The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone. These are individuals who command the resources of small nations. Yet their insecurities win out every time, rendering them powerless to take a stand on anything and instead wander to the beats of others’ drums.
Every bit of lip service about connecting people is overshadowed by "they 'trust me'. dumb fucks".
So what does money have to do with doing what you want ?
That’s still capitulation. When it’s fashionable, they’re one way. When it’s not, they’re the other. It’s not savvy, it’s cowardice.
But what are you going to do to Carnegie? Not have steel? Rockerfeller says something antithetical to Elite Beliefs? Good luck getting oil.
The Silicon Valley 'elite' of today has wealth predicated on theoretical value calculations of things the world isn't even convinced it needs. Monumental difference, and it significantly changes how these guys operate and what legacy they leave.
Did anyone really think Zuck cares about people? After all the past and ongoing ethical issues with his companies?
He is consistently looking out for himself. There is no capitulation.
For ex, from the article re the school:
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered.
> In 2017, a Harvard study funded by CZI found that by 2015 the growth rate of student achievement in English had significantly improved — but that there had been no significant change for math.
> the school met stumbling blocks. Two principals left in its early years, which three former school leaders said made it difficult to establish stability for students.
NYTimes said the refocusing on science investment vs social happened slowly over 5yrs and they haven't invested in any social ones in a few years. So this change has been in the works for a while...
For as long as I’ve seen Bill Gates donate to all causes that would please the most leftist proponents, the only reaction I’ve seen was indifference/hate.
It’s a sociological reality: Nothing pleases a mob. On one side, leftist characters always end up in a situation where they were not left enough, which, in revolutionary environments, justifies their termination. In France when the left was elected the president was described as “a capitalist, simping for billionaires”. On the other side, if you are rich and perform acts promoted by leftism, such as donating your entire salary, increasing your employees by 30% a year, or like Bill Gates, donating your entire wealth for the world’s hunger and health before your death, your actions are construed as malevolent, probably there’s a “get rich” scheme behind it for Bill Gates, or probably “you had to treat your employees bad if you had to increase their salary.”
For a good person, there is no winning. But we have countless counterexamples of bad people liked by the same population. A lot, lot, lot of people reach this conclusion by their 40ies. After all, it’s not “spine” that people should have, but just mutual love, including some from the bottom to the top.
And perhaps it explains the current trends.
More likely, the wealthier you are the more tied you are to the system. The US government could make it very difficult for Zuck to conduct his business, which would tank his wealth. This is in particularly true when there's a pseudo-dictator in power.
Pretty fair if you take Eli Musk as a counterexample. Eli stood with the government and the whole left groaned that he sold out. Then he backed off due to his principles and the whole right groaned that he's not a team player, also the left still hates him too for some reason. Basically, in this hyper-polarized political environment, apparently all sides agree that they don't like Eli Musk, ironically the power commander of the Twitter propaganda network node.
In the article it was schools that were defunded. Does the government have a history of consistently funding schools?
Billionaires paying very little tax are forever ( certainly more than a lifetime as the wealth is handed down over generations ).
Painting with a very broad brush, the US is the most charitable country in the world, yet we lag behind many other countries according to various measures of human welfare.
The US was the most charitable nation in the world but it's not a given.
I think this depends quite a bit on what you're trying to achieve. Hard to measure effectiveness otherwise.
E.g. if you care about global human welfare (and setting aside longtermist ideas), the most effective use of a marginal dollar is to donate money to people in poorer countries (via various methods). One of the main reasons is that the richer countries have a much more robust social welfare system already via taxation.
Charity incurs oversight burdens. The UK has a long story about failures in charity, the charity commissioner has had to intercede many times. It would be wrong to assume there are no oversight costs, the thing is that to the charity they may look like externalities. They have to be borne, the state bears the cost.
Charities also usually cannot intercede politically to fix the situation demanding their charitable work. So, charities are excluded from lobbying in some ways, where governments reflect the will of the people and are subject to both good and band consequences.
Charities are abused. Churches for instance. Why do churches qualify for charitable status, when they (in most economies where they are or have been) are established entities with massive landholdings and wealth?
In the end, it's a matter of philosophy. Without being patronising, I tend to think right wing people who believe in personal responsibility and low taxes favour charity because it gives them discretion, to give or not, as a function of how they feel about the recipient, and left wing people who believe in the state as a construct reflecting popular will believe in state functions to implement the burdens individuals cannot manage for themselves.
I say that because my very good friends who donate highly tend to be right wing and tend to make moralising statements about diabetes being a function of a lack of personal self control and so do not fund interventions to prevent diabetes in the working poor because "they lack self control" and also chose not to fund womens reproductive rights on similar grounds "chastity is its own reward" -Bill and Melinda Gates were exceptional in ignoring the fundamentalist christian lobby which came into the room in the Reagan "just say no" years, and funded contraception and abortion in Africa regardless.
