Philanthropy often struggles with allocating limited resources among causes like animal welfare, global health, and existential risks. Current methods, which tend to be top-down or siloed, may miss opportunities for collaboration or fair trade-offs between different priorities. This inefficiency can lead to wasted efforts or even conflicting interventions, reducing overall impact.
One approach to solving this problem could involve creating a structured way for different philanthropic priorities to negotiate resource sharing. For instance:
The idea is to model how these groups would interact if given the chance to negotiate, rather than assuming they must compete. Organizations could use this to refine grantmaking, advocates could leverage trade opportunities, and donors could make better-informed contributions.
To explore this idea, one might start with:
Potential hurdles include ideological resistance or difficulty comparing impact across causes, but existing metrics (like adjusted quality-of-life measures) could help bridge gaps.
Unlike static grantmaking or voting-based systems, this approach focuses on active negotiation between causes. For example:
By treating funding as a dynamic system, rather than a fixed pie, this model might uncover more efficient—and even cooperative—ways to allocate resources.
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