When writing on effective altruism, I had a really trippy thought.
If "good done" by a charity was quantifiable (yeah yeah it isn't; all subjective; blah blah we know), or various units like human QALYs vs animal QALYs vs global temperature reduction vs whatever could be compared (subjectively, of course, all right) perhaps by the average of the comparisons produced by thousands of different people, and valued against one another:
We could produce a unit for "good done" by a charity, and thus "good done" per unit of currency ($, £, whatever).
And if we took this hypothetical unit of good done, lets call it a philanthrope (yeah yeah, very hard/impossible to produce, subjective, etc etc) and actually awarded it to charities when they did a certain amount of good;
And they awarded philanthropes to donors according to the "good" their donation did;
And philanthropes could be exchanged for money not just by charities but also by private individuals because that seems to make sense in terms of who ends up short and has thus "donated";
Then:
Philanthropes would be a currency, like pounds or whatever,
Tradeable, perhaps on stock markets
And representative of units of an unspecified "charitable commodity": trees saved, etc.
Which would be crazy.
Also, as the difficulty of performing one philanthrope rose as most of the more effective charitable interventions were done and thus used up, the value of a philanthrope would rise.
So what if someone exchanged the philanthrope for dollars, and gave them to a charity for more philanthropes? This would result in the value of the philanthrope plummeting... would it ever stop?
I'm woozy, sleepy and don't understand much economics, so if I'm talking absolute bollocks just tell me, but if someone more informed than me could make a guess at what might happen if philanthropes became real, I'd be interested.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14983848 times)