Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished, but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-win...
That explains why everybody is talking about philanthropy, LGBT, women's rights, diversity, racism and whatever instead of maybe paying their janitors and other low ranking staff a living wage.
But that might impact revenue.
And I'd say the reason for this is twofold:
1. Making social issues the big topic of discussion means millionaires, celebrities and companies can pretend to be 'progressive' while not actually doing anything meaningful to make the world better or help people escape poverty.
2. Stuff like Occupy likely scared the hell out of those with power/property/whatever, which led to a mission to get people fighting among themselves rather than against those with actual power.
Today, nationalist groups and media in the US receive millions of dollars in support.
I can't help but think someone took a look over at how Europeans neutralized dissent and thought they had a good thing going.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_14...
> the number of childhood deaths per year has been cut in half since 1990.
> Extreme poverty has been cut in half over the last 25 years.
> In 1988, when the global campaign was launched to end polio, there were 350,000 new cases each year.
> Last year, there were 37.
I genuinely don't know; hoping someone has the data.
As the article mentions when you donate to the Red Cross first they immediately take a cut of that money for themselves. Then its distributed to other charities which then take an administrative cut. And then in carrying out the program there are more 'administrative' cuts. In one program NPR reviewed, administrative costs alone ate up 1/3rd of all donations. Later in the article the Red Cross, upon discovering NPR is investigating their efforts, sends an email to NPR suggesting that, 'NPR and ProPublica were "creating ill will in the community, which may give rise to a security incident.. We will hold you and your news organizations fully responsible."
When the Red Cross says things like it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians - they include among those 130,000 "people who went to a seminar on how to fix their own homes, people who received temporary rental assistance, and thousands of people who received temporary shelters — which start to disintegrate after three to five years." In total the Red Cross's half a billion dollars in Haiti ended up creating 6 permanent homes. And this sort of inaction is not an isolated incident.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
Just look at China and South-East Asia in general. They are coming out of poverty by becoming rich, not because someone is parachuting goods every day.
Charity of that sort arguably undermines local economies and makes people dependent on future charity. That's why poverty is better addressed by supporting free markets.
"Rotary, along with our partners, has reduced polio cases by 99.9 percent worldwide since our first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. We are close to eradicating polio, but we need your help. Whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, here are some ways to make a global impact and protect children against polio forever."
And this didn't used to just be a story of Mideastern nations. This was the story of the world. The one thing that changed this was nukes. Mutually assured destruction is why the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not World War 3. And it's why direct unrestrained confrontation between developed nations has really become a thing of the past. Countries like China would never have been able to develop if not for the peace and stability that nuclear weapons have enabled. We can even look to nations like India. It's surreal to imagine that until 1947 that entire nation was just a property of the British Empire. Even the notion of a British Empire is surreal! But now that they have gained their independence and are a nuclear nation, they are also gradually increasing in prosperity as Indian decisions are being made to put Indians first. And as a nuclear power their decisions, independence, and developments are all effectively guaranteed, at least until we develop technology that can effectively render nukes harmless.
Like so many things in life, some of the greatest progress comes not from directed efforts, but from paradoxical places you would never even imagine to look in the pursuit of your goal.
Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Some things are much better, some are much worse.
But Gates doesn’t have stats on the concentration of ownership of global resources in that post because it’s not a KPI for him.
Suicides and opiates are. (and if you are a maslow hierarchy fan, you will notice that life has gotten extremely good for these problems to exist)
Things are much much better, equating these is irresponsible.
EDIT: Lets not overthink the very obvious intention and meaning behind my comment.
I’d consider suicide and addiction more of a context than a “choice”.
This confuses proximate and root causes. Someone may "choose" to pull the trigger and end their life, or choose to swallow one more blissful pill to avoid confronting their miserable existence, but they probably would not have knowingly chosen the circumstances that now leave them with that horrible choice.
Oopiates where prescribed in huge numbers knowing that many people would become addicted to them.
Disease vectors are often under peoples control. Do you hike in the woods and risk lime disease?
Poverty is often a little of everything. It's far easier to become poor than stop being poor, but it's not some inescapable prison.
Further, there are huge differences between poor and extreme poverty. Reaching say 20$/day is a vast step up for many people.
