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Comment by rcarrigan87 | Hacker News Reader

Further down in the article, some interesting points about the motivations behind philanthropy.

"philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’s about social stability."

So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued.

I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity.

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That is exactly the control mechanism that was used by a number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent the Arab Spring revolutions from happening within their borders. They handed out billions of cash to the populace.

"...the Saudi state began spending $130 billion to pump up civil servant salaries (paying two extra months’ salaries)"

"In Kuwait, at around the same time, the state increased civil servant salaries by 115 percent at a cost of more than $1 billion, and at an additional cost of $5 billion, gave a cash handout of Kuwaiti Dinar (KD) 1000 to its citizens and promised free distribution of foodstuffs for fourteen months"

http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61...

What will become of the already unstable Middle East when oil begins its inevitable (likely slow) decline as a dominant power source?

My guess? Not much.

Seems like they would find some other investments to make in the meantime.

Look at the state of the Middle East between the rise of sea-borne trade that withered the old overland Silk Road trade routes and the current petro-states.

Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.

And it looks (at least in Saudi Arabia's case) that they were trying to diversify towards renewables in a vast way [0], although my google search also turned up more recent articles indicating they're pushing that back [1]. The thing about the Saudi Arabian royal family is that they're all guaranteed allowances and the family grows at a near exponential rate since they all have multiple wives. I couldn't find any good sources on numbers but in a book about Saudi Arabia by former CIA operative Robert Baer "Sleeping with the Devil: How the US Sold it's Soul for Saudi Crude" [3] [4] I believe he estimated the current number to be about 60,000 (Wikipedia estimates 15,000 so I may be remembering that wrong [5]), aka an unsustainable population growth in royal family members.

[0] - http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 [1] - http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabi... [3] - http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/... [4] - (heartily recommended, although because most of these things are classified, truly it is his word. In his other book about Iran, his conclusion was to bring Iran to the playing table and recognize them as a regional and world power, so it doesn't seem to follow a strictly American narrative, and in my opinion, gives him a bit of credence. Others may beg to differ, I'm not sure.) [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

Renewables are great, but I'm not sure they would be able to support an entire economy. One of the few great things about fossil fuels and specifically oil is that it is a power source that can be stored in a dense and stable form. Renewables can't really be stored in this manner and therefore can't easily be exported beyond reasonably short distances. Saudi Arabia therefore can't rely on selling renewable energy to the USA, China, and the EU to support their economy like they do with oil.

Oil can be synthesized; to the extent it has desirable traits as an energy transport medium, that doesn't mean it has to be the root energy source.

I was thinking more become a key developer of solar panels and export the panels themselves (or wind turbine blades, geothermal pipes, etc (off the cuff examples, I don't know if they have use or desire for blades or pipes)).

I believe he wrote a long Atlantic article based on the book - 'The Fall of the House of Saud'

The Fall of the House of Saud

The Atlantic. May 2003 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/05/the-fall...

"A former CIA operative argues, in an article drawn form his new book, Sleeping With the Devil, that today's Saudi Arabia can't last much longer—and the social and economic fallout of its demise could be calamitous.

Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil.

The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount.

In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated—that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."

Alternatively, the royals will just loot the sovereign wealth fund and flee the country.

Sovereign wealth funds in third-world countries don't tend to last long. Nauru would still be one if the richest countries on Earth except that the sovereign wealth fund somehow found its way into the pockets of the people tasked with looking after the sovereign wealth fund.

I also thought of Nauru. Seems the island center is chewed-up former phosphate mines and the islanders have nothing to show for it. Australia briefly (?) tried to relocate some unwanted refugees there. Not much to say for the place anymore.

They may actually emerge as a leader in green energy & architecture. Masdar City looks like an interesting project to follow.

If anything, they'll get richer, as oil is not exactly an elastic good. As supply dries up, demand won't, so price will have to compensate, and barring some form of extra-market intervention, it will probably mean a higher margin for the suppliers.

Probably what already happened to Egypt and Syria when their oil production dropped.

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity:

“[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”

Wow, need to read more of him.

That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves).

For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun).

It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。

>those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students

That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst?

Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?

What long term value? The system is already gone.

If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.

