7 ms·

This could work not just for donating blood, but for pretty much any kind of service. Imagine if you could see, in real time, how your job affects other people

This could work not just for donating blood, but for pretty much any kind of service. Imagine if you could see, in real time, how your job affects other people's lives, even in the most mundane way. It would let you see the value of what you do, and give you a reason to do it better.

fabiandesimone 11y ago
I always thought about this about taxes. If you could choose from a list of projects a la Kickstarter where YOU choose where your taxes go to, I'm sure people would not only feel better about taxes in general but would allow them to get involved in said projects.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  The problem with this approach is the areas of need rarely aligns with areas of desire. What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?
  - Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
    Well if you agree with the assumption that we live in a democracy and that for anything to exist in a democracy a majority of people have to support it? Such as welfare for the poor and sick, etc. If we took away that democracy that majority of people will still exist the only difference is they get to voluntary choose where to put their resources (meaning 100% goes to the charities) rather than having most of it spent by bureaucrats and politicians on other things such as war, debt, etc.
  - minot 11y ago
    > What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about? This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations. I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.
    - hobarrera 11y ago
      If nobody cares about a given area, why is it being maintained?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Of course - if governments could raise funds by donations they would not tax. I hate taxes, but I hate the absence of taxes more :)
      - boomlinde 11y ago
        Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.
        TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        Governments are well-known to use every trick in the book to get more money.
        paulmd 11y ago
        Indeed, they already do it right now: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html They obviously don't take in anything more than a trivial amount of money. If you think that people would donate an equivalent amount of money if their taxes were eliminated - then you must have an awful lot of faith in people's inherent generosity in the face of their own self-interest. The economically optimal decision for any one person is to not give, but in the aggregate that means we don't have funding for infrastructure, research, etc.
        boomlinde 11y ago
        I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but that the reasoning is, if it assumes that a government knows the most efficient way to do something.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    It's hard to imagine any system where areas that nobody cares for get funded.
- Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
  Agreed, I don't believe we should be forced (with the threat of imprisonment) to pay taxes. I believe it should be voluntary, that way members of society get to allocate their resources in the most efficient way possible. You might already be a Libertarian/Voluntaryist for having this belief but if not check out Murray Rothbard or Friedrick Hayek.
- oadam 11y ago
  Some countries in EU have 2% of income tax support, i.e. If you are a tax payer in Lithuania and would like to support the development of non-profit/school/academy or sport club, you can do so by transferring 2% of your income tax to the administrating enterprise. And you can change/donate it every year.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    While that is very good, at the same time 2% is pretty much nothing. Why not make it so that 50% is payers choice? (I wouldn't make it 100% only because there are too many people who wouldn't want to fund the military).
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      According to a slapdash google search, the 2015 federal income due to taxes is $3.9 trillion, and about half of that comes from income tax. 2% of that is $20 million dollars. I want to say that that's not nothing, but the Rosetta equipment alone cost €220 million. I'm not even sure how much of an impact $20m would have if you spread it across, e.g., the New York public school system.
      - nicky0 11y ago
        I hope you don't work in a math related field.
      - rory096 11y ago
        ($3.9T / 2) * 2% = $39 billion
        cmdrfred 11y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%2C000&oq=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%2C000&aqs=chrome..69i57.2704j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%...
      - 11y ago
