How today's billionaires plan to improve the world

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21736517-should-be-cause-celebration-or-concern-mega-rich-have-ambitious-plans-improve

by godelmachine • 8 years ago

39 64 8 years ago

economist.com

everyone• 8 years ago

The roaring 2020's

montrose• 8 years ago

The Economist has a novel approach: look at what's actually happening.

"The would-be world-changers are applying innovative and evidence-based approaches in clinics and classrooms, where elected politicians are often too timid to risk failure, captured by entrenched interests or unwilling to spend public money on experimentation."

Bucephalus355• 8 years ago

This is very concerning. Ultimately, money provides such global power now that it has effectively escaped sovereign jurisdiction. There are barriers on where national power ends, but effectively none on where money can move or what it can do (comparatively). This article could have had the headline “How Today’s Mega Powerful Plan To Improve The World”. This relates to the idea of putting Central Banks outside the scope of most legislatures, it was supposed to insulate them from “greedy democracies”, but instead it created something worse.

All of this is the culmination of the migration of the State from governments to Financiers. A replacement of democratic justice with “market justice”.

NOTE: I still like Elon Musk. But he’s the exception, and it could be argued that NASA would have done all of this already if their budget hadn’t been frozen for the last 50 years. FYI the budget in 1967 for NASA was, even BEFORE being adjusted to inflation, greater than it was today. Astounding.

peoplewindow• 8 years ago

Money is not the same thing as power, although power usually makes money abundant. Billionaires have in many ways much less power than even a relatively minor government official or regulator.

Zuckerberg learned this the hard way when he spaffed $100 million on New York schools and ended up with zero measurable difference in outcomes.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-...

$100 million down the drain, largely because - guess what - the politics of Newark were totally unaffected by all this money. Zuck wanted a new teachers contract that linked pay to performance to be a part of the reform, and $50m of the $100m was devoted to achieving this outcome. It was meant to be used for teacher bonuses and so on. But only the state legislature could make real change there, and they didn't. Instead the contract was renegotiated with seniority protections intact because the union refused to budge on it, and the local government rolled over. The district also spent huge sums of money on "consultants" making $1000/day - $20m of it went down that rabbit hole.

In the end Zuck discovered that you can't solve political problems with money, no matter how much you throw around. Trump beat Clinton despite spending 50% as much, even though Obama had been warning after Citizens United that it represented a "serious harm to democracy". People tend to over-estimate the impact money can have on society.

pjc503• 8 years ago

Kind of surprising that the teachers won that one, but good on them. Performance-related pay in education is an absolute minefield, because it's not widget-making or even something as rigourously scientifically subject to assessment as software development(+). Outcomes in education are hugely susceptible to wider social conditions such as whether the parents can afford to feed the kids breakfast.

If a system isn't really carefully designed, it ends up creating incentives to dump the hardest to teach kids somewhere.

(+) sarcasm - everyone claims that 10x developers exist, and they might be right, but there's no reliable scheme for identifying performance.

jondubois• 8 years ago

The biggest problems in society are mental ones:

- People place way too much value on social connections over hard work.

- People have a greatly exaggerated view when it comes to the correlation between status/popularity and skill.

- The motto 'people over products' has been taken to such an extreme that products and tangible results seem to have been completely removed from the equation.

- Those who have the money to make a difference don't lead, instead, they follow trends.

If we solved these problems, society would be much, much better. Unfortunately solving these problems goes against the interests of wealthy people.

dantheman2• 8 years ago

SpaceX cost about 1 billion dollars over 10 years. NASA provided ~500 million as part of launch contracts.

NASA's budget is ~18 billion a year. So out of 180 billion dollars they would have needed to devote ~500 million and then just fund it themselves.

So it's not really a money issue.

asaph• 8 years ago

This comment ignores the fact that SpaceX built on a foundation NASA helped create. SpaceX stands on the shoulders of giants.

DennisP4• 8 years ago

SpaceX spent less than a billion dollars developing the Falcon Heavy. NASA has been spending a couple billion a year on the SLS, a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle engines that will cost over a billion dollars per launch. It's not lack of money that's keeping NASA from doing what SpaceX has done.

(SLS is bigger than the Falcon Heavy, but it's smaller than the BFR. There's a good chance the BFR will fly before the SLS.)

expertentipp2• 8 years ago

By taking away the resources from the population and giving in return some charity campaigns and campaigns improving their personal image? (it's hard getting to the top by being nice, generous, and caring).

jstanley• 8 years ago

Yes, such evil people, "taking resources from the population" by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay.

expertentipp2• 8 years ago

by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay.

Exclusively on certain markets - large, developed, and rich enough. While on other markets taking advantage of cheap labor and loose employee protection... and while paying the taxes in none of these markets... you forgot to add.

brbrodude• 8 years ago

With no society, no running water, no roads and no expendable poor/cheap people moving the gears, it just wouldn't be possible for them to get even close to this ammount of wealth, then they evade taxes, buy politics and do everything to keep things their way, have things their way, take all that they can, then when they're in effect absolute rulers under their sphere and took so much, they get to play on how to bettering society. The problem to me is very clear, this so called help is the other side of the Koch brother's, the think tanks lie factories, the manipulation of the masses, the corruption of Science, of Media, of Public Debate, of Democracy & etc. They'll just use all this power to create a world they see as better, but obviously never touching on the structure that gave them all that. And if a switcheroo is needed the infrastructure will already be in place. It should never have happened in the first place, that much power from this flawed economics is just like having absolute monarchs, aristocrats or church rule again, it should be limited(by a system which balances it, just like the separation of powers in government).

