MrBeast's Faux Philanthropy
unherd.com
unherd.com
It primarily raises generic concerns about these kinds of projects, without linking them to these specific projects, after some generic mud-slinging starting with "racist comments made as a teenager" and a very careful wording of "teen grooming allegations" that may leave readers thinking that Donaldson (MrBeast) was accused of grooming a co-host rather than what actually happened (the now-dismissed co-host being accused of grooming).
The well video doesn't mention it but the project site does mention sustainable maintenance of the wells. Of course, this could be either a serious and effective effort or a bit of text on a web site, but the article doesn't try to distinguish that either, it just assumes the worst.
How much substance do you think is here? https://news3lv.com/news/local/las-vegas-staff-say-mrbeast-s...
I respect the authors commitment to showing how MrBeasts philanthropy can be ineffective if not counter productive.
But, in his stated intentions of getting google admoney and redistributing it to people in need, what else is he supposed to do? We can agree to disagree that this itself is a bad premise.
What I’m really interested in is knowing what the Beast Philanthrophy has to say about these things. Are they aware that 6/10 wells are in disrepair in some parts? Are they willing to invisibly commit funds to future maintenance? How does Beast Philanthropy vet orphanages to ensure they’re not the mentioned “farms”?
On the hierarchy of benevolent individuals in this example we have: 1. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of helping the less fortunate 2. Journalists stating 1 is inefficient for X, Y, Z, and working with 1 to improve the efficacy of their philanthropy, with the intent of helping the less fortunate 3. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of improving their own self image 4. Journalists writing about 1 or 3 with the intent of making them look bad instead of improving outcomes for those in need.
1. It is not the donor's fault if the wells are not being maintained properly. Ideally this should be something that the locals are paid and trained to do but honestly, if you can't even be bothered to take care of your primary source of water, you have big problems which cannot be solved by ANYONE's philanthropy.
2. That brings me to the point about local attitudes towards donors and what is done for them: I have seen locals really benefit from things donated to them and they then use the new facilities to build a much better future for themselves and their children. HOWEVER, I have also seen locals who absolutely waste whatever is given to them. They may even loot everything down to the last nut and bolt. I have some theories about why this happens (based on personal experience) but I have noticed very different outcomes in different villages for the EXACT SAME help received from donors.
Secondly, there is this issue of trust. There are villages where the people simply do not trust each other AT ALL. I have seen villages where each person thinks they ought to steal first before their neighbours do.
If someone is willing to donate a new facility, but the local people would prefer the "nuts and bolts" which make up the facility, why should they respect the donor's wishes over their own needs?
Learning about this, and figuring out how to make a positive impact without upsetting some people is what I am trying to do here. I have had people tell me that the mere visit of a foreigner to one family caused envy among the neighbors because they assumed that this family was getting money from that visitor, and then they made up stories about that family and tried to discredit them with their landlord.
One of the issues with the thinking around community projects is the propensity to consider beneficiaries of donations as though they can't possibly do anything wrong - so the thinking goes that if a project fails the blame should never be placed on the beneficiaries - it can be placed on donors, the intermediate agencies, monitoring agencies.. EVERYONE apart from the beneficiary.
I am not supportive of such an approach.
I think it is far more helpful in the long run to make it very clear to the folks in these areas that if the donations made to them are misused that it will impact all donations in the future - that it is contingent upon them to ensure that the donations are well used, that the equipment is protected etc.. and that there are real consequences to not doing that.
That is, treat them as adults - not as infants. Make them accountable. Stop pussyfooting around talking about tough issues. Have people explain why something was allowed to be looted etc.
(I'm not familiar with Mr. Beast. I will say that the 2 videos I've seen bordered on psychopathy. But I think the general principle of my statement is still worth exploring.)
The premise of your position is that philanthropy is always a net good, but that isn't true: philanthropy can be harmful. Homelessness is the easiest example to think about, where half-baked philanthropic efforts can have immediate harmful consequences, as we see time and time again.
He needs to target an audience of children because they are gullible through inexperience and won't be able to read this from him.
Kinda? There's a thin line between donating food to a homeless shelter and setting up a camera crew to film a vetted contingent of contestants who have to fight in potentially dangerous conditions where Beast Ltd. cannot be held accountable for injuries. One is selfless - the other is petty exploitation. It feels very clear where "the line" is here.
I guess you could argue that Mr. Beast has an incentive to set up these things to maximize profit so he can "donate more to charity" (cough cough buy cars and houses). But at the end of the day the publicity alone is enough to argue that he's exploiting the people involved - the additional ad revenue and inherent high-performance incentive of his work makes it hard to call the whole thing charity. Maybe gambling or, at the most absolute generous, a "game" show.
