# There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing ### The State is a looming question around tithing In many people’s minds, our taxes (which are much more than 10%) have taken the the place of the tithe. Indeed, historically states were often the collector and distributor of tithes. Ideally, taxes would serve the purpose of a tithe administered by the state, going to the things that people would want their tithes to go towards. However, pragmatically this is not the case. I don’t have a good answer to the government question, but I don’t think that the current situation, where everybody is basically fighting to control where everybody else’s money goes is going to change any time soon. I’m going to avoid a huge, tangled, and centuries old question about the role and spending priorities of the state and treat it as a fixed sunk cost. Instead, pay-it-forward tithing could extend the fairly uncontroversial[^1] line of thinking that asserts that it’s good that extra-governmental nonprofits and charity exist. If research inevitably leads to public goods and there are flavors of it that the government isn’t supporting it should fall into that same line of thinking. ### It would be easy for bad actors to exploit the system People could use tithe money to do work that impedes progress through excessive efforts to capture value (like patents and lawsuits) and then don’t tithe any of their own profits. However, the ‘bad actors can take advantage of it’ argument is true for almost any cultural movement. Additionally, by default, research-generated knowledge tends to diffuse through people inevitably sharing or starting their own organizations unless it’s stopped by legal structures like patents or regulations. ### People are terrible at evaluating the quality of research Tithing is absolutely not a way to “optimally” fund research. There will be potentially wonderful projects that wither on the vine and steaming piles of shiny nothingness that get funded. However, it’s not clear that current funding methods are much better than track-record and hype-biased randomness. At the very worst, pay-it-forward tithing would make that randomness less correlated. In a more likely scenario people would defer to well-informed friends or organizations like GiveWell would emerge. Of course, it is possible that we would end up in a situation where money just went to the new hotness like resonating water in a bathtub. ### We should change institutions to allow markets to work instead of depending on charity The idea that what we should be doing is building ‘markets for everything’ takes the assertion that [[tensions]] to the extreme. [[Current value capture mechanisms are crude]]. There is definitely some ideological appeal to this way of thinking: it feels fair that everybody who creates value should be rewarded for it. On the practical front, the possibility of profit can rally many more resources than the goodness of hearts and markets are the most efficient way we know of to coordinate large numbers of people who don’t know each other. Versions of this line of thinking suggest different [[Better value capture mechanisms]] I find all of these ideas appealing, but I do not think that they can be the only solution because of the sheer illegibility and [[Nebulous]] ity inherent in research. Dig into the history of any innovation - even one that’s been cleanly attributed to one person - and you will see that there were other people involved, prior ideas they built off of, infrastructure and resources they utilized. It’s a fractal mess. Where do you draw the line? Should the neighbor who had a cross-fence conversation about a process she uses at work that sparked the realization that led to the invention capture some value? She was certainly instrumental to its success. What about the technician who knew how to twist the wire in just the right way to get the first proof-of-concept to work? [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]]. And what about all the failed projects that left a pile of skeletons indicating where the traps were? [[Many things cannot be measured well]]. Maybe there is a way for a market to account for all of this, but I cannot conceive of how. ### Related * [[DARPA would not have a positive return]] * [[Market failures are coupled to externalities]] * [[Technology increases the number of externalities in the world]] * [[There is a significant class of innovations that would create drastically less value for the world if their value had been captured by their creators]] [^1]:Even, I believe, in most authoritarian and socialist regimes. <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/There+are+many+questions+and+issues+with+the+idea+of+pay-it-forward+tithing) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/There+are+many+questions+and+issues+with+the+idea+of+pay-it-forward+tithing)