Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.
Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head.
The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about.
But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around).
I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.
The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago.
And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big.
Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent.
Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility.
And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.
That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction.
There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.
European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.
Now identify a country that could respond with a similar level of aid in less time. Not more aid in more time, but just “beat to the punch” with a useful initial response. Citations preferred.
The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.
Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama.
Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year:
2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer.
Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress.
The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example.
4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process.
"The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u...
The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.
You're just cherry picking numbers.
The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid.
But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), the UK ($284.85), and obviously behind top-spenders such as Norway ($812.58), Sweden ($701.10), Luxembourg ($609.48), etc.
It also puts them behind the EU: The total spending of the EU was $73.80 billion from member states and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
Food is obviously one of the most important ways of providing foreign aid combating an immediate problem, and it's great the US are using their geography to help out, but it's not exactly fair to pretend others aren't contributing.
And what about US institutions, such as the one this article is about? Seems like you are doing your own cherry picking.
They're already included in the US number. In fact they are the US number.
Due to the greater autonomy of EU member states their individual contributions and those done by EU institutions (meaning those institutions not belonging to a specific member state) were kept separate in the above link.
It's possible the word "institution" doesn't mean what you think it means.
If not, then it’s not a very helpful metric since huge amounts of aid aren’t being measured.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
In my opinion, it is great we have ultra-rich people who decide to spend their resources in ways that help others in ways the government currently isn't able to.
He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/socialist/fascist revolution. I truly and sincerely hope today's ultra billionaires are as smart and realistic as Carnegie in this respect.
Carnegie emphasized education in his giving. Limited success. His library movement was largely successful, but his trade school turned into yet another hyper expensive prestinge-driven private university. Although I guess it was the brith-place of a lot of the computer technologies that made the current crop of ultra billionaires rich.
I think we're over-due for someone to emphasize healthcare in their giving. (Gates did this, but not in the USA.) We're also over due for a labor backlash against this sort of obscene wealth concentration (and not even as a value-laden statement... just as a "lessons from history" thing, the pendulum will probably swing).
"In 1900, he donated $1 million for the creation of a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh, envisioning a school where working-class men and women of Pittsburgh could learn practical skills, trades and crafts that would enhance their careers, lives and communities."
It was not until the dawn of the computer era that things started to change.
https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html
See this link for more details.
CMU has damn close to zero "working class men and women from Pittsburgh" in its student body these days, unless by "working class" you mean "parents were doctors, lawyers, and software engineers from shadyside/squill/fox chapel/etc." :(. On the other hand, it is one of the two big reasons Pittsburgh experienced a renaissance in the early 21st century (which continues to this day), and in that sense did achieve the goal of helping the Pittsburgh community thrive. Just not by elevating working class folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Institution_for_Scien...
Some astronomical observatories built atop certain mountains were built with his funding.
That’s interesting. Why would he “lay siege” to workers? Were they hiding somewhere behind fortifications, and he was trying to force them to work, or what? It’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where capitalists would even find it useful to “lay siege” to workers.
5. Niger: Wealth per Adult: $1,017 Niger is the largest nation in West Africa, but more than 80% of its land area is in the Sahara Desert, so it is prone to drought and famine. The GDP as of 2017 was $9.87 billion, but the wealth per adult remained low despite economic reforms.
Reference:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/managing-wealth/112916...
Is comparing very poor countries to individuals from very rich countries a relevant framing? Global wealth disparities aren't a new phenomenon (and global wealth inequality is decreasing!)
That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor. (OT: I often wonder if his story is well-known in tech circles because of the end date of his reign.)
That's kind of my point though; owning an empire is an extreme form of wealth, well beyond what any of the American tech billionaires have.
So no, I don't think that any billionaire is even remotely close to being able to sustainably spend what any country-level government can.
For another reference: the smallest GDP listed at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... is ~$40B, and government spending is usually some 10s of percent of GDP.