Given unlimited money/resources, what good can we do in the world? | Hacker News Reader

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

4 pointsjhuckestein12 comments

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.

What do you guys think? Either right off the top of your head or take your time. This is going to be interesting :)

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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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.

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...

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.

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)

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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