Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

I recently wrote on the topic of the lack of overlap between zealotry for a cause and wealth. I think that to become super-wealthy requires a certain cluelessness when it comes to what to spend money on - or how to spend money to best effect, or more fundamentally how to use money to change the world in a way you believe in, or a lack of the vision needed to see how to spend money.

This is a social evolution sort of a thing: if you are a zealot and you know how to spend money to effect the change you want, then you aren't going to stay on the money-accumulation train for anywhere near as long. You'll spend it, and make some of that change happen.

You need something like this sort of effect to explain why there are any wealthy people at all. Any one of the Forbes 100 could cure a couple of diseases, get a fair way to demonstrating a cure for aging in mice ($1 billion price tag), develop the tech to irrigate the Sahara, etc, etc. But they largely do not, and remain within the process they have built for themselves. Where they do go all out for philanthropy, there is usually a startling lack of imagination - see the Gates Foundation, for example, which is doing nothing more than business as usual in big philanthropy, or the Ellison Medical Foundation which does nothing more than replicate the NIH.

Anyway. Knowing how to spend money "right" (meaning right for you, your vision, having a vision, etc) is not compatible with accumulating money, and only the outliers will fall into both camps.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/02/one-wealthy-zealo...

I see a lot of disparagement, especially on HN, of the Gates Foundation's methods. I don't find myself questioning Bill Gates when he talks about how unimaginably difficult it is to improve systems like education or cope with malaria.

On a fundamental level - individual scandals and cynicism about Gates' motives aside - what is the foundation doing wrong?

I strongly, strongly disagree with the Gates Foundation's method for improving education, but I am happy that he's at least raising awareness of the problem, forcing discussion, and pushing changes. He's right about the "what", but he's wrong about the "why" and the "how".

Oddly, I'd expect his parents would know better, too.

I suspect that one cause of this is that super wealthy people are often owners of a business. Their money is tied up in what made them wealthy emotionally as well as politically. For instance Buffet was wealthy in Berkshire-Hathaway shares. He recently started contributing significant portions of his wealth to charity because he no longer felt that he needed those shares to retain control. On another point, while Gates Foundation is not nearly as visionary as I would like they are not a traditional charity either from what I have seen. They tried to identify the best place to save lives (in the short term) with money, and started there. They have a good statistical grounding.

While the Gates Foundation may not be flashy or romantic, they do seem to be pragmatic- which in the end is probably a lot more helpful for actually helping the maximum number of people.

As I understand, the Gates Foundation has saved ~5.8 million lives through vaccines and healthcare, and seems to be on track to save many more: http://frugaldad.com/microsoft/

I'm genuinely curious-how is that "business as usual" for big philanthropy? Who else is successfully nearly eliminating major fatal diseases?

Gates Foundation, for example, which is doing nothing more than business as usual in big philanthropy

I wouldn't call things like the giving pledge "business as usual" in big philanthropy. I can't think of any prior art for it.

http://givingpledge.org/

It is in many ways a sign of the age - the focus on getting money, and the comparative lack of interest in explaining how to be far better at spending it to attain measurable results than the rest of big philanthropy.

Philanthropy done right looks much more like the Thiel model:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/12/peter-thiel-encou...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/breakout-labs-ann...

The Gates Foundation would do far more good in the world by splitting itself up into a hundred or a thousand more directed and competing interests, focused on bottom-up change one innovation at a time.

As it is, the majority of its funds will probably eventually evaporate in the grind of top-down existing strategies that have solved nothing permanently - but have instead led to government-bound institutions that do more to perpetuate the problems they allegedly try to solve than generate good in the world, or which have turned into jobs programs for comparatively privileged individuals, disconnected from any need to achieve concrete results.

As it is, the majority of its funds will probably eventually evaporate in the grind of top-down existing strategies that have solved nothing permanently

I agree with much of what you're saying, but my overall outlook isn't that negative. There is a real chance that their work will help completely eradicate malaria. If that's not solving something permanently, I don't know what is.

> I wouldn't call things like the giving pledge "business as usual" in big philanthropy. I can't think of any prior art for it.

Andrew Carnegie, in The Gospel of Wealth, railed against inheritance and said, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced". He advised fellow millionaires of his era to donate their fortunes during their lifetime to activities that would create greater wealth in the community, such as free libraries for the poor.

Exquisite example. I stand corrected.

I'm wondering if people in the position to "change the world" have any desire to make that change?

If I were in the billions of dollars rich, I don't know if I'd want to do much to change the world. You can call me unenlightened, but and the end of the day, I'd be the unenlightened billionaire and you'd just be some person trying to tell me how to spend my money.

If your assertions about the ease of solving those various problems are true, it is even more bizarre that they are not being attacked by collective action.

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