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Actually I think I could work such that when you are unemployed or getting money from the government coffers you also get a notice with a name and picture of the person who payed tax to give you that. Sorta like "your income this months was made possible by the hard work of $NAME" - would you be more or less inclined to abuse government founds this way?
  - pluma 11y ago
    That would be passive-aggressive abuse. Unemployment is rarely a choice, yet society likes to make the unemployed feel that way. This would add insult to injury.
    - civilian 11y ago
      Don't you think it could be phrased as a warm community support message?
      - pluma 11y ago
        It's not about the how but the why. Social welfare is a matter of decency, not a luxury. What good does it do to couple that with a sense of sponsorship other than to elicit a feeling of guilt? This is just sociopathic Ayn Randian bullshit, not beneficial to anyone at all.
- spacko 11y ago
  "Congratulations, Herr Schmidt, your 2014 taxes have just been spent on a chandelier for the rebuilt Berlin city palace!"
  - civilian 11y ago
    "Congratulations Ms Smith, your 2013 taxes have provided 0.01% of the cost of a missile that was just deployed in Afghanistan!" If we could choose how our taxes were used (a libertarian dream of mine for awhile), we'd have really lumpy funding. Hopefully it'd cause our military to be defunded, but the VA would probably end up taking the brunt of the hit. Along those lines, I bet the funding of NASA would be even lumpier than it usually is. Don't they have difficulty planning engineering efforts because they're not sure if congress is going to continue funding next year? Here's a thought: why don't NASA and other gov research institutes have an endowment instead? The government can add in a one-time lump sum and then periodically add the typical budget to the endowment? I imagine this would be pretty hairy though. It could be just another fund to get ransacked by congress on a rainy day, and there'd easily be controversy about how the fund was invested.
Trombone12 11y ago
I think telemarketers don't need much reminding.
charlesdm 11y ago
> "How your job affects other people's lives" You mean, how a software developer might be helping companies be more efficient, meaning they can now lay off people with lower income jobs because their services are no longer required? I like this idea for blood donations though!
- AriaMinaei 11y ago
  I'm going to assume that people getting laid off is the fault of software makers and software makers only, for the sake of argument of course. Even then, it's good to know how your work affects people, whether positive or negative. At least you see the result of your work in the big picture, and have a chance to do something about it.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  That assumes that those jobs would have existed without your software - and that the factory/warehouse wouldn't simply have closed and caused even further job loss.
  - Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
    It's like how the ice block men lost their jobs to the invention of the fridge. It's unfortunate but we got to move forward. Plus those people have free will to improve their skills and work somewhere else.
jessriedel 11y ago
I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages: >How many people have you helped? > “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one-new-stat-this-ones-big/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one... This is available crudely for Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics http://stats.grok.se/ http://stats.grok.se/ I think it should be a very high priority for the project to allow users to quickly and attractively integrate this into their userpage (and by default for new users). Could help reverse the slow atrophy of the wikipedia user base.
- AriaMinaei 11y ago
  Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives. The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive. For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, or how much you've helped them, or any other quantified view of your work, you are just somehow able to see the story of how you helped them. Who did you help, in what situation? And it doesn't have to be something big like saving lives. Just, mundane, everyday stuff.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    I think that's more of a concern when there is a principal-agent problem. Yes, if you pay me X $/widget but are unable to measure widget quality well, then I may try to maximize number of widgets produced at the expense of quality. (And it may make sense to use other incentive structures.) But if I'm trying to help people, it's much less likely that I'll stupidly maximize a metric (# of page views) by lowering quality. What have I to gain? (This of course because a problem as soon as you start tangibly rewarding me based on the metric, or if the metric influences my public reputation, etc.)