I don't understand your question. The long term value I'm talking about is that of the system being gone, so it being gone is a realization of that value, not a point that the value isn't there.

That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank."

>If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.

Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad.

But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.

Why should we care about a future sociologist's or historian's opinion about what was "worst"?

It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.

We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?

The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are.

Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.

>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?

Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have.

I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable.

Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse.

Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them.

The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.

The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.

How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.

I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.

Do you think you would be the same you if you had been born into slavery?

I don't think that's a useful hypothetical. If I were born into slavery, I would be a different person, and I can't tell you what that person would think.

Yes, that was my point. You had written as if that were not the case.

I was telling you what I actually do think, not what someone else might think. That is, knowing what I know now, I would say what I said. If you are asking me if I would agree with that while not knowing what I know now, then obviously I can't say, because I would know things that I don't currently know.

Regardless, I can't make decisions using information I don't have, so the question is pointless.

I do not consciously support slavery. I just find some objection to the apparent false dichotomy that beating slaves is a sound path to their freedom.

If (and it's a very big if), the only way to end slavery is to have slaves be beaten, then you might have a good point. However, I can think of no way to verify that, nor can I think of any evidence in support of that premise that can withstand even most most basic scrutiny.

>How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people?

How do you know he didn't?

> How do you know he didn't?

In particular, Mein Kampf comes pretty close.

Would you allow yourself to be beaten if it meant your children could be free? Or would you rather let your children be slaves and neither of you be beaten?

This isn't just about slavery: it could apply to any war-like situation. But if you aren't being beaten as a slave, how are you resisting slavery? Your owner just lets you get away with not doing what you're told?

Because I really don't see how not resisting is supposed to end slavery, and I don't see how avoiding beatings is any kind of resistance.

Surely there are other ways to resist slavery than being beaten?

If there were some highly effective and rapid communication system, for example, the slaves could possibly organize and GTFO before their owners had any way to stop them. Yes, there's the chance that it could turn bloody, but I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully (as far as one can imagine such a hypothetical).

Even if such a thing were possible, it seems highly unlikely that a bunch of slaves could pull it off successfully. How's a slave going to gain access to a high-speed communication network in a way that doesn't immediately prompt retribution?

Slaves are either compliant or tortured for not being compliant. That's why slavery is so brutal; if your owner doesn't beat you, he'll either kill you or sell you to someone who will. There's really no other option for dealing with a slave who refuses to obey. (And I don't see how a compliant slave can help end slavery.)

> I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully

How? People who legally own slaves aren't going to just let their slaves walk away anymore than any company now is going to let their employees walk away with all their profits.

> he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian.

Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that.

But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said.

But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.

His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (the source of the quote, if anyone's curious) gave me the distinct impression that Wilde enjoyed bugging the shit out of people. Who would have guessed?

That's not quite true. I feel like you missed the whole point. The audience is their contemporaries. "Good" slave owners gave an excuse to their contemporaries to allow slavery to exist. If other people only saw "bad" slabs owners his argument is slavery would've ended sooner️.

I think it's obvious from the context that he means "worst" from a macro perspective. I don't really see why it bugs you so much -- the fact that any given person likely prefer a "kind" slaveowner, or prefer that the rich be charitable seems to go without saying.

>"whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value"

This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.

This puts me in mind of Slavoj Zizek on charity.

http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...

I think you meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

weird, i wonder how that happened. thank you.

That's a silly notion.

If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today.

Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in?

In the end, rebellions happen when people don't have basic security. If in a future society, where the 1% people countrols 99% of the wealth, but even the poorest people get all the food, shelter, entertainment etc they need, I don't think there is going to be a rebellion like we see in history books.

Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".

If all the 99% actually had the comforts you imagine, they wouldn't be so mad at the 1%

Oscar Wilde was completely out of touch with the realities of the impoverished. He was a Kardashian with literary talent.

That's not an element specific to China. Wealth inequality is fairly well accepted to be a threat to social stability and the economy. People tend to see such inequality is unfair and at some point they are going to discover their revolutionary side.

It's therefore not merely in the interest of rich people to be philanthropists, it's also in the interest of governments to achieve a certain balance. I think the latter is a far bigger reason for philanthropy. It's hard to argue for taking money away from people who are already engaged in philanthropy.