Millions of people have escaped 3rd world poverty. It’s vastly easier for you people who can often relocate to more prosperous areas and or gain more valuable skills. Further when you talk about poverty it’s critical to understand the vast difference in living on ~2$ a day and 20$ a day in the same areas. 20$ a day can mean the ability to invest in their and their child’s future. That jump in many ways is the first rung on the ladder of prosperity, but it it a very meaningful step up.
That said, it’s very easy for people to fall into poverty. War, famine, disease, accident, etc all push people down.
You may want to revisit your statement. This kind of trend (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Ag...) is not what you call "skyrocketting". Of course every suicide is one too much, but let's go easy on the hyperbole.
The villagers go from earning "nothing" to earning $1/day according to our money system. They have been "lifted out of poverty," despite now living in disgusting slums in a city as foreign to them as it would be to us. Their culture (and perhaps knowledge of regenerative agriculture) are lost forever. We don't measure the carbon sequestration capacity lost by the now-inundated land, or the huge amounts of methane that the swamped vegetation releases. We just know we created "green energy." The villagers' risk of dying in those slums from many awful diseases has thankfully plummeted, but their profound communal loss will likely manifest in the form of depression or anxiety -- which are on the rise globally. Could that rise be a symptom of our realizing that while the "numbers" get better and better, it's occurring at the cost of obliterating the planet in possibly irreparable ways?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of good, too. But there's a lot that gets missed in choosing what and how we measure.
[1] This example is lifted largely from a favorite author, Charles Eisenstein, from his new book "Climate: A New Story." You can read up on the Tehri dam. If it breaks (and some seismologists think it's a real possibility), it will cause untold more devastation.
Have you seen some of the industrial cities in India and China?
I think I'd rather check out at 30 in a world where I could actually breathe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog
And I have never seen this in the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmryr65iTwM
It is all so unnecessary. Meanwhile, our elites will not abide a blow to their quarterly earnings for anyone, so the formula is: make money polluting China, go live in Canada; make money polluting India, go live in the USA.
>Some progress is real.
Let me similarly point three cherry-picked stats that show the world is getting worse, to point out how flawed that reasoning is.
* The percentage of the population living under democracies has gone down since 2000.
* Wealth concentration and income inequality have risen since the 1970s.
* Suicides have gone up.
If there is one thing I realise is that only technological progress marches on. The rest of "progress" (social, political) almost never goes unequivocally "forwards", and is subject to setbacks and upturns and reversals of previously achieved progress.
For my taste, Anand Giridharadas mixes those things a bit too loosely. One moment he is talking about the elite that is fighting for a better future in Africa and the next minute he talks about how the funding of public schools in the US is organized.
Sure, his point is that the US elites are helping Africa because (it is cheaper and) it doesn't endanger the system of their wealth in the US, but I wonder if helping the people in Africa isn't more urgent than the ones in the developed part of the world.
That said, I like how he presents and explains his view to the audience at Google.
No.
You either don't know what 'social upheaval' means in the minds of nationalists or I wonder why you would judge it as 'rightfully'. There is absolutely nothing rightful about killing people.
I don't know if that movement is just a based on feeling 'left behind', maybe as a symptom. I mean, there are serious issues connected to all of this. For example, there are companies in Europe which systematically conquer specific African industries (e.g., milk products), which is one of the reasons why the Africans migrate (no job -> no food -> certain death). The worst about it is that the same industries receive EU subsidies.
So the European people pay money which causes the Africans to come to Europe (great job). After all, stopping the European companies from doing that wouldn't solve the problem as the US or the Chinese would just see the opportunity, but I doubt that shutting down the own country is a proper solution to that problem either (and nationalists don't stop there).
"
Just study the rise of the Nazi party or the Russian revolution or even the Iranian revolution. Ordinary citizens started to feel that the country is not working for them anymore and looked for somebody to change that. Maybe they picked the wrong leaders to make those changes but the trigger was dissatisfaction with the current state. So if our current elite focuses on helping other countries while enjoying tax cuts for themselves but decaying infrastructure and wage stagnation at home there will at some point be a movement to change peacefully or forcefully.
You wrote '[...] rightfully so' which I have to object clearly.
