
How today's billionaires plan to improve the world - godelmachine
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21736517-should-be-cause-celebration-or-concern-mega-rich-have-ambitious-plans-improve
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Bucephalus355
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
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-...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-
zuckerbergs-100-million-donation-155608055.html)

$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.

~~~
pjc50
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.

------
sametmax
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.

------
DennisP
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...](https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-
ebook/dp/B00HNZ0Z96)

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

------
montrose
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."

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

~~~
dsacco
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.

~~~
bhaak
The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic
functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big
banks?

I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that
would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.

~~~
dsacco
_> The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic
functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big
banks?_

Implicit in this question is the idea that the destabilizing effects are
actually a large amount of the banking activity. I would argue they are not,
we just hear about that far more often because it's bad news, and bad news is
more interesting. The rote, mundane functionality of all banks, including the
big ones, is mostly under the radar and (in my opinion) vastly
underappreciated with respect to banks' occasional tendency to throw the
system out of whack. In particular, I would posit that the latter is more a
manifestation of common economic activity than it is to a centralized and
consolidated banking infrastructure. Or, more succinctly, that economic
activity at the modern scale does not sustain itself without these banks
working more or less as they do now.

There are certainly improvements to be made, for sure. But I personally
discount the possibility that those improvements would radically reshape
banking infrastructure or significantly reduce the volatility cycle we
encounter every decade or two.

------
roman_savchuk
>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
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.

------
aurelianito
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.

------
muse900
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.

------
everyone
The roaring 2020's

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expertentipp
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
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.

~~~
expertentipp
> 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.

------
hownottowrite
Cached: [https://archive.is/BYAdr](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...

------
hutzlibu
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?

~~~
sametmax
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.

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

~~~
bromuro
Yeah how many of those billions are part of that economy that is actually
causing the harm (wars, famine, poverty, etc) that they are then proud to
“fight”? c’mon how can people believe in such narrative? like the new one with
Elon Musk... it is impossible even to try criticize them. Their hypocrisy is
too smart and too well organized to be fought.

~~~
csallen
Comments like these are ineffective because you aren't providing any evidence
or arguments to justify your beliefs. You're just asserting that you're right
and everyone else is wrong. Why should anyone believe you?

~~~
sametmax
We have 20 years of reporting about the mischief of Microsoft. What more do
you need ?

Why do we even have to, yet again, bring the burden of the proof to fight a PR
orchestrated with millions of dollar ?

It's an impossible to win fight to tell the sky is blue to people if the
minute they don't look at it anymore, they doubt it and ask for proof.

~~~
csallen
Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices caused wars, famine, and
poverty in Africa? That's news to me. So yeah, you do have the burden of proof
if you're going to defend statements to that effect.

Also, it's not safe to assume that everyone has read the same things you've
read, and knows the same things you do. You have to be prepared to present
your evidence during every conversation. Those are table stakes.

------
zabana
.

~~~
samsolomon
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.

