to keep them off my notification screen every day. I figure these people dont even bother filtering like the work I did above, as I had never once received solicitation for donation before. Now I'm bracing for the inevitable deluge of similar hounding from other candidates in coming years.
I dont give my real address, i use email labels for filtering and have leaf accounts in a forwarding network of emails specifically for crap like this.
I can only wonder how its going to work if the current political campaign "best practices" alienate a large slice of voters just because the current most-active slice is susceptible to that kind of manipulation.
[+] [-] fnord77|6 years ago|reply
I estimate the time and materials they have spend since then to extract more money from me exceeds my original $50 contribution.
[+] [-] cornstalks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempestn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply
I had this done to me many addresses ago and it’s bizarre how many mailers say something like “donate now so we can raise more donations because of terrible thing C”
I think the issue not covered in the nice article is that it’s not just coordination it’s competence. I think the reason why smart people don’t donate is that there’s not something to buy. If you have almond industry level funds to a cause it would like just result in a bunch of marathons and commercials. Smaller amounts, well placed seem much more effective.
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
I don't get why this is normalised. If fraudsters aren't doing this I'd be amazed. How hard is it to mock up an ID badge, get a clip board and start taking 'donations'.
[+] [-] zhte415|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legogris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shameshame|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nessunodoro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seibelj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koboll|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if something like the National Popular Vote compact could work here.
It works like this: state legislatures pass a law that says if enough states sign onto the compact to pass 270 electoral votes, their electors are automatically assigned to the winner of the popular vote. In this way, nothing changes and no one has to sacrifice anything until enough states agree to actually effect a change, and then they act together to effectively obviate the Electoral College.
Sure, if I donate $100 to a homelessness charity, it'll feel like a drop in the bucket. But if some charity starts an initiative to take my credit card information and only charge it once enough people donate to end homelessness, I might be more inclined to do it. Either the threshold is reached and homelessness ends, or I get a feeling of altruistic pride for doing nothing. Everyone wins!
[+] [-] YawningAngel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|6 years ago|reply
But it also seems hard to me to imagine that adding up to very much. There are what, each year maybe a few hundred politicians who leave office and might be up for such patronage? If all of them get a million dollars, that's a few hundred million dollars a year. The movers and shakers of Washington DC are also... I mean, a lot of them become lobbyists or media people, and while they probably get good deals in doing that, it's hard to argue that a former congressional committee chairperson is going to be a bad lobbyist or whatever.
I think that actually, the people who become movers and shakers in government tend to not have a ton of trouble getting enough money to live solidly upper-class lifestyles, and they have self-selected as people who value having influence more than money.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
If the Big Company does badly, voters will lose their jobs, and it will be a tough reelection. The politicians don't need to be bribed.
[+] [-] whiddershins|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps people don’t really care nearly as much about the outcome of elections as they say they do.
I think most people suspect the outcome of an election won’t affect their lives nearly as dramatically as people claim, there’s too much inertia in the system.
Also, maybe, just maybe, people are subconsciously more intellectually humble than they let on, and realize that predictions about the impact of policy and elections are notoriously unreliable.
Taking a political position can serve to identify yourself with a certain social group, or as part of your personal identity, or if you are feeling somewhat metaphysical it can indicate the structure of your ethical system.
In all of those cases there is no need to actually spend money to achieve the goal.
If I am an “Apple person” I need to spend $1,000 on a phone to demonstrate this.
But if I’m a Sanders supporter I can do all this signaling by expressing outrage on Facebook and at dinner parties without spending a dime.
If this theory is correct, a political movement that could somehow get people to feel they have to contribute money to be a “real” supporter with associated social status would be drowning in contributions.
[+] [-] hondo77|6 years ago|reply
How much of that is actually from sales in the US vs. exports? In 2018, California produced 80% of the worldwide almond crop and exported 70% of it. Americans aren't quite as hungry for almonds as the author assumes.