I am saying that what nationalists call 'social upheaval' is often against the law and therefore not rightful. So if you are using the established democratic processes (voting, demonstrating, etc.) to change the political situation that is okay. But if you do so forcefully, that is most likely not okay (depending on the law of the country you live in).
This happens when the general population decides that their leadership is not working for them anymore.
You are taking 'true' situations out of context and rearrange them so that they serve your purpose. For example, yes, what happened in East Germany before the wall fell was unlawful, but the context is, that East Germany was an occupied country which changes the whole situation and is not applicable to the modern US. Instead, the criminal deeds of that Nazis were what lead to the situation in East Germany in the first place.
Similarly, India wasn't a free country either at Gandhi's time, and France wasn't a democracy at the time. So even if you might find a few situations where unlawful behavior changes the world for the better, it doesn't mean that it is an appropriate tool to solve conflicts in general.
I doubt that I will change your mind, but you should seriously consider looking to the world from multiple perspectives.
It's really not that different. The inequality in conditions between poor public schools and wealthier schools (public and private) is dangerous for the future of American productivity, causing gainful participation in the economy to become ever more correlated with prior socioeconomic privilege.
If that productivity growth runs out, and the relative conditions worsen for non-wealthy people in the US, there will be no more helping Africa, due to economic decline, or domestic political instability.
Basically, these aren't independent problems. Increasing inequality at home makes it harder to help people elsewhere. Spiraling poverty elsewhere results in conflicts in those places, and we eventually experience the effects of those conflicts one way or another.
I don't think that the current system of funding public schools in the US is good. The opposite is the case. Yes, I do believe that education is a critical instrument to fight inequality and racism and that every human should have free access to high-quality education (which is not that difficult to achieve with modern technologies).
By the way, your argument is missing a decisive point: The help for Africa is done by the elite, not by the broad population. Therefore, even if the inequality in the US would rise, it would take a while before there would be 'no help for Africa' anymore (until it would be politically problematic).
Given the speed of information dispersal, it might become politically problematic quickly, especially once a narrative is established.
However, due to the length of election cycles, it may not be an electoral issue as quickly.
I have a hard time believing this. The elite spend a lot of time looking for ways to help themselves. The elite spend a lot of time looking to enrich themselves. The elite didn't become the elite by being charitable or caring or thinking of others.
Also, I don't think this "nature" is just confined to the elite. Everyone is selfish.
> but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status.
People who love wealth and power don't want to diminish their wealth and power?
I basically agree with the guy but nothing he said is new or insightful.
A large portion of our conversations(as a 10%er) is about how we can create products, services, or nonprofit organizations that help people.
This also seems to neglect that Exchange has both parties benefiting.
Have they seen ONE such project from start to end that made real difference? Like I don't know, here's something egotistic: help one family -- buy them a beach house, supply them with tech and some financial reserves, AND help them build a profitable consultancy so they don't hang on your neck until you die?
Something communal: or just build a well-funded school where they personally pay the fair wages of the teachers? For 10 years?
I've been hearing a lot about the wealthy thinking of how to help. IMO it always stops at thinking only. At this point I've come to think they want to feel good about themselves but not really make a difference.
In any case, I've never seen somebody rich actually make a difference anywhere. I mean it's normal if they want to protect the sources of their wealth -- to an extent -- but there are many good deeds to be done that don't involve them sacrificing their wealth.
Hence I concluded the occasional charity tooting is just a feel-good factor for them.
And when populations hit a tipping point, the elite will start a big war to thin out a few hundred million people or maybe 3-4 billion this time.
It is the same as it ever was.
Google, Facebook, and all the other big tech companies could have helped liberate humanity--we were talking about privacy and open government in the late 1990s. It was all set to be implemented, then 9/11 happened and a new Iron Curtain fell on the US. All by design by those who can't allow the rabble to have any true freedom.
When I look at what Google and the others have become now, I just feel ill--this is a major power play where they are aiding and abetting outright tyranny in China and will happily aid and abet the same crimes in the West as long as it suits their goal of power consolidation. Worse, they are now aligned with the far left, which makes utterly no sense except from a "gaining total domination" mindset. It's sick. The left is not "for the people." Show me one historical example! That talk was always a false front for naked brutality.
Before you downvote me, realize what is at stake here. Read some damn history books and come to understand what happened to the Greeks and the Romans and why.