Universal Basic Philanthropy

Thien-Nam Dinh is President of Token Ibis.  Here is the abstract to his paper on Universal Basic Philanthropy:

In democratic society, few processes are more consequential than the mechanisms for funding public goods. The subject of this study is one attempt to demonstrate such a mechanism: a real-world experiment to pioneer a concept called Universal Basic Philanthropy. In this experiment, a local nonprofit in the city of Albuquerque distributed free money to individuals to reallocate to other local nonprofits of their choosing. Over the course of approximately four years, the project facilitated $145,641 over 13,812 donations from 702 people to 59 organizations. In this study, I use publicly available transaction data from the Albuquerque pilot project to explore the following question: how we can better understand social demand for public goods? Using a network approach, I characterize the organizations supported by participants in the project using three measures of graph centrality: intensity, popularity, and connectivity. I use natural language processing to embed, cluster, and aggregate these centrality measures at the level of causes. The paramount result is as follows: organizations in arts, culture, and education have a comparative advantage in the intensity of fundraising while organizations in civics, basic needs, and other causes have a comparative advantage in connectivity.

darryll k. jones