[YossarianFrPrez]

From what I can understand, instead of funding various causes via "matching donations" QF is proposal for a funding body to do something like 'match in proportion to a blend of the donation amount with the number of people donating to the cause.' The point seems to be to smooth out any undue influence any one philanthropist or individual funder has and make the funding of public goods quasi-democratic.

However, compare these two problems: a) not enough people who can afford to do so engage in philanthropy, and b) philanthropic funding isn't quasi-democratically distributed. I have to imagine that (a) is a much, much bigger issue than (b).

I guess one could argue that because there isn't an analog of "a market" for public goods (c.f. "The Use of Knowledge in Society") somehow we aren't funding the important public goods "efficiently"? And maybe we should think about this more? Yet it's not clear that efficiency (in the economic sense) should be the goal or even applies. This is because markets are great at distilling people's the preferences for fungible goods they want to buy and fungible services they want to use when faced with multiple options for procuring some of each. But a) the vast majority of people don't have that same type of preference for which public goods should be funded, and b) public goods typically aren't fungible. (I.e., funding one scientist gives you a very different research output from funding another in the same subfield.)

[patcon]

> a) not enough people who can afford to do so engage in philanthropy, and b) philanthropic funding isn't quasi-democratically distributed. I have to imagine that (a) is a much, much bigger issue than (b)

Consider philanthropy funding as actions that terraform the future. The future is where all possibilities unfold, so shaping future landscape pays dividends to the worldview of those who materialize it.

I would propose that if (b) is miscalibrated and inequitable, it might affect everything, including (a), much more than we assume.

But also, I'm not trying to claim I know that one is more important, just that they're both quite important and very interrelated :)

[YossarianFrPrez]

Ah, interesting. So what (I think) you are saying is that if there is enough of the right type of philanthropic, in-kind donation more people will be able to donate in the future. I will admit the possibility that there may be a clever way of of doing in-kind donations that isn't wide-spread. Sort of akin to ranked-choice-voting but for donor matching.