That would take much of the corruption out of it. These donor advised funds now allow someone to maintain full control of their money while the IRS considers it 'donated' it for a major tax write-offs.
I'm sure there are good nonprofits/charities. And there's definitely inefficient public offices that are mainly interested in politics.
My point is "seems less efficient" is kind of weak ground to be asking others for evidence
You don't have to have a 'sense', you can look up the overhead for some nonprofits to look and see how much is spent on compensation vs giving/redirecting money to their causes vs. ancillary expenses.
It's often much less than the government in terms of overall efficiency.
Also I’m not from the area but how are disadvantaged youth coming from Palo Alto at all? Isn’t it one of the highest CoL areas in the nation? Also isn’t it pretty crime-free and well-maintained? How disadvantaged can you be if that’s where you live?
On the second part {speculation} Because maybe not so rich people lived there before the area became so expensive or moved there for job opportunity + safe place to raise kids ?
If you do a quick Google / chatgpt you'll see that the cost of living compared to median income is extremely bad... So not the worst place but certainly not the best...
What is a "National Need".
Why is Education a National Need?
Great Big National plans are often the least efficient method of organisation, short of maybe asking the UN to get involved.
Why is it a National Need?
What is a national need? And why is education specifically a national need?
Won't be popular on HN, I think we need to move closer to that again. Maybe not that extreme, but that's the proper direction. We can then use that income to tackle big problems.
We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
How about we first bring back pensions and 30 year jobs before we try and fix that?
One of the best things about the freedom of moving from job to job and not relying on pensions or 30-year contracts is that it enables and empowers everyday workers to have the innate, untenable, inalienable "check and balance" on the labor market to choose who they give labor to at any given time - and picket them as well. For the average person: You SHOULD be able to move jobs at any time, you SHOULD be able to not feel pressure of unrealized benefits of a pension 30 years down the road when you do, your housing SHOULD NOT be directly based on your employer ("company towns"), and normalizing systemic status-quo changes that makes it hard to decide/change who cuts your checks is NOT a step in the right direction.
Sanders was right when he said folks in managerial positions - and above - need to care more about their workers, but the businesses that drive the labor market banded together - perhaps unknowingly through a status quo "collective conscious" - to make MOST of your pickings in MOST same-tier jobs look very much alike. There are many ways to fix that in practice across other nations today, like sectoral bargaining; where union experts in a given trade collectively bargain for what SHOULD be an effective minimum wage or minimum benefits package within that trade - instead of the government doing it for them. There's also works councils in Germany that have a similar effect.
Absolutely any conversion, collateral, or divestiture of securities need to be taxed at the rate of those securities at that time. A lot of plutocrats are playing the system by just basing their loans and the collaterals thereof, and their payments for things, on stocks and securities because they are "unrealized gains".
If securities are enough of a bearer instrument to give loaners confidence for otherwise no-collateral loans, they're enough of a realized gain to be taxed when you use them for a purchase - or alongside one.
> We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
"We" can tax every breath of every person alive but we are not going back to 50s for sure.
In the private sector, obsession with short term profits and "shareholder value" is the corollary.
Both of these are now polite consensus, inevitable, but have wrecked government, wrecked our economy, and wrecked people's minds.
No absolutes. Sometimes this is true, sometimes not. It feels great, amazing, to give back, to change someone's life with your money. It can feel even better for some people, to give back, to change someone's life, with your NEIGHBOR's money. So you can get people whose existence is to enforce that their neighbor, Peter, shall pay their other neighbor, Paul, and have Paul give them a solid pat on the back for doing them a solid. Peter is unhappy about it. Thusly is the cornerstone of politics.
Sometimes this thinking makes sense, sometimes not, usually not in the extremes, of which such people exist.
At least have the gilded age decadency deceny to build some muesums.
If Chan's experiment isn't working, why would we expect her to keep funding it?
The part at the end about it taking 20 years or whatever makes no sense, a child is not in school for 20 years.
>“It was beyond naivete,” the former administrator said. “It was hubris.”
What the heck?
Education is hard, and it's surprising how much "gee whizz" type tech / ideas are out there that supposedly fix things like a magic wand. And in the meantime, no disciplinary rules?
The performance and behavior issues will continue until the spiritual beatings cease. You cannot keep imposing systems of oppression onto people and medicate away their natural responses to it. Let the riot be the rhyme of the unheard and may these kids flip over all the desks of the adults not walking out of their jobs in response to fascism.
Perhaps better glasses are in order.
