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Stephen Diamond's avatar

Once a distaste for charities spending a lot of money on fundraising is entrenched among donors, I don’t see how it can be undermined by any particular charity or donor ‘defecting’ from the norm.

This is Wiblin's key argument against Vance's main claim, yet it appears in a footnote and is undefended. (There are way too many "I don't see" "it seems to me" hedges, and most of the OP is unintelligible without puzzling out what Wiblin's tediously tries to convey.)

But fact is, Wiblin's correct. The reason a charity's defection won't break such entrenchment is that people don't invest in charities to make capitalist profit! A capitalist enterprise that fails to invest somewhat efficiently goes bankrupt; a socialist enterprise that's inefficient is open to political attack; the inefficiency of a charity may not interfere with its thriving if contributing sends awesome signals.

So, the only path to improve charity efficiency is to try to change the norms that control signaling. Make the billionaires more "morally" sensitive to efficiency issues in charities and give them the information the market—by its nature dependent on profit-seeking rather than signaling to the extent it's efficient—can't give them. Whereas Vance dreams that the whole world is a capitalist enterprise.

The ignored root issue is that charity is inherently a highly inefficient way to transfer resources—because inefficient signaling is the essence of charitable giving. Wiblin's unwillingness to accept (or maybe just to state) this truism is what make the OP obscure.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I've always thought that street fundraisers were scams, that is, that they are profitable only to the people doing it, so I would ask for non-anecdotal evidence.

Even assuming that they do rise any significant amount of money for actual charities, that business model is clearly nor scalable.

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