That is also mirrored in the article. The government isn't entirely happy with this rich second generation, philanthropy helps with that.

The impression I get from American philanthropists is that, for many of them, it's another way to show off their wealth. It might not directly benefit them, but neither does buying diamonds or gold jewelry. With philanthropy you get big galas, get buildings named after you, demonstrate how wealthy you are to your peers, etc.

This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory in evolutionary biology.

Any nice book offering an overview of evolutionary biology applied to our society that you'd recommend?

Not quite a book, but you might find the materials for this MIT course on Game Theory and Social Behavior insightful: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-gam...

"We will apply insights from game theory to explain human social behavior, focusing on novel applications which have heretofore been the realm of psychologists and philosophers—for example, why people speak indirectly, in what sense beauty is socially constructed, and where our moral intuitions come from—and eschewing traditional economic applications such as industrial organization or auctions."

I learned about signalling theory in this course, among other insights into why society acts the way it does.

Thanks. I occasionally follow news from complexity theory and there are many exciting findings. But there are so many hidden gems I could not find out till I learn some key words to make my search meaningful to the search engines.

On Human Nature by Edward Wilson is supposed to be a classic on this subject (the mix of biology, evolution and sociology).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Human_Nature

Rap music.

For what its worth, a billionaire once told me the following quote: There are two types of people that give money to charity - those that want to, and those that have to

(the context of the conversation was the idea of charity as atonement for sins)

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich."

Very much so. China is a communist country. Here's the China Communist Party's current policy statement.[1]

"The basic line of the CPC at this stage is to unite the people of all ethnic groups to, with economic construction at the core, adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles, adhere to reform and opening-up, and in a spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle, to build China into a prosperous, democratic and civilized modern socialist country. The Four Cardinal Principles -- adhering to the socialist road, adhering to the people's democratic dictatorship, adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party of China -- have been established by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China as the basis to maintain the nation."

Well within living memory, China's government was sentencing rich people to death for crimes against the state. That's one reason many rich people in China try to get money out of the country and get out themselves. There might be a policy change, and they could be sent to labor camps in the western provinces. It's happened before, and might happen again.

[1] http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm

If they are at all studied in classic literature and world history, it should at least be at the back of their mind, because it's been a known effect since at least the Romans. Where do you think the phrase "bread and circuses" comes from?

>I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity.

This is a bit more pessimistic view but what about the raise in minimum wage for fast food workers (in NY) to $15 an hour? I daresay those employees are less likely to participate in Occupy Wall Street protests now, not that the balance of power in this country has actually changed any.

All $15 an hour does it raise them to the new subsistence level. The aware of them still want major changes.

"All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

As true today as it was in 1776. If people can eak out a living, the majority will be satisfied.

If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued.

One could say the same about salaried employees - give them enough to stay. Too little - they revolt or leave, too much - they save the money and still leave after they've saved enough

Nobody in their right mind saves with current interest rates and cheap credit combined with consumerism keeps enough people in hock across the income spectrum

More like sparse array.

People in their right mind are able to not fall prey to consumerism and hock.

The (slightly cynical) argument could be made that the concessions made by capital to labor in the United States in the early 20th century were to prevent revolts (of the sort that happened in Europe and elsewhere) and especially to reduce the chance a Communist Revolution taking hold. I note that that era was marked by significant industrialist philanthropy as well.

Relevant recent quote from someone at the UN:

> "Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-ref...

Inequality is a problem for the rich, too, and not just because the poor will eventually revolt on them and take their stuff by force or murder them violently, but also because when most money is concentrated in the hands of only a few, the "economy" becomes weaker and less dynamic, as people can't afford to buy all sorts of stuff anymore (from the rich people's companies). The lesson here is not to postpone solving the inequality problem until the poor are already at their doors or causing riots in the streets.

Pretty sure that is the motivation behind many government support programs. keep the people at the bottom placated enough to support you. The trouble is you create a dependent class because the number of people willing to live in such a way is higher than most would expect

I would argue that the third motive is one that does not generate as much American philanthropy as it should. Events like the French Revolution usually seem more imminent in hindsight than they did at the time.

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued."

I sometimes wonder if this is one of the motivations behind the guaranteed minimum income movement.

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