Money Stuff on charity-adjusted billionaire rankings

I'm working on something similar. See https://impactlist.xyz/ for a very early demo. Don't take the effectiveness ratings that seriously yet -- I've just done very shallow research using LLMs so far. The aim is not to measure how wealthy people would be if they never donated to charity, but how much good billionaires have done with their charitable donations.

I originally posted about it on this forum a couple years ago (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LCJa4AAi7YBcyro2H/proposal-impact-list-like-the-forbes-list-except-for-impact) but didn't start working on it seriously until this month.

Currently looking for volunteers (researchers and React devs). Here's the discord: https://discord.gg/6GNre8U2ta.

This has always been the policy of the Giving Pledge:

Since the very beginning of the Giving Pledge, it has focused on those with a net worth of at least one billion dollars (or who would be billionaires if not for their giving) due to the enormous potential of the resources they can deploy.

An interesting way to think about this is that when you donate money to a good cause, nobody can ever take that away from you. Not the tax-man, not Trump, not a recession or a stock-market collapse. You will forever have that "credit" in your account. 

The idea of this post is so obviously correct that anything else just doesn't make sense. If it's a competition for who has earned / inherited the most money - which sadly for some people it is - then why shouldn't money voluntarily given away be part of the total? 

Right now, rich-lists are a contest to find the greediest humans, people who amass but do not share huge fortunes. Maybe calling the the "Forbes Greed list" would help change this??

I like the idea of Charity adjusted rankings rather than current rankings. My thoughts:

1. It's unlikely to gain significant traction.
2. Is already done in many ways indirectly including names on schools/buildings/etc, The Giving Pledge and other forms of charitable recognition.
3. Highlights how much value & prestige we place on money.
4. Demonstrates why we should work towards a fairer and more efficient economic & monetary system that internalizes externalities so that individual wealth better represents net contributions to society.

The (Nobel laureate) economist Michael Spence also wrote on this topic last year in Project Syndicate. After reading the article, I realized the Merit reward in Rovas (the application I developed) could be a suitable measure for the social impact of the philanthropists he calls for. A list of Merit holders would then be Matt Levine’s league table.

In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.

Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to "prime" the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.

However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.

There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.