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Unread 02-06-2011, 15:24
Tristan Lall's Avatar
Tristan Lall Tristan Lall is offline
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Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by trilogy2826 View Post
To address Tristan's comments: I am with Akash and Brandon so far as being confused by your logic and derisiveness toward this effort. Every year I personally put over $800 cash and easily 500-600 hours of my "leisure time" into Wave Robotics. All of our team members and sponsors donate their cash and energy to different degrees. Almost every fundraiser we have ever done would cost more than we would gain if we were to pay our volunteers even minimum wage. I know from talking to many other teams in the past, this is similar in their estimation. The coin donation effort was no different in this regard than every other effort every team has put into making their team more than just a collection of people.
It's not about the team paying anybody minimum wage—so I think you're misunderstanding.

It's simply about recognizing that first, what's most advantageous for the team may not be equivalent to what's most advantageous to society, and second, that if team members could raise more money by working longer at their ordinary jobs (hypothetically at minimum wage, because that's a conservative estimate) and just donating the extra wages to the team1 (rather than staging fundraisers), that might be a more productive use of time, if they're so inclined. (Maybe there are difficult-to-quantify benefits like camaraderie and publicity that are built by fundraising in your chosen manner—but if you fundraise more efficiently, you'll have time left over that you can dedicate to other forms of team-building.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Thermal View Post
Except in the case where people donated their leisure hours into some pseudo form of labor for this team.
That's not actually an exception. If you give your leisure to your employer, and then donate the wage you earned to the team, the team is better off. And so is the rest of society, because you've underwritten your personal loss (difference between the value of labour and your wage) as part of the donation, so nobody but you suffers for it.

By contrast, if you give your leisure to the piggybank, and let it dictate the donation to the team, nobody is any better off than in the previous scenario. Not you, not your employer, and certainly not the team. That's why—compared to the alternatives—this is a bad choice when you consider society as a whole.

So, however you give away that time, you've made the choice to forego something of value (free time), in exchange for something else (money or the team's well-being).

The crucial difference is the rate of return. If you take the money you earn for working an extra hour, and donate it to the team, the rate of return is wage:leisure. If you take the time off, and use it to volunteer for the team, the rate return is proportional to your value in that capacity (for that duration). If you take the piggybank, the rate of return is low in absolute terms, and actually diminishes as the number of coins deposited increases.

In gross terms, if many people take their excess wages for a total of 400 h and donate them, the team could stand to make a lot of money (based on whatever the wages are for those people). If the team receives 400 h of mentorship, that might also be very useful (but mentorship often requires physical presence, which isn't so easy to subdivide). If the team wins the piggybank contest, their return is $1 000, no matter if 0.001 h or 400 h were needed to reach a winning total—and given equal publicity-seeking abilities, the team's expected return is only $500.

Surely for 400 h of labour—even other peoples' labour—they could do better than $500? (Or $1 000, if they're assured of the win.)

When both prospective recipients are trying hard to win, this also means the marginal value of each deposit in the piggybank is infinitesimal—every time you contribute, you're giving the team ≈ $0—and the marginal cost is high—you're foregoing > $0 in wages.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon Holley View Post
Many people are more than willing to spend 10 minutes or so doing a task like that to help someone out. That doesn't mean you can take 48 people's collective 10 minutes each, add them together and get an 8 hour day of coin dropping. 1 person simply would not do that for an 8 hour day, which is why I cannot follow your argument.
That's a fair point, and that's part of the reason I mentioned that a better crowdsourced fundraising solution would involve making it simple to transfer small amounts of money (equivalent to the relatively low value people place on 10 min of their time).

But let's be clear: I'm not arguing that someone should spend 8 h dropping coins. I think that would be a bad idea for the same reasons it's a bad idea to have hundreds of people divide the work amongst themselves—and maybe it's even worse, because a person's tolerance for menial tasks probably diminishes with repetitiveness.

(And yes, I am recognizing the irony of spending an inordinate amount of time discussing this topic, when perhaps I could be doing something more productive.)

1 Assuming for the purposes of this example that their employers will let them work on that basis. If salary is fixed no matter how much work you do, then this becomes more complicated—but the minimum wage should be a reasonable lower bound for the purposes of illustrating the point.
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