InnovationInspiration

App: Automatically Donate 10% of All Money In Your Bank Account to Charity

What if you could automatically donate 10 percent of all the money that comes into your bank account to charity? Would you do it?

This is one application I’ve been toying with building in my mind, but for the time being its more of a thought experiment than a real intention. Still, I think its interesting to consider this application from both the perspective of technological/institutional feasability, and also from the point of view of moral and economic justifiability. The idea is inspired by one of Peter Singer’s essays: Famine, Affluence, and Morality. For those who aren’t familiar with Peter Singer, he’s a controversial Australian philosopher who has written on several topics including abortion, animal rights and charity.

In the essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Singer argues that (in very simple terms):

1. there is immense suffering that exists in the world that can be partially alleviated through charity
2. we have a moral duty to alleviate suffering when we can.
3. there is an abundance of wealth in the developed world, and most people have substantial expendable income
4. given 1, 2, and 3, people with expendable income have a moral duty to alleviate suffering in the developing world by donating some portion of their salaries to charity.

It’s a pretty basic argument, and Singer himself claims he donates 25% of his salary to charity (Unicef and Oxfam) [Wikipedia]. The core concept is that the lives of those receiving the 5% of my salary that I donate, would enjoy that 5% far more than I would (this drawing on the idea of decreasing marginal benefit of income). Now, I’m not sure exactly the form in which Singer donates his percentage (e.g. a lump sum he saves at the end of the year, or what?). But, it is easy to imagine building an application that automatically apportions a percentage of any money deposited into your account towards a charity of your choice. Think of it as a feature that could be added into Mint. The siphoning off of the funds could take place whenever money is deposited into the account. This type of application would be based on a subscription charity model: choose to donate to charity once, and be committed until you turn it off type of application. And, by making it a % model, rather than your standard 20$ a month model, this type of application also has some notion of each person donating in proportion to their ability to do so.

In my mind there are two appealing aspects to this application (at first glance anyways):

• Being automated. You don’t have to fatigue yourself with decisions about how much to donate, and when.
• Being proportional to ability. Each person donates a percentage of their income, rather than a fixed sum (there are analogies to taxation here).

So, what do you think about this type of application? Would you be up for donating some percentage of your income to charity? Why or Why Not?

There are lots of different questions that emerge from this thought experiment. Here are some of the different things I’ve been thinking about:

• What are the differences between donating some percentage of your income to charity, versus just paying more taxes to the government instead? Are charities more efficient than government organizations?
• Would we actually be doing the ‘right’ thing by donating our money to charity? Is this the best use of our funds, or would the economy grow faster if we didn’t do this, and in turn potentially benefit everyone more in the long run in different ways?
• To what extent should we focus on ‘growing’ the economic pie, rather than equally dividing it? And, how do varying ‘divisions’ of the economic pie in turn affect growth rates of the economy, and overall happiness?
• Do we really have a duty to alleviate the suffering of others whenever we can? How does this interplay with our duty to bring others happiness? (a recent post on Hacker News brought up the interesting question of whether its more worthwhile to work on projects that bring people happiness, versus working on projects that alleviate injustices [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882356]]).
• On the macro scale, are we measuring the success of an economy by its ability to maximize happines, or to minimize suffering? In reality it seems to be neither, it’s GDP we use - there’s a great speech by Robert Kennedy about this.
• How should we choose charities to which to donate given that there are so many different causes? And how do we hold these organizations accountable for how they use our funds?
• If we built this application, how many people would actually use it, and what percentage of their income would they donate?

Concluding Sidenote:

I’ve thought of another variation of this application for overcoming debt - i.e. some fraction of your income is set aside to pay off your debt, and we are able to project when you will have paid off your debts.