MrBeast is unfortunately just one part of this. And he's not even the worst offender sadly.
> allaying guilt
Clearly the population is split on wether or not intent matters when it comes to philanthropy. Some people say, it is only respectable if you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not for some ulterior motive (like repairing/boosting your image). On the other side, you could argue that the majority of philanthropy is done for image improvement, and without that benefit millions of people would be left without help. Hoping for "true altruists" to save us is probably never going to work.
True altruists that can gain enough power and resources to make a difference is a paradox. I need 10 billion dollars before meaningful impact happens (random number, but the point stands _a lot of money_). That's more money that any altruistic person would ever get to, since they'd start donating at the 100million or less mark.
The closest we have to a true altruistic person with power is someone like Mackenzie Bezos. No derision here, but she didn't have "what it takes" to get there, but she does have the desire to help. Which is also why we don't hear much about her donations, compared I Mr. Beast, despite her giving orders of magnitude more money away. And more correctly.
Then, we could look one level higher, how do these people acquire their wealth? Clearly selling garbage food to kids, creating fake giveaway videos, and other things isn't exactly helping the world along the way. Making electric cars cool / hip? That's pretty good. Embrace, extend, extinguish? Terrible.
Holistically, Mr. Beast is earning his money off of children and "legal scams". Then, fixing his reputation by donation pennies on the dollar of that back to the world. Overall, probably not a great person. Couple that with how conscious he is of what he's doing based on various leaks, and is say definitely not someone I'd categorize as deserving of any adulation. Obviously not actively evil, but definitely overall harmful to society in his pursuit of fame and wealth.
Aside: how isn't this titled "MrBeast's Faux-lanthropy"?
In one camp is ineffective philanthropy pretending to be effective. In the other camp is actually effective philanthropy.
What makes is problematic is when the ineffective philanthropist is using the philanthropy to line their own pockets.
We have halloween coming up. Imagine one kid taking all the candy first and then acting as a "philantropist" by giving out a fraction of what would pass as a fair share to other kids — oh and he is making videos of it — and he selects who gets something and who doesn't. Very "effective", especially compared to all kids just getting their fair share.
As a parent I'd go with my kid to a psychotherapist if it did that, because it is not normal. Now that is of course an analogy and things are more complex in a capitalist world, but being an arsonist working in the firebrigade doesn't turn you into a hero even when you risk your life to extinguish the fire.
Fair share doesn't (or shouldn't) mean even share because that's just not possible.
Everyone has the same opportunity to do what Mr Beast is doing (and many try, some pretty successfully).
I watched the well drilling one and thought it was kinda cool, both for helping and also mucking around with cool drilling machines. (https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8). I'll admit not taking watching the Kardashians for more than about 30 seconds so I could be wrong there.
This fundamentally contradicts mainline capitalist theory.
People only trade / exchange money when they believe the service (or goods or whatever) is worth the money.
IE: someone pays $20 for X because they believe X is worth $30, $40, or $100 to them. If X were only worth $19, then they would reject the deal and walk away.
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Case in point: if gasoline doubled in price, would you still drive? How high would gasoline prices have to get before you stopped driving?
the (paraphrased) quote of "don't expect someone to understand something, if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it" is very much on point here as well.
The accumulation of wealth really does impact the economy negatively - as it's (by definition) not being spend, otherwise it wouldn't accumulate.
The reason why the theory is generally correct is because money that has been spent isn't gone, so it's once again available for the next trade. But in today's economy it's effectively false because the accumulated wealth is instead funneled into property acquisition and similar expenditures, which effectively becomes rent seeking that's ultimately just syphoning wealth from the population/damaging the economy at scale
You fight the over-accumulation of wealth by making an inflationary environment (ie: create policies that explicitly make tomorrow's money worth a little bit less than today's money). Or use wealth taxes (or other forms of taxation: promise to take away money in the future if it is not spent today).
Inflationary environments are actually positive for these people, because it makes it easier to justify ever increasing rents.
The people that are actually harmed by inflation are employed and not particularly rich, so they keep their savings in cash, essentially. (Both their wages and their savings get devalued every year, making large purchases to get out of these toxic spirals ever harder)
For the same reason wealth taxes don't really work either... unless you revamp the entire tax system and somehow found a way to make rent seeking unviable (I.e. exponentially increasing property taxes by quantity owned). I'm honestly not sure how that's gonna be possible however, it's too ingrained into our markets and the consequences of such changes would likely be extremely unpredictable
No. Deflationary is better, because they keep the same price but get more and more wealth anyway.
Its the lack of competition that's the problem in any case. If someone is not contributing well or giving a good deal, shop somewhere else. If you're unable to shop somewhere else, then its a known flaw in capitalism (called Monopolies). You only have a good capitalistic system if competition can be assured.
