I don't think that works in practice. If you donate money with the goal of advancing some agenda, and it's officially anonymous, you'll find a way of letting the right people know it was you.
Many people give money in a functionally anonymous way. Sure, it might be traceable, but if I go online and donate $100 to the red cross:
1) They might know my name, but they don't really know who I am
2) I don't really get any social status bump for doing this, unless I go around telling people that I made this donation (in which case, i'd agree, it's not really anonymous anymore)
Well, sure, anonymous donation is that. Then we want to encourage that so we find anonymous donors, deanonymize them, and canonize them. That makes more people want to be anonymous donors, a thing we want.
But I think the idea that donations shouldn't be public is a terrible thing. Social proof is a great motivator to get people to do things. The fact that most people are "shy" about letting the world know about their donations goes directly against the social proof.
Agree. Perhaps SOMEONE somewhere knows that you gave a donation, but functionally, many donations are as good as anonymous. If I give $300 (or even $3000) to a food bank, no one is calling to give me a congratulations. Do they have my name? Yes. They might send an automated thank you. And they DEFINITELY will reach out for future donations. But it doesn’t have a meaningful effect on my reputation.
People being able to donate anonymously to an effort to shape public opinion feels fundamentally wrong to me. If they believe in the position being pushed they should be happy to be publicly associated with it. If they aren’t then I’m very suspicious about why.
EDIT: the post I replied to was edited after my reply to add a lot of context that it now looks like I’m ignoring. Sadly I don’t have the time to address it point by point, so to clarify: this comment is a reply to the first line of the parent comment only.
To me the danger sign is that, if you’re doing anonymous donations properly, it would be impossible to solicit them. I mean, you wouldn’t know who to talk to! If the donor visits the institution, it’s just some random person with no reason for special treatment.
If there was an arms-length “anonymous fund” that people could donate to without even the development department knowing who they are, that would be the only way to have truly anonymous donations. And then I think the moral argument would make perfect sense.
Any charitable donation with your name on it is a Veblen good that (hopefully) becomes socially useful. If people donated out of a genuine sense of charity they would donate anonymously.
This is mostly irrelevant. Pretty much every traditional value system values anonymous donations more, but few people actually do it in a completely anonymous way. I.e., the article isn’t about real anonymous donors, it’s about pseudo-anonymous donors which outnumber the real ones.
It’s not particularly difficult to make a donation anonymous in a way that the recipient genuinely doesn’t know who made the donation. Just have a neutral third party handle it. This could be a donor advised fund or a trustee, for example. I suspect this isn’t particularly rare.
If people are worried about scientific donors having undue influence, a much cleaner route than trying to stop donations or screen every person is to simply require that donations be anonymous. That way, everyone still has the freedom to sponsor whatever they want, but nobody gets bribed to overlook sex trafficking.
And this is why all my personal donations are in cash and anonymous. It's no one else's business, I'm not going to be pretentious about it, and receiving "services" from an organization will not be predicated on how much I give.
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