fabiandesimone 11y ago

I always thought about this about taxes. If you could choose from a list of projects a la Kickstarter where YOU choose where your taxes go to, I'm sure people would not only feel better about taxes in general but would allow them to get involved in said projects.

danieltillett 11y ago
The problem with this approach is the areas of need rarely aligns with areas of desire. What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?
- Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
  Well if you agree with the assumption that we live in a democracy and that for anything to exist in a democracy a majority of people have to support it? Such as welfare for the poor and sick, etc. If we took away that democracy that majority of people will still exist the only difference is they get to voluntary choose where to put their resources (meaning 100% goes to the charities) rather than having most of it spent by bureaucrats and politicians on other things such as war, debt, etc.
- minot 11y ago
  > What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about? This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations. I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    If nobody cares about a given area, why is it being maintained?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Of course - if governments could raise funds by donations they would not tax. I hate taxes, but I hate the absence of taxes more :)
    - boomlinde 11y ago
      Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        Governments are well-known to use every trick in the book to get more money.
      - paulmd 11y ago
        Indeed, they already do it right now: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html They obviously don't take in anything more than a trivial amount of money. If you think that people would donate an equivalent amount of money if their taxes were eliminated - then you must have an awful lot of faith in people's inherent generosity in the face of their own self-interest. The economically optimal decision for any one person is to not give, but in the aggregate that means we don't have funding for infrastructure, research, etc.
        boomlinde 11y ago
        I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but that the reasoning is, if it assumes that a government knows the most efficient way to do something.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  It's hard to imagine any system where areas that nobody cares for get funded.
Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
Agreed, I don't believe we should be forced (with the threat of imprisonment) to pay taxes. I believe it should be voluntary, that way members of society get to allocate their resources in the most efficient way possible. You might already be a Libertarian/Voluntaryist for having this belief but if not check out Murray Rothbard or Friedrick Hayek.
oadam 11y ago
Some countries in EU have 2% of income tax support, i.e. If you are a tax payer in Lithuania and would like to support the development of non-profit/school/academy or sport club, you can do so by transferring 2% of your income tax to the administrating enterprise. And you can change/donate it every year.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  While that is very good, at the same time 2% is pretty much nothing. Why not make it so that 50% is payers choice? (I wouldn't make it 100% only because there are too many people who wouldn't want to fund the military).
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    According to a slapdash google search, the 2015 federal income due to taxes is $3.9 trillion, and about half of that comes from income tax. 2% of that is $20 million dollars. I want to say that that's not nothing, but the Rosetta equipment alone cost €220 million. I'm not even sure how much of an impact $20m would have if you spread it across, e.g., the New York public school system.
    - nicky0 11y ago
      I hope you don't work in a math related field.
    - rory096 11y ago
      ($3.9T / 2) * 2% = $39 billion
      - cmdrfred 11y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%2C000&oq=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%2C000&aqs=chrome..69i57.2704j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%...
    - 11y ago
tomjen3 11y ago
Actually I think I could work such that when you are unemployed or getting money from the government coffers you also get a notice with a name and picture of the person who payed tax to give you that. Sorta like "your income this months was made possible by the hard work of $NAME" - would you be more or less inclined to abuse government founds this way?
- pluma 11y ago
  That would be passive-aggressive abuse. Unemployment is rarely a choice, yet society likes to make the unemployed feel that way. This would add insult to injury.
  - civilian 11y ago
    Don't you think it could be phrased as a warm community support message?
    - pluma 11y ago
      It's not about the how but the why. Social welfare is a matter of decency, not a luxury. What good does it do to couple that with a sense of sponsorship other than to elicit a feeling of guilt? This is just sociopathic Ayn Randian bullshit, not beneficial to anyone at all.
spacko 11y ago
"Congratulations, Herr Schmidt, your 2014 taxes have just been spent on a chandelier for the rebuilt Berlin city palace!"
- civilian 11y ago
  "Congratulations Ms Smith, your 2013 taxes have provided 0.01% of the cost of a missile that was just deployed in Afghanistan!" If we could choose how our taxes were used (a libertarian dream of mine for awhile), we'd have really lumpy funding. Hopefully it'd cause our military to be defunded, but the VA would probably end up taking the brunt of the hit. Along those lines, I bet the funding of NASA would be even lumpier than it usually is. Don't they have difficulty planning engineering efforts because they're not sure if congress is going to continue funding next year? Here's a thought: why don't NASA and other gov research institutes have an endowment instead? The government can add in a one-time lump sum and then periodically add the typical budget to the endowment? I imagine this would be pretty hairy though. It could be just another fund to get ransacked by congress on a rainy day, and there'd easily be controversy about how the fund was invested.

Trombone12 11y ago

I think telemarketers don't need much reminding.

charlesdm 11y ago

> "How your job affects other people's lives" You mean, how a software developer might be helping companies be more efficient, meaning they can now lay off people with lower income jobs because their services are no longer required? I like this idea for blood donations though!

AriaMinaei 11y ago
I'm going to assume that people getting laid off is the fault of software makers and software makers only, for the sake of argument of course. Even then, it's good to know how your work affects people, whether positive or negative. At least you see the result of your work in the big picture, and have a chance to do something about it.
tomjen3 11y ago
That assumes that those jobs would have existed without your software - and that the factory/warehouse wouldn't simply have closed and caused even further job loss.
- Gu3rr1lla 11y ago
  It's like how the ice block men lost their jobs to the invention of the fridge. It's unfortunate but we got to move forward. Plus those people have free will to improve their skills and work somewhere else.

jessriedel 11y ago

I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages: >How many people have you helped? > “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one-new-stat-this-ones-big/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one... This is available crudely for Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics http://stats.grok.se/ http://stats.grok.se/ I think it should be a very high priority for the project to allow users to quickly and attractively integrate this into their userpage (and by default for new users). Could help reverse the slow atrophy of the wikipedia user base.

AriaMinaei 11y ago
Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives. The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive. For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, or how much you've helped them, or any other quantified view of your work, you are just somehow able to see the story of how you helped them. Who did you help, in what situation? And it doesn't have to be something big like saving lives. Just, mundane, everyday stuff.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  I think that's more of a concern when there is a principal-agent problem. Yes, if you pay me X $/widget but are unable to measure widget quality well, then I may try to maximize number of widgets produced at the expense of quality. (And it may make sense to use other incentive structures.) But if I'm trying to help people, it's much less likely that I'll stupidly maximize a metric (# of page views) by lowering quality. What have I to gain? (This of course because a problem as soon as you start tangibly rewarding me based on the metric, or if the metric influences my public reputation, etc.)