[...] It's not just a disaster-relief problem. It is also visible when corporations do CSR days, or how people put up things for charity auctions. The question is: why does giving stuff feel so much better than giving cash?

[...]

This might sound like I’m calling out the irrationality, but giving is emotional, it requires us to act on empathy, so it’s reasonable it’s not perfectly rational, and other emotions try to play their role. Still, the gap, between what people are willing to give in kind versus what they are willing to wire as cash, is real and large.

What if instead of fighting this bias, we designed around it?

This is a linkpost for my recent Substack post.