Ref: http://www.capradio.org/articles/2018/07/09/record-crop-for-...
[+] [-] bduerst|6 years ago|reply
Seems like they may have included it based on export percentages.
[+] [-] dumbfoundded|6 years ago|reply
Political contributions right now seem to function mostly as a tax avoidance strategy. These donations are effectively free. A company or wealthy individual can either pay taxes or donate the money to a "non-political" think tank to promote policies they'd like to see.
Convincing someone to influence elections is easy if they'd pay it in taxes anyways. I'm guessing it's difficult to convince someone that their post tax money is most efficiently spent influencing the political system.
One last note, there's also many other types of interactions companies have with the government. There's state level, regulatory bodies, local and county influences. Companies interact highly with the government at the local levels because they're easier to manipulate than the federal government.
[+] [-] wahern|6 years ago|reply
That's not how deductions work. A donation costs the donor much more than the tax reduction. All a deduction does is reduce your adjusted gross income, not literally offset the nominal sum you pay in taxes.
Say my top marginal tax bracket is 20%. If I donate $100 then it's costing me precisely $100. If I don't donate then I'm on the hook for $20 ($100 * 20%) in tax. $100 > $20. This presumes the $100 is earned income, and that the donation is in fact tax deductible. If neither of those hold then the relation is $100 > $0.
People have similarly mistaken ideas about so-called write-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ
[+] [-] andyjsong|6 years ago|reply
On a personal note, I like Andrew Yang's approach to wash out special interest groups and lobbyist with "democracy dollars" [2] of $100 for every citizen. Apparently it's been working in Seattle, but would love to hear from any Seattlites on the progress of the program.
[1] https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/tax-deductions-and-credits-...
[2] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/democracydollars/
[+] [-] wcarss|6 years ago|reply
The best deal that I'm aware of is a reduction in your reported taxable income equal to the donation, resulting in a savings of the affected tax bracket rates * the dollars donated per bracket, but even that kind of thing is somewhat limited as far as I'm aware (eg up to x% of income is allowed per year).
I might have just misunderstood you -- either way, curious if you know something about donations I don't or had a different idea in mind!
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewflnr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gnodar|6 years ago|reply
Maybe money in the form of "contributions", okay. But having money is still the largest predictor for policy direction.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence"[0]
[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
[+] [-] foobar_|6 years ago|reply
Money is a form of voting.
[+] [-] aetherson|6 years ago|reply
Informally, it may (or may not!) be that Fred was told by someone that his continuing to get these kinds of checks was dependent on him doing a specific favor for company A, but probably not everyone who receives some money that was originally sourced at company A did.
[+] [-] cwyers|6 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/the-cas...
TL;DR: It's hard to build consensus out in the open. Consensus requires the ability to apply positive and negative pressure to get followers to agree to things that are in the general interest but aren't in their interests. Radical transparency cuts down on the levers to build that consensus and makes it harder to pass budgets and other necessary laws.
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrgNet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|6 years ago|reply
Zing!
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] psvj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psvj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamisteven|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixstringtheory|6 years ago|reply
> I don’t want more money in politics. But the same factors that keep money out of politics keep it out of charity too.
And if "throwing money at something rarely fixes a problem" then what is a better way? Relying on volunteers? What are you donating all your time to day after day for no money? How do you think you incentivize people to spend the majority of their waking hours on something you think is important?
I don't think we should necessarily put more money into politics. I know that will only further consolidate power in a given country. But I'm not sure that was the point of the article either. It points out that it _seems_ like the rational thing to do would be for those with money, especially corporations with vast sums of it, to spend more on their candidate of choice. Yet they don't, at least not as much as the author expects, or expects us to expect. I didn't get the feeling it was saying the only way to save things is to throw more money at it, I think it's asking what is the underlying force that's keeping everyone from doing that? If we can figure that out, maybe we can understand some latent properties of the system we're in with regards to the charity parts.