Abstract
This study concerns how an organization that subsidizes voluntary giving with incentive payments, including one run by an autonomous AI agent, can measure success without Goodhart's-law gaming. A population-scale gauge reads success as the elasticity of giving to the subsidy: how far the subsidy can be withdrawn while giving persists. The study gives its individual-scale form as three jointly necessary account signals: a rising fraction of surplus routed into giving channels, no outflow back to oneself, and a retained balance falling toward zero. Read as a level, throughput ranks participants by wealth; the scale-free signals do not. The central argument is that this limit cannot be produced by coercion. A transfer the organization executes on a holding involves no act of giving; where pressure precedes a gift, the ledger cannot show whether the choice was free; and motivation-crowding evidence, contested at its boundaries, indicates that compulsion and payment tend to erode the disposition to give. The Buddhist analysis of volition (cetanā, AN 6.63) supports this in a narrower form: its commentary counts consciousness arising under command as wholesome, with prompting, so compulsion can neither supply the volition nor certify it. The host society must therefore leave the disposal of holdings free. A voluntary-circulation layer, distinct from coerced redistribution and from pure accumulation, supplies giving channels and a private, self-facing report, never a public ranking. Designated giving balances may expire by rule on terms accepted at receipt; a personal account is never emptied by rule.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Freedom Requirement: Voluntary Relinquishment as the Third Path, and the Micro-Scale of the Self-Eliminating Institution — Individual-Scale Success Metrics for Incentive-Subsidized Voluntary Giving, Motivation Crowding-Out, and Expiry of Designated-Purpose Giving Funds", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11987