Mutual Aid Contributions Are Largely Decided by "Heaven"

In a mutual aid platform's early days, the most decisive factor in contributions is the proportion of people who have passed the waiting period. Suppose a platform has just been created: of 1 million users, 100,000 have passed the waiting period and are entitled to aid, so 1 million people share in the claims arising among those 100,000. When the platform matures — when everyone has passed the waiting period — 1 million people share in the claims arising among 1 million.

Look: the incidence of risk is unchanged and the number of people on the platform is unchanged, yet contributions have gone up tenfold!

Let us look only at the mature platform, where it has the number of people the law of large numbers requires and most people are entitled to aid. What then determines how high contributions are?

1. The platform's rules, such as the terms for entitlement to aid. Aid of 100,000 instead of 50,000 means each member's contribution doubles.

2. Risk-control capability: the length of the waiting period, the ability to screen users, to filter out opportunism and to prevent fraud. Relax the review and contributions rise.

3. Heaven. By this I mean macro factors, such as the quality of the living environment across society, the resulting incidence of critical illness, the rate at which risk events occur, and so on. In an anti-cancer commune, for example, when the incidence of cancer rises noticeably, that commune's contributions rise with it; when different places relax their enforcement against drunk driving or on wearing seat belts, contributions in the accident mutual aid commune may rise noticeably. And aging has an even more far-reaching effect.

So once a mutual aid platform matures, how high the contributions are depends on heaven's mood. Saying this is not to say we resign ourselves to fate; we can in fact defy heaven and change our fate — it is said that the cancer incidence rate in the United States is already falling, and China's may one day see a similarly good turn.

This principle applies not only to mutual aid; it basically applies to public health insurance and commercial insurance too. In the end, every one of us pays a price for the environment we live in. Zweig said: all the gifts of fate have already been priced in secret.