NYTimes: The Prize Economy and Philanthropy
There’s an interesting introductory article (albeit a little light on substance) in the NYTimes today on these multimillion dollar prizes that seem to be proliferating these days, incentivising philanthropic (usually tech-focused) progress. Recent examples include the Ansari X Prize (space travel, $10m) , Google.org RechargeIT (energy efficient cars, $10m) - which is similar in its theme to the Automotive X Prize, the Archon X Prize (genomic sequencing, $10m) and the Google Lunar X Prize ($30 million). Several more prizes are in the pipeline, too - mainly the X Prize Foundation’s pipeline!
There’s no question that these work. Space travel had, indeed, slowed after the frenzied Space Races of yore. The $10 million offered a strong incentive for teams to deliver commercially viable spaceflight - the money is there, they just had to deliver - and deliver better than rival teams! The Lunar X prize should hopefully keep the momentum going.
But looking at the list above, does anyone think current philanthropic prizes are somewhat limited in size and scope? And for all their benefit to humanity, the public is merely a spectator in all of this, as well-funded teams of experts battle it out for cash offered up by extremely wealthy individuals, foundations and corporations. The public, meanwhile, is only philanthropically active insomuch as it occasionally donates to nonprofits and charities, and pays its taxes.
If:
- humanity is benefiting,
- prizes on the million/multimillion dollar scale are effective,
- the Internet and globalisation is linking crowds far in excess of millions (the "Support the Campaign for Breast Cancer Research" application on Facebook has amassed 2.5 million supporters since its foundation this year
… does this not point to increasing potential for mass philanthropy creating these kinds of prizes?
[disclosure: Stay on the lookout for more on this (CivSpark!)]
Related:
- Criticism of the X Prize Foundation
- There’s an interesting introductory article (albeit a little light on substance) in the NYTimes today on these multimillion dollar prizes that seem to be proliferating these days, incentivising philanthropic (usually tech-focused) progress. Recent examples include the Ansari X Prize (space travel, $10m) , Google.org RechargeIT (energy efficient cars, $10m) - which is similar in its theme to the Automotive X Prize, the Archon X Prize (genomic sequencing, $10m) and the Google Lunar X Prize ($30 million). Several more prizes are in the pipeline, too - mainly the X Prize Foundation’s pipeline! For all their glamour, headline-grabbing magnetism, and all-round 'wow' factor, just how much good is the X Prize Foundation actually doing? It's extremely hard to quantify the social benefit of an innovation, admittedly. As I mentioned earlier, part of me feels that this isn't money particularly well spent, despite the awe that their projects inspire. I have three overriding issues with these prizes: 1. The X Prizes in practice have very little social value (I'll go into this in more detail below). This is a terrible shame, not just because of the missed opportunity for genuine humanitarian benefit, but also because society still lacks a contemporary poster child (one...
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- Quickie: the Freakonomics blog relates a story about a collaboration between the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Market-Based Management Institute to create a $17,500 ($10k, 5k and 2.5k for 1st, 2nd and 3rd) prize fund for great teaching / communication of concepts in economics del.icio.us Tags: prizes,economics,contests,education...
- Future trends in philanthropy: targeted donation, wikicharity
- I was browsing around WikiLeaks (a site's that's been in the news a lot recently - it collects whistleblower evidence and exposes it to the world; like WikiPedia, it's collectively and openly administered and edited) for JPMorgan/Bear Sterns content. Not much there so far, except this clever investment vehicle JP Morgan has invented to allow insider trading. Sucks to be you, external stakeholder. Anyhow. What interested me was their 'business model' (it's not-for-profit, to be clear). When whistleblowers submit evidence of evil, that goes up for all to see. Wikileaks takes charge of taking that, doing additional background research on the story, and writing it up as a press release (the JPMorgan insider trading write-up can be seen here). It's an important step in a day when newsrooms are increasingly under pressure to survive (and thus to get to stories as quickly and efficiently as possible). But it costs money. The business model is this: 'targeted donation' requests on the leaked documents page. Rather than generally be a supporter of wikileaks, I enable/provide direction to its work by restricting my donation to particular issues I care about (the 'Sudan Appeal' type of charity function, writ large, writ standard). I see...
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