I told them since the beginning: I'm doing my best, I cannot be sure to be able to pay it until the end. do your best and figure out how to help of I need you.
fortunately I was able to pay all of them until the end. but the lesson is: thank the supporters, hope for the best but understand the uncertainty
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
And after the end of the 2025-2026 school year is far from overnight.
It's still a very bad situation to abruptly need to find a new school, even if you get a pathetic $1000 coupon for a school which costs much more than that.
I'm merely talking about stability for the child. This would be a stressful event even for a well off child.
That's why I keep asking if you guys are parents. A school change can be a huge deal.
As for why Zuck's conduct is immoral, it's about keeping promises. You say you're going to fund something and solicit people to orient their entire life around it, which is what we do when we enroll our kids in school. Then you take it away. That is ... Almost criminal levels of not keeping your word. I would totally unironically put it on the scale of violence towards the families. It honestly is very offensive, it makes my blood boil.
Hundreds or thousands of people have made consequential life decisions based on this “charity,” and the removal of it will upend non-trivial parts of their lives. It will make zero appreciable difference to the Zuckerbergs, which is appropriate, because keeping the school in operation seemed to matter not to them either.
So yeah, when you use pocket change to fuck over thousands of people for political purposes and them fuck them again when you get bored — I don’t see how anyone calls that charity with a straight face.
Even if this initiative was driven by the state what is to say that it would have been 100% guaranteed to continue? States also run out of money and resources.
A tuition-free school created by Zuckerberg and Chan will shutter next year
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
They understood that they were breaking commitments that they had made to parents, and that they were putting an unexpected burden on a local school district, and they tried to address that.
By contrast, Elon and Trump abruptly broke commitments that the US made all over the world. Stopping clinical trials midway, leaving food and medicine sitting to rot in warehouses, etc.
(Spoiler - this book does not provide a ringing endorsement of dubiously acquired wealth being dubiously applied through a commercial / for-profit prism.)
Or, they're cowards who can't in the least minimum stand up for the causes they claim to strongly, morally support and are willing to discard them at a moment's hint of sacrifice or trouble.
If the latter, then how cowardly indeed. If you're already a fucking centibillionaire, then what a truly absurd, spineless shit of a human being with zero internal firmness you'd have to be to screw over thousands of people who had really come depend on these programs...
All because you might, possibly, have to stand up to one screaming orangutan and maybe lose a few billion out of a wholly gargantuan fortune that you will never ever be able to spend in a lifetime.
Either way, the saddest part is the people who'd come to depend on these things, now affected by their loss.
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered
>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
If you've invested the amounts we're talking about here, and made the statements they made about their investments at the get-go, and have the vast resources they have for tweaking and improving these programs, then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work, instead of shutting them down in one very conveniently timed political climate. It's their money and they can do whatever they want with it, but the whole thing reeks of political expediency either out of spinelessness or shallow original motives.
>>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
Yeah, the dangers of investing anything in Jersey. Tony Soprano laughs in his grave.. Joke aside, that much earlier project seemed like one very inexperienced attempt that was mishandled right from the start. Giving that much money to a bunch of ambiguously honest bureaucrats is just asking for disaster. Especially when you as the donor have zero internal presence in or real experience with the system you're donating to.
Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.
So? Should they have been obliged to fund this indefinitely forever and ever? Would you not say the "CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community" part is a little redeeming?
Would you have preferred Zuck to have bought moar yachts instead of supporting education, however briefly?
That said, I think you're grossly underestimating how hard it can be for some of the families that were using this school to find an alternative that doesn't cause their kids problems.
With that in mind I'd say there is a sort of moral imperative to preserving a context you created when it's designed for helping vulnerable kids and families. Not a legal rule I'd agree with, but an ethical imperative that shouldn't cut things off without more sustained effort and only a modest cash payoff as compensation.
Given the absolutely colossal fortune of the Zuckerbergs, they could have funded and worked to improve this program for as long as they wanted to, with nary a visible dent in their assets, but (in my opinion during one very convenient space of time) they just decide "nope, fuck it. Here's some cash kids"
At least then, everyone can be sure that they're not funding harmful programs. Also, billionaires would be more satisfied and less inclined to engage is harmful politics if they're too busy cruising the world on their yachts.
Keeping billionaires on the hamster wheel is dumb and harmful. They won capitalism. They won at life. That's it, there's no higher goal, that's the game. Give them a medal and let them enjoy their mansions.
Right now, it seems like Billionaires don't realize that they won the game because the people around them keep trying to make them feel like it's not enough.
"The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes. 400 kids lost their school."
"Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat from funding social issues forced the closure of a school Chan opened for disadvantaged families in Silicon Valley."