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The evidence
The ask
There is a point past which money stops buying wellbeing. The research on this is famous and it ends better than most people think: the 2010 finding that day-to-day wellbeing plateaus around a comfortable income was re-examined in 2023 by the original author and his strongest critic together, and what survived is precise. Happiness keeps rising with income for most people. It flattens only for an unhappy minority, and for them more income does not fix it. Whatever is wrong is not for sale.
People with the least purpose in life die at more than twice the rate of people with the most, in the same years, adjusted for everything the studies could adjust for. Across ten prospective studies and 136,265 people, higher purpose predicts lower mortality. It predicts less Alzheimer's disease. In an English cohort of older adults, 29.3 per cent of the lowest wellbeing quartile died during follow-up against 9.3 per cent of the highest. Purpose is observational science, not a slogan, and it predicts rather than causes. But it is the strongest lever the wellbeing literature has.
Economics has known for thirty years that visible giving returns standing and legacy to the giver, in what the literature calls competitive altruism. That is not a cynical note. It is the reason philanthropy exists at civilisational scale, and the same literature says the return depends on one thing: that the giving is believed. A gift nobody can verify buys nothing, not even for the giver.
In October 2021 the head of the World Food Programme said two per cent of one man's wealth could help solve world hunger. The man answered with a condition: describe exactly how, 'with open source accounting', and the money moves. Nine days later the institution published a plan: 6.6 billion dollars, 42 million people, 43 countries, line by line. We hold the document. And there the record stops. The money went elsewhere, the institution says it received none of it, and no instrument existed anywhere in the system that could carry the exchange to completion: nothing that could take stated intent on one side, verified outcome on the other, and hold both parties to the middle.
A register where every claim carries its source. An archive where every source is held. Data pulled from the primary systems by tools anyone can run, so the numbers are reproducible rather than trusted. The international aid system marks 65 billion dollars a year with policy intentions and says, in its own binding text, that the marks are descriptive rather than quantitative and were never designed to measure outcomes. That is not a scandal. It is a design, stated honestly, waiting for its missing half.
None of this cares how many zeroes are involved. Verification scales down as well as up: the public register treats every contribution identically, publishes it identically, and refuses it influence identically. The first version of the machinery is already running on this site.
If a world where giving can be believed is a world you want to exist sooner, the option is one page away. That is all this page will say about it.
unformentoo.org · independent research by Mikal Steen Monslaup, supported by Manderådet and MannsForum
Every figure above is verified against a primary source before it appears here; the working ledger is public in the repository.
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