A New Constitution, Part 9

This is part 9 of the series; part 8 is here.

In the last part of this series, I used the website Kiva as an example of how to use the Internet to efficiently get charity to the needy. In this part, I describe a more sophisticated version that could be used to enable a wide variety of charitable giving, including education and healthcare for low-income families.

As I mentioned previously, I don't think the government is efficient at providing social services such as education and healthcare; I would prefer that people gave charity directly. Here's one way this could be achieved.

Imagine a web site called, say, charity 2.0. Any person or organization can visit the site and register a request for funds; either a loan or an outright donation. They describe their situation and its urgency, their geographic location, how they would use the funds wisely, and maybe upload some pictures.

Some examples:

1. a high school could request funds to educate 20 local low-income children
2. a low-income family could request funds for medical insurance
3. an animal lover could request funds to provide foster care for some young raccoons
4. a teacher could request funds to take some children on a special field trip

A visitor to the site can browse fund requests by location, subject, amount, urgency, and various other parameters. For example, I could look for opportunities to fund education for local low-income kids, or to fund urgent medical needs under $500. A Google maps integration could easily display funding requests in my area.

A community rating system like Rapleaf could provide some basic cross-checking on the integrity of the requests; trusting that your money is not going to waste is definitely a concern. But let's face it, a ton of money is wasted already in government welfare schemes, so it doesn't have to be perfect to be a whole lot better than what we currently have.

One of the goals of the system is to allow people to fully enjoy the natural act of helping others, even if they're not known to them personally. This is one thing that Kiva does very well. When you fund a recipient, you can decide whether it's anonymous or in your name. Similarly, the recipient has the chance to post thank you notes and updates on their progress so that the givers can enjoy the results of their donation.

What about the history of giving and receiving? The history of a person's reception of money is always public. The history of a person's giving is public by default, but can be turned off by the giver. The idea here is that people can be rightfully proud to have helped others, and although I don't like the idea of people boasting about how much they've given, I do like the idea that they can leave a quiet record of their good nature. This encourages people to "put their money where their mouth is". If someone bitches all day long about how poor people need better education, I can log in and see if they're actively doing something about it. If not, I'll put them on the spot and ask them why. A gentle social pressure can work wonders!

It's interesting to note that a system like this was simply not possible until very recently. So perhaps the concept of government welfare made sense in the absence of the Internet, but I think there are better ways available to us now.

The next part of this series is here.

Comments

[Jef Newsom]

After the Tsunami in 2004, I heard about a site called Charity Navigator on the radio. It provides some level of ranking of charities in the US.

http://www.charitynavigator.org/

I honestly don't know much about them beyond hearing about them on the radio and browsing their site, so ymmv, but your post reminded me of it.

I'm enjoying the constitution series, but I feel like your diverging a bit. I would think that the constitution should be more like a set of requirements than a solution as above.

Are you using the solution to lead to some underlying principles that you'll incorporate into the constitution, or are you advocating a gov't or privately sponsored charity website as a part of your constitution? Or are you merely stating that your constitution would prevent the introduction of welfare as a means of providing social services?

The peer-pressure idea is a bit off to me, though. It has the potential to violate "The right for each person to live according to their own values" - hypothetically, you probably wouldn't like it if you found out that I donated to support abstinance programs, and yet we might get along swimmingly otherwise. I think that that kind of social pressure often creates more problems than it solves. But then again, I grew up in the eighties and watched re-runs of the Breakfast Club on the weekends.

[Graham Glass]

Hi Jef,

Regarding the separation of policy from mechanism, I presented the "charity portal" in order to show that charity could replace welfare as the main mechanism whereby people can help others. The constitution itself would simple place restrictions on the role of government. Before the end of the series I'll roll up all the bits and pieces and present them a clear and hopefully coherent whole.

Regarding your second point; I mentioned that people can opt to make some or all of their contributions private if they want to. My hope of course is that most contributions will be ones that people can be proud of, even if it annoys others. Perhaps knowing that some of your friends supported things you did not agree with would in fact lead to interesting dialog rather than a degradation of the friendship?

Cheers,
Graham

[Jacek Kopecky]

Graham, I'm also enjoying this series a lot, but I fear that with this chairty ideal you're missing some considerations.

In 1774, Maria Theresa of Austria introduced mandatory education around where I've lived. This means the parents can be punished for not giving their children education.

Consider a family of drunken and hating-each-other parents and a few kids - the parents would not request charity funds, unless they could spend it on drinks, and people would rather give the charity money to a family with more perspective. And without that mandatory education, the drunks could not be bothered to send their kids to school (even if charity supported), could they?

I'd say mandatory education has to be supported by some kind of law-and-public-money system, and the benefits of bringing some education to everybody outweigh the losses in public funding and quality because of some state monopoly.

Similar case could be made for public health.