Mind-boggling
Via The Daily Dish, the list of people and groups that donated $5000 or more to the campaign to vote yes on Proposition 8 in California.
What astonishes me is how much some individuals donated. Leaving aside the argument of why people care deeply about gay marriage, I understand that it's worth it to donate small amounts to a cause you believe in, but might not be your first cause. For example, I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) does really good work and I could see myself donating small amounts of money to them. (For the flip side, I can also see why people who are denied legal protection to be with the ones they love might decide this is their first cause. I have no idea how I'd choose, were I in a similar situation.)
However, in the large scheme of things, I don't think the work EFF does is more important than work that stops human suffering, and money I spend on that cause is money I could be spending on something else. So in my household, the bulk of our giving goes to organizations that help with hunger. (This year, Heifer International.)
But consider, for a moment, Mike Murray (a micro-financier in my home town of Redmond, WA) who donated $100,000. This guy thought it was worth more than most people's yearly salary to prevent other people from marrying? To make it concrete, I generously estimate that for every $1000 this person donated, he actually prevented 2 gay couples from marrying.(*)
With $1000 you could instead:
(*) This is, obviously, an extremely rough "back of the envelope" calculation. If you're interested in the details, read on. I used the "5% of the population is gay" metric (notoriously hard to measure). From the 2006 census data, I got the 36,457,549 number for the population of CA. 5% of that is 1,822,877 gays in CA.
I had trouble finding what average percentage of the population was married. The only statistic I could find was an older number from a 1976 book, that said that states averaged at 60% of the population being married. Honestly, this seems rather high to me, but this gives the donor the benefit of the doubt that marriage is really rampant. So, 60% of 1,822,877 gives 1,093,726 possible married people. Halving that number gives us 546,863 actual marriages.
But, we're not done yet. That $100,000 can't claim credit for preventing ALL of those marriages, as it was part of a much larger amount of money spent against it. From the Los Angeles NBC station, I found the number $35,800,000 as the amount raised by the pro-ban side. This means that $100,000 can actually only claim credit for about 0.3% of the success of the ban. Taking 0.3% of the marriages means this person personally prevented approximately 1641 marriages.
Heifer International prices a heifer at $500. So with $1000, I can prevent 1.6 marriages - let's round to 2 to be generous to the donor. Or I can help two families out of poverty by giving them a cow.
What astonishes me is how much some individuals donated. Leaving aside the argument of why people care deeply about gay marriage, I understand that it's worth it to donate small amounts to a cause you believe in, but might not be your first cause. For example, I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) does really good work and I could see myself donating small amounts of money to them. (For the flip side, I can also see why people who are denied legal protection to be with the ones they love might decide this is their first cause. I have no idea how I'd choose, were I in a similar situation.)
However, in the large scheme of things, I don't think the work EFF does is more important than work that stops human suffering, and money I spend on that cause is money I could be spending on something else. So in my household, the bulk of our giving goes to organizations that help with hunger. (This year, Heifer International.)
But consider, for a moment, Mike Murray (a micro-financier in my home town of Redmond, WA) who donated $100,000. This guy thought it was worth more than most people's yearly salary to prevent other people from marrying? To make it concrete, I generously estimate that for every $1000 this person donated, he actually prevented 2 gay couples from marrying.(*)
With $1000 you could instead:
- Provide two cows for two poor families
- Provide two children one year's worth of food, water, and education
- Loan money to a woman in Azerbaijin to buy an oven to expand her sweets business (or similar needs)
(*) This is, obviously, an extremely rough "back of the envelope" calculation. If you're interested in the details, read on. I used the "5% of the population is gay" metric (notoriously hard to measure). From the 2006 census data, I got the 36,457,549 number for the population of CA. 5% of that is 1,822,877 gays in CA.
I had trouble finding what average percentage of the population was married. The only statistic I could find was an older number from a 1976 book, that said that states averaged at 60% of the population being married. Honestly, this seems rather high to me, but this gives the donor the benefit of the doubt that marriage is really rampant. So, 60% of 1,822,877 gives 1,093,726 possible married people. Halving that number gives us 546,863 actual marriages.
But, we're not done yet. That $100,000 can't claim credit for preventing ALL of those marriages, as it was part of a much larger amount of money spent against it. From the Los Angeles NBC station, I found the number $35,800,000 as the amount raised by the pro-ban side. This means that $100,000 can actually only claim credit for about 0.3% of the success of the ban. Taking 0.3% of the marriages means this person personally prevented approximately 1641 marriages.
Heifer International prices a heifer at $500. So with $1000, I can prevent 1.6 marriages - let's round to 2 to be generous to the donor. Or I can help two families out of poverty by giving them a cow.