A possible tax efficient swap mechanism for charity
I had an idea a while ago, which sounded simple to me, but searching with certain keywords did not yield appropriate results, so am presenting it for discussion to LW . Please inform me if something like this is already in existence. Please inform if I need to cross post it on effective altruism forum also, or they share enough users with LW and it need not be repeated.
Introduction
Two persons A, B living in different tax jurisdictions I and J respectively, want to contribute to organizations M and N qualifying for tax exemption in the other person's jurisdiction. i.e. M qualifies in J and N qualifies in I. For the purpose of this demo, lets consider they intend to contribute the same amounts.
They "swap" their charities and produce receipts to the effect from the respective organizations.i.e. A contributes to N and B contributes to M.
This helps them gain 10% to 20% more money when compared to contributing to their preferred charities which do not qualify.
So, the idea is to create a website where people can post such an intent, to contribute to cross-national charities and can reliably present receipts that will be acceptable to all concerned.
The main uses i envisage for such swaps would be science supporters in the developing world wanting to contribute to research happening in the developed world swapping with EA's wanting to gain a bigger bang for their buck in the developing world. This potentially reduces the need for a lot of charities to seek out tax exemption in multiple jurisdictions.
Avenues for further research
Question on the basic idea
- Do both charities have to be acceptable to both donors or are neutral and maybe even "hostile" swaps possible? How much does that complicate matters
- A certain cut of the proceeds seems to be the simplest for the website to operate, but will it be acceptable to the users?
- Might this be construed as being illegal in certain jurisdictions, after all, it is a tax avoidance scheme, to be honest.
Logistics questions
- The 1:1:1:1 case for person to jurisdictions to causes to "the time of swap" is the simplest. There are many possible complications which can allow more charity to be funneled, but require the website hosts to be exposed to non-trivial amounts of risk. Example in one exchange, more dollars are offered for charity than euro-equivalents while in another swap, more euro-equivalents are offered compared to dollars. This can balance, but it is more complicated.
- Do the accounts need to "balance"? Will a non 1:1 ratio be acceptable for certain supporters of causes?
- Foreign exchange fluctuations affect amounts of money donated and may cause some unnecessary heartburn in some cases.
- Times of feeling charitable may wary and may prevent markets from clearing. Christians may feel more charitable near Christmas or Easter and Muslims during Ramadan.
- Might this require all charities to get themselves a digital signature? What are the other avenues to getting a reliable receipt from charities?
- If both payments are routed through the website/entity, then might unnecessary forex changes remove a lot of value? Could crypto-currency style atomic swaps help or would they introduce unnecessary complexity that people would rather not be bothered with.
- Might it complicate the relationship of donors with charities to the extent that the gain is lost in extra cost to reach out?
POLL : Aging research booster
I wanted to take a poll among LW folk since this question I had didn't seem to have a straight forward utilitarian answer. Please correct my impression, if wrong.
Situation
A government has a limited budget of USD $10 Billion, which it will award in 10 years with which it plans to encourage aging stoppage/reversal. It plans to do this in a relatively fair manner by announcing a competition in which various therapies will be evaluated.
The methodology is simple. The photographs of people who have undertaken the therapy and a control group are shown to people and they evaluate whether this person looks B years old or B + I years old. Similar checks are done with the blood and various other health checkups. These are evaluated by doctors, who answer the same question. Does this look like the report of one who is B or B+ I years old. All possible blindings are done correctly.
B is the base year against which the therapy will be evaluated and I is the increment of years for which the therapy should work.
For eg. the competition announcement can be. The government will offer the prize of $10 Billion to the team that demonstrates stoppage of aging from the age of 30 to 40. (Here, B is 30 and I is 10)
What do you think are the optimal values of B and I, given the constraints mentioned above (There are actually two variables which I assumed constant for this , the amount of the prize A and the time in which the research has to be done T.)
The reason I thought this wasn't a straight forward question is that there seem to be tradeoffs between whether to increase the work life time (eg. 30 to 45) or should we cease aging at retirement time (eg. 60 to 75), allowing for greater leisure.
Assume that this therapy is tested on women.
[EDIT : Confusion with the poll system. The polls are in the first comment]
Max Autonomy
I would like to raise a discussion topic in the spirit of trying to quantify risk from uncontrolled / unsupervised software.
What is the maximum autonomy that has been granted to an algorithm according to your best estimates? What is the likely trend in the future?
The estimates could be in terms of money, human lives, processes, etc.
Another estimate could be on the time it takes for a human to come in the process and say "This isn't right".
A high speed trading algorithm has a lot of money on the line, but a drone might have lives on the line.
A lot of business processes might get affected by data coming in via an API from a system that might have had slightly different assumptions resulting in catastrophic events. eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash
The reason this topic might be worth researching is that it is a relatively easy to communicate risk of AGI. There might be many people who have an implicit assumption that whatever software is being deployed in the real world, there are humans to counter balance it. For them, empirical evidence that they are mistaken about the autonomy given to present day software may shift beliefs.
EDIT : formatting
Imperfect Levers
Related to : Lost Purposes, The importance of Goodhart's Law, Homo Hypocritus, SIAI's scary idea, Value Deathism
Summary : Whenever human beings seek to achieve goals far beyond their individual ability, they use leverage of some kind of another. Creating organizations to achieve goals is a very powerful source of leverage. However due to their nature, organizations are imperfect levers and the primary purpose is often lost. The inertia of present forms and processes dominates beyond its useful period. The present system of the world has many such imperfect organizations in power and any of them developing near-general intelligence without significant redesign of their utility function can be a source of existential risk/values risk.
Ranking the "competition" based on optimization power
Most long term users on Less Wrong understand the concept of optimization power and how a system can be called intelligent if it can restrict the future in significant ways. Now I believe that in this world, only institutions are close to superintelligence in any significant way.
I believe it is important for us to have atleast some outside idea of which institutions/systems are powerful in today's world so that we can atleast see some outlines of how the increasing optimization power will end up affecting normal people.
So, my question is - what are the present institutions or systems that you would classify as having the maximum optimization power. Please present your thought behind it if you feel you are mentioning some unknown institution. I am presenting my guesses after the break.
The Importance of Goodhart's Law
This article introduces Goodhart's law, provides a few examples, tries to explain an origin for the law and lists out a few general mitigations.
Goodhart's law states that once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place. wikipedia The law was named for its developer, Charles Goodhart, a chief economic advisor to the Bank of England.
The much more famous Lucas critique is a relatively specific formulation of the same.
The most famous examples of Goodhart's law should be the soviet factories which when given targets on the basis of numbers of nails produced many tiny useless nails and when given targets on basis of weight produced a few giant nails. Numbers and weight both correlated well in a pre-central plan scenario. After they are made targets (in different times and periods), they lose that value.
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