

Given unlimited money/resources, what good can we do in the world? - jhuckestein

Anyone I meet, I ask this question and the answers have been manifold and enlightening. The question makes you think about the problem of "the world" in a different, more holistic way.<p>What do you guys think? Either right off the top of your head or take your time. This is going to be interesting :)<p>I think we can learn a lot from the answers and I am considering running a blogging project on this. This is also a question I'd like to see answered by Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Ray Kurzweil, Barack Obama and others.
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jhuckestein
I'll go first and start by giving an overview of the breadth of suggestions I
have heard (without comments):

\- Pay off debt for all states \- "Buy" food for all the people in the world
\- Pay off debt for only the US to reinstate it as single superpower thus
preventing a worldwar in the coming century \- Give all charities in the world
unlimited funds \- Found a new state somewhere and build it up as elite state
to lead the world into the future \- Force democracy onto all states \- Fly
away to other planets \- Build a huge research center solving the worlds 14
challenges \- set up "money-machines on the street everywhere \- buy rain
forest to protect it

And these are only the ones I remember. I hope I'll get around to posting my
own ideas later tonight.

The problem (or good thing) about the question is, that you start thinking
about completely new things. You take on the perspective of a world CEO who
tries to fix the biggest problems in a sustainable way but doesn't know where
to start.

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mwuertinger
I think one of the biggest problems in our world is that all the governments
are very obstinate when it comes to making international agreements. This
issue could be well observed at the Copenhagen climate conference last year.

Therefore I suggest that we create a world government directly elected by all
the people on earth. This government would be able to deal with all the
unsolved global issues like climate change, world hunger or collapsing
financial systems.

Well I have to admit, this isn't really my idea, I adopted it from Andreas
Eschbach's book "Eine Billion Dollar" (German for "One Trillion Dollars")
where a nobody inherits one trillion dollars and thinks a long time about what
to do with it. It's a really good book, unfortunately only available in
German, as far as I know...

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andrewcooke
if you give someone a pile of money and tell them to improve the world what's
going to happen? there isn't a single, good, clear, correct plan of action, as
far as i know. so even if this hypothetical person with a pile of money was an
objective, honest, smart person, they'd be pretty unsure about what to do. and
most people aren't objective, honest and smart.

so what's going to happen? they're going to push right ahead with whatever
they think is right. and because they have a pile of money they have a pile of
power. so you end up with this powerful person telling everyone what to do -
_even though it's probably not the best solution_.

so it seems to me that it might be a good idea to look at alternatives. maybe
your question is assuming the wrong thing somehow.

but what alternatives are there?

here's one, off the top of my head. instead of having a system where we go
like crazy to make a pile of money so that we can then "do good" with it, why
don't we ease off and not make so much in the first place? if we didn't try so
hard to make the place unequal, perhaps we wouldn't need to spend so much on
fixing the inequality.

[there's an obvious answer to that about life not being zero-sum, and i agree
there's some kind of balance necessary, but i am not at all sure that we've
found the best equilibrium where we are.]

here's another: give everyone a dollar. or a pig. or a chicken. or a saw.
exactly what isn't so important. what's important with this idea is that you
spread the money around to _everyone_. you spread it _really thin_ and then
let the people "on the ground" decide what to do.

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jhuckestein
I totally agree. So we have to fix the inequality somehow. But how? Let's not
talk about resources at this point. The idea of my assumption is that while
you build your plan of action, whenever you need money or anything else, you
can just ignore that.

This allows us to think about questions that would otherwise never be asked:
\- Would it help the world (from a holistic perspective), to pay off the debts
for all countries? \- For Altruists, is it even possible to do more good than
we're currently doing if we had more money?

The questions was meant to be more of an experiment. Just assume the person
with all the money/resources was you. You seem pretty nice. How would you try
to maximize the happiness of all the people in the world? (A valid answer is
also to not make use of it or do individual, smaller projects)

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cindygallop
Wow, great minds think alike - this is the equivalent of 'If you ran the
world, what would you do?' :)

As you may have seen, my answer is I would turn every single good intention
into action.

If you have a mo and would like to, do email me - cindy@ifwerantheworld.com.
Would love to discuss further.

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juliamae
It's interesting that you started this with "given unlimited money."

Something I've fully accepted lately is that the way we spend our money
affects more change than who we vote for (in the USA anyway). So given a huge
amount of money, I would start a campaign to educate people about that.

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JacobAldridge
Business training and entrepreneur support for developing and third world (if
there's a distinction) countries.

Business builds a functioning economy in a way that aid cannot; a support net
may still be required for decades, but a 'hand up' is better than a 'hand
out'.

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kimfuh
I feel that the most important thing in life is freedom to experience
everything you can and want without limiting the experience of others.

The best good I can think of is find a way to give everyone this freedom.

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jhuckestein
Thanks! But may I challenge you to tell us how this could be done? (resources
and money are irrelevant) You have set the goal, now we need to find out how
to get there!

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kimfuh
First we have to assess the problems. Before we tackle wants, we have to
identify areas that still have needs as basic as water, food, and shelter.
Provide these for areas in need, then we can start with the wants.

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mwuertinger
Expand the Desertec project (<http://www.desertec.org>) to make it the main
source of energy for the entire planet thus eliminating fossil and nuclear
power.

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protomyth
Build a lot of Water Desalination Plants and lay a lot of pipe. Power them
with tidal, solar, wind, or nuclear.

