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Jack comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
Village Reach is a fantastic charity. But they would have no clue what to do with a billion dollars. They could take maybe one percent of the revenue this would generate.
Edit: Which is to say that funding Village Reach is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, we just need a lot more ideas.
Is the idea to save all the ad revenue and then give it as a lump sum? That seems like a strange thing to do. Would Village Reach be able to take the amount each month of ad uptime would generate, once monthly?
GiveWell says they could absorb $2.5 million over the next year. That means if Kevin's math is right 15% of one month's revenue would top them off.
They do separate, regional projects, and that number is what they need to carry out the projects they've already committed to.
If they get on Craigslist and start seeing steady money out of it, they can start a bunch of new projects in new areas.
With what staff? Maybe GiveWell or someone could answer this but right now we have no reason to think they could scale up to a budget 100x what they had last year. We also don't know what level of efficiency they could maintain with the increased size.
With staff they hire. Certain kinds of problems are both inevitable and fixable once money is in the pipeline.
When you add that much money, you're giving it to the planners, not the plan. If what they're doing doesn't scale to the money they get (though I think it will) they'll do something else. Treat it like one of those business plan contests. Their success so far shows that they know how to do charity work.
It will also get people to join on Facebook, without which there will be no money for anyone.
But I'm not married to that particular charity. I just think that with so much money waiting to be claimed, we're having a little too much fun seeing who can predict the smallest nitty-gritties the farthest away.
I'd rather give a lot of the money to GiveWell, earmarked for international charities. They can then decide how much would be effective in the hands of Village Reach.
OK, let's do that. You win.
We can probably still use "Save babies on Craigslist" or something similar as the slogan if we make some baby-oriented charity the "poster child."
EDIT: spelling
I agree that making a lump-sum donation is a bad idea. But 200 million dollars (going by the OP's estimate) per year is still a lot of money for a charity to absorb. Givewell puts the "room for more funding" at $2.5 million (for 2010). This may (probably will) go up for later years, but it's a long way from $200 million. Stop TB Partnership is a bit larger, but still not $200M/year large.