patrissimo comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong

29 Post author: CarlShulman 23 September 2010 05:33AM

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Comment author: Yvain 23 September 2010 05:51:51PM 28 points [-]

I think there is a market for some sort of organization by which a person who wants to donate $50 to the Democrats can contact a person who wants to donate $50 to the Republicans and mutually agree to donate their collective $100 to some third-party cause like world hunger instead.

Comment author: patrissimo 29 September 2010 05:22:55PM 1 point [-]

But politics is not about policy. Political donors want to signal their affiliation with their tribes, not spend their money efficiently to change the world. It's a modern potlatch. Otherwise they'd be giving to something else in the first place - it's extraordinarily unlikely that giving to the Democrats or Republicans is the maximal way to impact the world, so anyone who is doing it obviously doesn't have the goal of efficient charity.

I predict that such an organization would capture < 0.5% of donors by # and < 0.1% by $. That's a pretty small market - a few hundred thousand.