12 ms·

I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, the

• pdonis 6y ago
  > If your goal is to build houses Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? > if it's to recruit lifetime donors Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way?
  • protomyth 6y ago
    Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? To build more houses they do really need to recruit the lifetime donors. The whole point of the donor's doing some of the work is to get the donations in the first place. It generally is pitched as a team building exercise.
  • awillen 6y ago
    But if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding), then isn't that the right thing to do if your goal is to build as many houses as possible? You mentioned efficiency, but the goal was never efficiency - it's to build houses. Would it be better if people were entirely rational and just gave money instead of incompetently homebuilding and then also became lifetime donors? Of course. That's not reality, though.
    • pdonis 6y ago
      > if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding) If that is the case, yes. Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first. The question then becomes, does this actually happen? Do people who volunteer to build homes end up becoming lifetime donors? Or are those two separate sets of people?
      • macintux 6y ago
        Speaking from personal experience, getting involved with volunteer work ensures I always consider those organizations when donating. Certainly I volunteered because I had strong feelings towards those needs anyway, but those connections make a big difference.
      • fhrow4484 6y ago
        > Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first. Having people engage in a process isn't just for personal fulfillment of "morally incompetent" people: it also serves as due diligence. Trust is a big factor of deciding where you want to donate your money. Having walked through the process as a volunteer, you have a much clearer picture of how your donations are spent, and yes you are more likely to donate. Trust has to be earned one way or another. Piggybacking on this home building example with an extreme example: how would you feel if you donated for years to some non profit which builds houses, but later learned that child labor is used to build those as well as cheap, structurally unsound materials, with the non profit CEO pocketing millions?
        • yters 6y ago
  • crispyambulance 6y ago
    > [building houses] is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? I think that's PART of their goal. They're a Christian organization. "Service" is also a part of their mission, that means having people physically work for/with the needy (and not just give money). Moreover, much of their work is done domestically where construction labor is NOT cheap. Yes, some things are going to be shoddy, but it's really hard to get a house built and renovated for low cost in the USA. There are challenges not only in finding labor but also general contractors and materials. Could all the "building of houses" be done more efficiently if Habitat for Humanity was all just finance and management operations? Perhaps, but the service aspect would be missing.
    • pdonis 6y ago
      > "Service" is also a part of their mission The point of the article under discussion is that "service", if it just means "doing stuff yourself" without regard to how productive you actually are--how much you actually help--is a morally incompetent goal. If you have a feeling of service after productively helping someone, that's great. But if you have a feeling of service while the actual impact of what you did was negligible (or even negative), that's bad. So "service" can't be a goal just by itself; it has to be something like "service that actually does help".
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        "service" definitely can be a goal just by itself - perhaps you can argue that it shouldn't be a goal by itself, but I think that it's undeniable that in certain cases it is a truthful, accurate description of a goal that some people have. And IMHO the "should" discussion is even not that relevant there because it does not change the values that people actually have. As people say regarding decision theory, "the utility function is not up for grabs"; people's goals are what they are, and if it turns out that someone's goal actually is more about personal service than good results, well, you can't force them to change so let's just facilitate them to get good results while still achieving their core goal, to get a win-win outcome. It's plausible that their goals might also be achieved just as well without actually productively helping someone - so you might want to nudge them away from that and towards more productive means; but these nudges won't be effective without taking into account what their actual goals are and what types of "service that actually does help" are not valid options because they don't satisfy the goals of the potential helper.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    >> If your goal is to build houses > Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? >> if it's to recruit lifetime donors > Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way? But it can't. You can't hire these hypothetical teams of cheaper local builders when you have no money. Also, people are forgetting that Habitat for Humanity also builds homes domestically. I've volunteered for one of those jobs, once. My understanding the labor was split between 1) future occupant sweat equity, 2) unskilled volunteer labor (me), 3) volunteer skilled labor (people in building trades). I knew someone who worked for a similar charity, that sent emergency food to areas where children were starving. They have volunteers run little assembly lines for two hour stretches where they manually mix and pack the food. That work could be easily automated, but if they did that, they'd have no money to buy food for the machines to pack, or to ship it where it's needed. That's because the corporations that sponsor the packing events (where they get most of their revenue) are far more interested in feel-good team-building exercises than actually feeding starving children. I don't think it's quite so bad with individual donors (who don't have pockets as deep as corporations), but it's quite clear that getting the donors involved increases their engagement significantly. There's a big difference between sending a check and being there than just sending a check. The focus on first order efficiency is fatally ignorant of actual human psychology.
