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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot. Is there something you have in mind, specifically?

This kind of logic is just jealousy. "They have money I don't and spend it on things I don't value" is true of every entity wealthier than you. It's true of your consumption too: how many $7 lattes have you purchased that could have fed a whole family, as it were? It's true of corporations and bureaucracies and governments too, which is why libertarianism is so tempting.

But there's no world where everyone agrees on what stuff we should value, just like there's no world (or at least no feasible world) where people aren't able to spend wastefully, because both of those are at their core subjective decisions.

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You can build a small school in a third world country, such as Nepal, for £10k. So you could build somewhere around 1000 small schools (or a lesser number of bigger ones).

Are there 1000 Nepali villages who have asked for a school and the local community thinks that’s what they’re really short on?

Or is that a thing you like seeing pictures of westerners building/staffing?

Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.

Your fellow respondent who mentioned GiveDirectly was at least advocating for a use of resources that has a strong chance of being net positive for the ostensible recipients.

>Are there 1000 Nepali villages who have asked for a school and the local community thinks that’s what they’re really short on?

Quite likely. Certainly if you include other developing countries, as well as Nepal.

There are small communities in Nepal that get very little help from the central government. Also much work still to be done to repair damage from the last earthquake, especially outside the tourist areas.

>Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.

Many of them are. However there are organizations like https://thejunipertrust.org that spend 98% of donations helping the intended recipients. Also they employ local to do the work. Which means money goes into the community which also makes the local community more invested in the project.

I understand GiveDirectly is also an excellent charity. But (egotistically) it is nice to be able to point at a picture of a school and think 'I did that' (or, at least, financed it).

10k must be the cost of materials and labor. But arranging this project, getting the local authorities on board, is extra.

In the case of The Juniper Trust, the vast majority of the organizing is done for free, by volunteers in the UK and Nepal.

Why would it cost anything to get 'the local authorities on board' to build a school - unless the country is totally corrupt?

That's a feasible individual expense. Have you built a school in Nepal? Do you have a link where I could? My guess is that, like most places, the fundamental limits to this stuff are not financial. You want 1000 schools you need 1000 schools worth of raw materials and 1000 crews to build them and roads to get all that stuff there and utilities to be extended to cover it. And then you need 1000 schools worth of teachers and staff, which you probably don't have either.

Economies don't work like this. They never have. If money was all it took to eradicate poverty then poverty wouldn't exist. Inequality in opportunity is an endemic problem with entire societies.

Including our own! Because that's exactly what you're complaining about: our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably. But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way. You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.

> Have you built a school in Nepal?

Yes. Sponsored the build anyway. I didn't lug the bricks miles from the nearest road!

>Do you have a link where I could?

https://thejunipertrust.org/

>You want 1000 schools you need 1000 schools worth of raw materials and 1000 crews to build them and roads to get all that stuff there and utilities to be extended to cover it.

If you had $10M to spend, then building 1000 small schools probably wouldn't be the best approach. For the reasons you say. But I don't have $10M to give.

>our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably

Yes. Rich people should be taxed more. Not a popular viewpoint on HN, I'm sure.

>But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way.

We could fix it, if we wanted to. But the billionaires have the power, and they don't want it fixed.

>You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.

Nepal is a poor country with chronic inequality. But, because it is a poor country, your dollar can do a lot more good there.

So, I clicked through. And while this looks like a worthy charity, you're spinning the numbers pretty badly. It's not $10k to build a school ab initio. It's $10k to REbuild an existing school damaged by an earthquake. Not the same thing at all!

I did say small school. Ours was a 2 room kintergarden, built from scratch to replace one that was made of corrugated iron and not in a good state.

https://thejunipertrust.org/jt_projects/bampti-kindergaten-s...

(the total cost was around ~£12k, of which we donated £10k).

> With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot

You could outright transfer it to some of the poorest people in the world (via https://www.givedirectly.org/, you'd add ~5% to their total cash transfer amount). They could then invest it in whatever they need.

Surely the billionaire in question does a ton of charity and philanthropy already, though, right? They all do. Is your point that they don't do enough, or that they shouldn't be allowed to spend 10M of what they don't give on a ridiculous dog house? Those are numerical arguments, so shouldn't you have to come to them with numbers to present?

Again, my point is that this is all subjective. You're simply saying that you don't value the ridiculous dog house and that they should spend that on something else, but they probably do spend on the thing you want already, or something very similar.

You don't get to tell people how to spend their money for the same reason they don't get to direct your own wasteful spending (which surely exists, right?). That's just standard western liberalism, you don't seriously disagree?

I agree jealousy can be present when the Have Nots look at the purchasing decisions of the Haves.

And I also agree that there is subjectivity in the decisions in whether the wealthy are self-indulging kings of the globalized era, or examples of the spoils the geniuses or innovators can achieve as they bring value to earth.

But the billionaires can justify their despotism and self-indulgence to the masses as they are marched to the guillotine. And the intellectual discourse on the subjectivity of hedonistic decisions be silenced. The French aristocracy learned the lessons of royal restraint the hard way.

> The French aristocracy learned the lessons of royal restraint the hard way.

"The French revolution was good, actually" is quite a take...

One Thomas Jefferson seems to have shared.

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