Ps.: The free market is not that system.

hownottowrite• 8 years ago

Cached: https://archive.is/BYAdr

Note: The print title of this article was "The billionaires and the Falcon Heavy". Probably more appropriate given the actual content.

Spoiler: Article contains lightweight, anti-tech snobbery...

hutzlibu6• 8 years ago

Unlike most people, I am not against mega rich in general, or asume, that they are all evil. But what just came to my mind with this sentence:

".. and Henry Ford ruthlessly made fortunes and then established foundations to enlighten the masses and ensure world peace long after their death. "

... is how it is meant regarding Ford. Enlightening the masses about the jews evil conspiracy and ensuring world peace by helping nazi domination?

dantheman2• 8 years ago

Ford may have had bad political views, but the Ford foundation has had a huge effect on the world, especially during the cold war.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/

sametmax6• 8 years ago

That's how people end up seeing the victors. No matter what they do.

Take Bill Gates. 20 years ago he was evil incarnate, his company caught in lying, cheating, corrupting. Now his PR team made sure he is regarded as one of the good ones. For the last few years, you saw post in HN, reddit, imgurs, all singing the goodness of his heart. And then comments followed.

No matter how many article you had decades ago stating all the wrong MS did, it's all water under the bridge. No ones remember. Clean slate.

Now people are even saying that Bush Jr. was "not so bad".

In 10 years, people will say Trump was ok.

hutzlibu6• 8 years ago

"Take Bill Gates. 20 years ago he was evil incarnate, his company caught in lying, cheating, corrupting. Now his PR team made sure he is regarded as one of the good ones. "

Well, I never considered him to be the evil incarnate, even though I am for free software as long as I can remember. But yes, the hatdred towards him has declined.

But I think it might also have to do with him stepping a bit away from Microsoft and focusing more on his foundation (even though I don't believe, that his foundation is really doing so good). And Microsoft in general being not that important anymore.

DennisP4• 8 years ago

Partly Bill's PR team. Mostly the fact that he's committed most of his billions to helping the poor and healing the sick.

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

It's a really sad reflection on how easy it is to manipulate people with PR.

It sends a toxic message: be a ruthless businessman today, and, if you succeed, donate money you don't need before dying and people will call you a saint.

csallen3• 8 years ago

This is largely explained by all sorts of human biases. We overweigh the present moment and blow things out of proportion. In other words, we're always going to overreact to how "evil" our least favorite figures are in the present. But with the benefit of hindsight, we'll do a more rational job evaluating them.

I'm a liberal voter, but I found the liberal reaction to Trump's election to be extreme. People thought it was the end of the free world and progress as we know it. Someone I knew spent a large sum of money on a bomb shelter.

When your assessment is that low, is there really anywhere to go but up in the future?

apatters• 8 years ago

Bill was certainly a ruthless businessman whose tactics caused all kinds of frustration for corporate IT departments and even stymied the development of the web for a few years.

But in hindsight that all seems a lot less evil to me than what today's giants are doing: vacuuming up our personal lives and delivering them to the NSA, cultivating addiction and depression in children to increase ad views, etc.

1990s/2000s Microsoft seems saintly to me by comparison.

dsacco7• 8 years ago

Take Bill Gates. 20 years ago he was evil incarnate, his company caught in lying, cheating, corrupting.

You have to know this level of hyperbole is baiting Godwin’s Law...

I’ll come right out and say it: I never thought Microsoft’s activity was that bad, and I never really understood the ire that Bill Gates received. I agree it was worth antitrust action, but the way people talked about him and the company has always struck me as self-righteous and hollow. There were just so many worse people and things that it seemed silly in my opinion, and sort of lacking in awareness about the broader context of the country or even the world. In fact I would go so far as to say people carrying on about him like this made it more difficult to take Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior seriously because it stifled honest conversation. If Gates is anything remotely close to “evil incarnate”, then what adjective would you use to describe, I don’t know, Kim Jong Un? Do you see why it’s hard to take your point seriously when your proclamation is that over the top? How can we communicate in good faith if that’s where you’re starting from?

People diminutize the fact that Gates has spent billions of dollars of his own wealth both leading initiatives and helping others along for inarguable good in the world by calling it “PR” - if that’s PR, what isn’t? How can we reasonably and rationally discuss the legitimately impressive humanitarian achievements of the Gates Foundation or Microsoft without you just dismissing it as the machinations of someone hellbent on a quest for power? What satisfies your bar for altruism?! Listening to descriptions of the man, you’d think he was literally burning puppies and kittens alive in the early days of Microsoft while blasting The Imperial March, like some kind of macabre cartoon villain.