• mjburgess 6y ago
  > seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out I've not seen any evidence that this is true, nor that "Overton"-thinking has any evidence as such. OP's comment is precisely that backreactions to this kind of thinking are often larger than the alleged shifts that are assumed to occur. NB. The "overton window" is a description of a consensus, not a model; ie., there is nothing of the consensus which is like a dial to be moved. The reason that people view X as possible is the latent preferences around X, incentives and institutional practices, and their (essentially rational) judgement about the practicalities and possibilities of X. Eg., Marxism isn't "outside the overton window" by some weird dialogue exclusion. Ironically, it is only in the conversation because of "overton thinking" ie., hype. It is outside the window because peoples preferences, incentives, and institutional practices are overwhelmingly oriented away from Marxism; which has no practical or evidentiary basis. No social mechanism of implementation. No group of people have the incentives, reasons and power to implement Marxism. Activism cannot "move the overton window". It provides no reasons, incentives, or power. It changes no institutional practices; it offers no evidence. "Hype activism" frequently does more harm than good, by reinforcing the status quo.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Activism cannot “move the overton window”. The “Overton Window” is a concept developed initially and further elaborated subsequently by a policy think tank, largely as a tool for activists (specifically, that think tank itself) to understand how they can move the social consensus to drive policy. https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow
    • mjburgess 6y ago
      Yes, and it's a false model of "policy change". Your link even, largely, makes this point, to quote: Sometimes politicians can move the Overton Window themselves by courageously endorsing a policy lying outside the window, but this is rare. More often, the window moves based on a much more complex and dynamic phenomenon, one that is not easily controlled from on high: the slow evolution of societal values and norms. It's a description of why politicians will advocate for some policies; it's not a theory of change. (Such a theory would be unevidenced and obviously false). The quote says "rare", but i'd say, "essentially never". The "slow evolution" is also not really of norms. The public do not "Accept" ideas within some "Window" that you move by "Advocacy". Almost all "beliefs" are grounded in technological, incentive, preference and practice structures. They are symptoms of much larger mechanistic forces that regulate behaviour (, belief, etc.). The significant majority of "belief change" is caused by technological and economic change.
• dabbledash 6y ago
  “Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out.” This seems like an argument in favor of openly advocating positions that are good but too far from the current consensus to be adopted. Dragging the Overton window toward stupid policies or bad behavior is a different issue.
• wisty 6y ago
  There does need to be a middle ground. But there are definitely dangers when charities try to maximise revenue: 1. They are (to some extent) competing for donors. If it's zero sum, then more marketing spending means the least efficient charities "win". 2. It might even be negative sum, as donors turn away from charity in general. 3. A focus on revenue changes the way charities operate, and might change the type of people who work there. I think there's a sweet spot to engagement. You don't have to send the donor out there, but sending them photos does help. They get the personal connection and the feeling that their money was well spent without needing to waste a lot of money. Obviously it's not 100% efficient, but it brings a lot to the table - a certain level of accountability, engagement, and not too much inefficiency.
• DenisM 6y ago
  Deliberately stretching the overtone window to extreme positions is how things go to hell - you might think you are just applying leverage but plenty of others will happily occupy the space you created and push things farther out still. Overtone creep is how the French Revolution progressed from enlighten liberalism to the guillotine and indiscriminate mass executions.