Think a little about it: if the money gains in value it would mean their property loses value, because it's price would go down (as the money will be worth more).
Rent seekers mostly have their net worth in assets such as properties and shares, and for those people, inflation is good - because these effectively become more valuable - because they're suddenly worth it's purchasing price + inflation. (That's the definition of inflation, you need more cash to purchase the same product vs deflation where you can buy the same product for less cash).
If every wage etc increased at the same rate as inflation, the difference would probably be academic... But it's not, most employees didn't get a total 30% wage increase within the last 4 years after all, which means that the total purchasing power of (for example) the American people has decreased.
This will ultimately reduce their ability to spend money on products, which means less trades that happen... And more accumulation of wealth, because the people that actually captured that value invested it in things that will effectively become rent seeking, ultimately furthering the spiral
I don't think the poor or middle class have much net worth in anything.
In particular, my mental model is that the middle class will get wrecked by their student loans or car loans if you purposefully deflated the dollar.
The rich have enough money to prepare for all circumstances, be it inflation or deflation. It's a loss if you're trying to prevent them from gaining more money by simple means like this. In times of deflation they will hoard cash (even international trades like the the carry trade: taking advantage of the difference of inflation between national currencies and economies).
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In any case: increasing the cost of everyone's debt burdens is almost obviously the wrong move.
And I think you'd agree too that assets become more valuable by inflation (because that's kinda the definition of the term), and that consequently means that if your net worth is mostly assets, as every rent seekers portfolio is - you really do like inflation.
Even if you're right that the people heavily in debt also gain by having it devalued via inflation: I don't think it'd have enough impact to offset their depreciated wage and the additional cost of living though - but that's just my personal expectation
If you spend $40 to fill up your car (but you were willing to pay as high as $120 to fill up your car), then $80 of value was created out of nothingness. You got $120 of value (given that you _would have_ filled up your car at a much higher price anyway), but only paid $40 to get it.
This is fundamental to the theory of capitalism. The trade isn't grounded at the paid price (ie: $40 in this case), the trade is grounded in the price _YOU WOULD HAVE PAID FOR_ vs what you actually paid.
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If you are paying above the price what is comfortable for you, then you must stop paying for the system to work.
Now obviously: capitalism stops working in cases where you'd pay any amount of money (because now the opponent would choose any price and force you to pay). This happens in monopolies and health care. (There's no limit to the price you'd pay to stay alive).
However, I still posit that in the vast majority of cases, that capitalism works. Negotiating for a lower price is assumed to happen on both parties.
So effectively, philanthropy is funded using the proceeds of theft. It's about diffusing harm to all and concentrating the benefits towards a select few.
I think the reasoning is ridiculous. Shame someone for digging a well because it might not be repaired in the future????
Now don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he's being accused to has much more merit, for example in one video he showed a dilapidated hospital that he claimed to rebuild from scratch, but other footage revealed that the hospital was in fact in much better condition initially. So he's basically trying to make it look like he's doing more than in reality, and that's definitely something that needs to be called out.
Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from.
It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth.
And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy.
> He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”.
At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!
That seems like a false dichotomy no? The article is specifically about MrBeast, who would NOT have "lavish resources" if he did what you propose. The stunt nature of the work IS the income stream.
I think it's more reasonable to ask if he's just creating short term gains, or making things worse. I would guess the former. Which is honestly better than the alternative which is he does cruel prank videos with the same budget.
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
There are no Mr Beast videos where "miserable" people compete to get charity prizes.
Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools".
Just another outsider who thinks they know better.
Side note, the Mr Beast handbook is an interesting read https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/how-to-succeed-at-mrbea...
A grown adult man really wrote this.
If I were Mr Beast and I read this I’d shrug it off and think you can’t impress everyone. Again, I don’t agree or even follow what he does but it actually doesn’t matter, if you do good, or bad, or do much of anything notable, you will attract hate.
Of course, and you need to accept that you will get hate, but it shouldn't become a source of validation. Getting hate from bad people doesn't mean you're doing good - e.g. Stalin was hated by Nazis, that doesn't make him a good guy.
> where he says “Be hated” and describes how in being successful you should seek to be hated by those with poor values
I think that even if you're in fact the good guy doing good things, seeking hate / outrage from the bad people is wrong or at least tactically a bad decision in the sense they will get even more deep-seated in their bad values.
With Musk, it's quite different. He's the richest person on the planet, exchanging favors with a presidential candidate of the most powerful country on earth, both of them having pretty "flexible" views on democracy and upholding the law. Musk is powerful and dangerous.
* https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education... shows the average lifetime earning of an american is between 1/2 and 3 million dollars depending on sex and education level.