Have some perspective. It was an internet browser.

madaxe_again3• 8 years ago

Ford also successfully sued the US government following the Second World War for bombing their factories - in Nazi Germany - which also used slave labour from concentration camps. https://www.quora.com/Did-Ford-sue-the-US-government-for-bom...

pjc503• 8 years ago

Extraordinary claim, which isn't quite borne out by the Quora answer.

And there's a lot of weirdness in there, including the obviously lunatic claim "The U.S. (et al.) effectively built and maintained the Nazi war machine for the entirety of World War 2."

sametmax6• 8 years ago

Our society have failed if we need to wait for people accumulate a lot of riches no matter the consequences so that eventually they may decide, once they had had and done everything they want, to invest it back in a cause they deem worthy.

zabana• 8 years ago

psergeant• 8 years ago

You’re the first person I’ve seen suggest it isn’t, so perhaps the onus is on you?

samsolomon• 8 years ago

Can you please provide a valid reason that it is no longer credible?

I am a long time Economist reader. The publication is consistent in quality and its viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with its views, but it does not lack credibility.

nickpp• 8 years ago

Well I guess any individual or organization has capacity for good or evil in them. But, in mankind history so far, the large organizations responsible for most evil in the world were religious and governmental.

Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Especially since their track of record during the last century is net positive (much more good things coming out of them than bad).

And especially considering the “new” way they made their money, through adding value instead of the old way through being born into is, stealing and pillaging...

ponderatul• 8 years ago

Net positive how? How do you measure that, when you take into account oil companies and banks for example?

dsacco7• 8 years ago

Banks are a net positive. Without them we have no modern economy. Occasionally the economy destabalizes as part of a cycle, but it (historically) restabalizes. The media pays an outsized lens to the corruption of Big Banks, but without their basic activity many modern quality of life improvements would be infeasible.

lackingcaffeine• 8 years ago

Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

This is fairly naive and also misses the fact that corporations have been around for a very long time too and don't have a great moral track record either. The Dutch East India Company at its peak dwarfed any modern corporation in terms of wealth and power[1] and was incredibly exploitative and corrupt. The British East India Company caused Opium addiction in China and kickstarted the colonisation of India. Industrial capitalists created (and still create) inhumane working conditions for their workers. If you count the whole sum of human misery created by the economic demands of the slave trade it becomes harder to even confidently assert that governments or religions have caused more evil.

This is not necessarily to say that corporations have caused more evil than governments or politics, but they do have a long track record of evil too and shouldn't be given "the benefit of the doubt" any more than any other organisation with a large amount of power.

[1] http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...

aurelianito• 8 years ago

Ultra riches are the new nobility. People that are not bounded by the rules the rest of us must abide to. Some pf them do good things with their power, and some of them do bad things. The main issue, for me, is that we don't get to choose or control. They are like old time's Kings and queens.

DennisP4• 8 years ago

From the article: "The billionaires’ most useful function, then, is not to bring about change themselves, but to explore and test new models and methods for others to emulate. Using their access to policymakers, they encourage the adoption of the ideas that work."

I think it's hard to argue against this; it's something that governments don't often do well. We need risk-takers who can try out new new approaches, get things done cheaply, and commit to a plan over the course of multiple election cycles.

Space launch is a case in point. I just read a book about solar power satellites [1], that went through the history of advanced launch programs in the U.S. Nothing ever got done because every few years, the new set of elected officials decided they wanted a different plan.

So all the ideas for new plans finally were abandoned, and now we've settled on an extremely risk-averse approach: the SLS, a disposable rocket using technology from the Space Shuttle. Politicians like it because it keeps the big contractors happy and puts jobs in a lot of districts, but it can't hope to expand access to space in the way the BFR is likely to do, because it will cost several billion dollars per launch [2].

If we don't like depending on billionaires, then we'd better figure out how to make daring and creative governments. Until we do, I'm glad there are people willing and able to spend their own money on fixing the problems that governments aren't fixing. I don't understand the view that only our governments should try to make the world better.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HN...

[2] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1

muse900• 8 years ago

For me personally, whats very concerning is that we are in 2018, prolly a few years away from having flying cars and whatnot.

And yet its much easier to find a cellphone than it is to find food and water. There are literally people still dying of starvation and yet there is something to be done about it.

We've evolved into buying more and more stuff, improving our everyday life by little bits such as upgrading from iphone 7 to 8, while there are still people out there that don't have something to put in their stomach, don't have the means to basic healthcare and don't have a roof over their head for when its cold and raining.

If you so want to improve the world, start off the basics and then move on.

roman_savchuk• 8 years ago

Mr Musk has gone further still. Rather than using his business wealth to support philanthropy in an unrelated area, he runs two giant companies, Tesla (a clean-energy firm that sells electric cars) and SpaceX (which builds the Falcon rockets), that further his ambitious goals directly.

Well, by launching many rockets burning hundreds of tons of kerosene each, SpaceX kinda offsets Tesla's clean energy efforts.

el_cid• 8 years ago

Well by getting the human race closer to colonizing other rocks floating in space, it kinda offsets SpaceX burning hundreds of tons of kerosene for each rocket.

How today's billionaires plan to improve the world

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