[ymvacrfw] Donating to charity selfishly

One one hand, when you donate to charity, it should be to help others. On the other hand, you would like to spend your money to benefit yourself. It is possible to accomplish both of these goals simultaneously.

You need to donate to a "good" (in the economic sense) that your enjoyment of the good does not prevent others from enjoying the good, a nonrivalrous and nonexcludable good, that is, a public good (in the economic sense).

Unfortunately there are not a lot of opportunities to donate to public goods, and the ones that exist are weird. You can donate to science, especially to medical research, especially to medical research for a medical condition you may have a genetic, environmental, or lifestyle predilection of becoming afflicted. But frequently after the medical research is completed into a medical treatment, you have to pay for it again even though you donated toward it in the beginning.

For this and others, there's a dilution going on; your money is going to a very wide cause, and/or you don't know what you'll get out at the end: the end result of the medical research.

Public broadcasting, TV and radio over the air, is a pretty good example of a public good; though they don't let you earmark it toward specific shows or genres.

Now we propose other categories that I wish existed.

The most famous public good is information, because information, once created, can be infinitely copied allowing many people to enjoy it.

With much art being able to be digitally encoded, much art is information. Thus, it would be nice to donate toward creation of art to be placed in public domain after creation. Furthermore, it should be possible to donate toward a particular artist. In essence, "the public" commissions an artist, and "the public" receives the work - it being in public domain.

Examples of digitally encodable art are film, music, literature, digital images. With the power of 3D printing and CNC (?) some sculpture might be possible, too. Unfortunately not live performances, but documented choreography is.

The good thing about commissioning an artist is based on previous work, you have a pretty good idea of what you'll get out of the commission: most artists have a style that they stick to.

This is in fact a business model that may work for artists even with weak (or no) copyright protections. An artist establishes a collection box and a threshold, fans donate into collection box until the threshold is released, and then the musician records his or her next album or the producer/director makes his or her next film or the author writes his or her next book, releasing them into the public domain.

Another category of information is open source software. You can donate toward a project, or for a large project, you can donate toward a particular feature or bug you want fixed, a bug bounty.

Another category is consumer information. You can donate toward research about a particular product or service that you intend to buy. This is not donating toward a diluted consumer-research group in general, but toward the creation of research for a particular product or set of products you are choosing among. In our era of aggressive advertising to buy a product, there is often a dearth of information of why NOT to buy it.

The other famous category of public goods are infrastructure (though sometimes they are not completely nonrivalrous, like congestion on roads). Donate specifically for upkeep of the roads, sidewalks, and parks you use.

Because donations toward public goods offer the most bang for the buck, they ought to constitute the bulk of charitable donations, rather than mere wealth redistribution (which only offers $1 bang for $1) which seems to dominate today.