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Further down in the article, some interesting points about the motivations behind philanthropy. "philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’

Further down in the article, some interesting points about the motivations behind philanthropy. "philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’s about social stability." So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued. I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity.

hndude 11y ago
>I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity. This is a bit more pessimistic view but what about the raise in minimum wage for fast food workers (in NY) to $15 an hour? I daresay those employees are less likely to participate in Occupy Wall Street protests now, not that the balance of power in this country has actually changed any.
- bsenftner 11y ago
  All $15 an hour does it raise them to the new subsistence level. The aware of them still want major changes.
  - zardo 11y ago
    "All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." As true today as it was in 1776. If people can eak out a living, the majority will be satisfied.
vijayr 11y ago
If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued. One could say the same about salaried employees - give them enough to stay. Too little - they revolt or leave, too much - they save the money and still leave after they've saved enough
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  Nobody in their right mind saves with current interest rates and cheap credit combined with consumerism keeps enough people in hock across the income spectrum
  - keyboardwarrior 11y ago
    More like sparse array.
  - plonh 11y ago
    People in their right mind are able to not fall prey to consumerism and hock.
DasIch 11y ago
That's not an element specific to China. Wealth inequality is fairly well accepted to be a threat to social stability and the economy. People tend to see such inequality is unfair and at some point they are going to discover their revolutionary side. It's therefore not merely in the interest of rich people to be philanthropists, it's also in the interest of governments to achieve a certain balance. I think the latter is a far bigger reason for philanthropy. It's hard to argue for taking money away from people who are already engaged in philanthropy. That is also mirrored in the article. The government isn't entirely happy with this rich second generation, philanthropy helps with that.
vvvv 11y ago
That is exactly the control mechanism that was used by a number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent the Arab Spring revolutions from happening within their borders. They handed out billions of cash to the populace. "...the Saudi state began spending $130 billion to pump up civil servant salaries (paying two extra months’ salaries)" "In Kuwait, at around the same time, the state increased civil servant salaries by 115 percent at a cost of more than $1 billion, and at an additional cost of $5 billion, gave a cash handout of Kuwaiti Dinar (KD) 1000 to its citizens and promised free distribution of foodstuffs for fourteen months" http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61403.pdf http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61...
- themartorana 11y ago
  What will become of the already unstable Middle East when oil begins its inevitable (likely slow) decline as a dominant power source?
  - tehwebguy 11y ago
    My guess? Not much. Seems like they would find some other investments to make in the meantime.
  - douche 11y ago
    Look at the state of the Middle East between the rise of sea-borne trade that withered the old overland Silk Road trade routes and the current petro-states.
  - AngrySkillzz 11y ago
    Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.
    - codyb 11y ago
      And it looks (at least in Saudi Arabia's case) that they were trying to diversify towards renewables in a vast way [0], although my google search also turned up more recent articles indicating they're pushing that back [1]. The thing about the Saudi Arabian royal family is that they're all guaranteed allowances and the family grows at a near exponential rate since they all have multiple wives. I couldn't find any good sources on numbers but in a book about Saudi Arabia by former CIA operative Robert Baer "Sleeping with the Devil: How the US Sold it's Soul for Saudi Crude" [3] [4] I believe he estimated the current number to be about 60,000 (Wikipedia estimates 15,000 so I may be remembering that wrong [5]), aka an unsustainable population growth in royal family members. [0] - http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 [1] - http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabia-delays-109-billion-solar-program-eight-years.html http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabi... [3] - http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/dp/1400052688 http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/... [4] - (heartily recommended, although because most of these things are classified, truly it is his word. In his other book about Iran, his conclusion was to bring Iran to the playing table and recognize them as a regional and world power, so it doesn't seem to follow a strictly American narrative, and in my opinion, gives him a bit of credence. Others may beg to differ, I'm not sure.) [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud
mtgx 11y ago
Relevant recent quote from someone at the UN: > "Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist." http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-refugees-idUSKCN0RQ0RJ20150927 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-ref... Inequality is a problem for the rich, too, and not just because the poor will eventually revolt on them and take their stuff by force or murder them violently, but also because when most money is concentrated in the hands of only a few, the "economy" becomes weaker and less dynamic, as people can't afford to buy all sorts of stuff anymore (from the rich people's companies). The lesson here is not to postpone solving the inequality problem until the poor are already at their doors or causing riots in the streets.
Shivetya 11y ago
Pretty sure that is the motivation behind many government support programs. keep the people at the bottom placated enough to support you. The trouble is you create a dependent class because the number of people willing to live in such a way is higher than most would expect
moron4hire 11y ago
If they are at all studied in classic literature and world history, it should at least be at the back of their mind, because it's been a known effect since at least the Romans. Where do you think the phrase "bread and circuses" comes from?
Chathamization 11y ago
The impression I get from American philanthropists is that, for many of them, it's another way to show off their wealth. It might not directly benefit them, but neither does buying diamonds or gold jewelry. With philanthropy you get big galas, get buildings named after you, demonstrate how wealthy you are to your peers, etc.
- hellbanner 11y ago
  This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory in evolutionary biology.
  - LiweiZ 11y ago
    Any nice book offering an overview of evolutionary biology applied to our society that you'd recommend?
    - cherry_su 11y ago
      Not quite a book, but you might find the materials for this MIT course on Game Theory and Social Behavior insightful: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-game-theory-into-social-behavior-fall-2013/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-gam... "We will apply insights from game theory to explain human social behavior, focusing on novel applications which have heretofore been the realm of psychologists and philosophers—for example, why people speak indirectly, in what sense beauty is socially constructed, and where our moral intuitions come from—and eschewing traditional economic applications such as industrial organization or auctions." I learned about signalling theory in this course, among other insights into why society acts the way it does.
      - LiweiZ 11y ago
        Thanks. I occasionally follow news from complexity theory and there are many exciting findings. But there are so many hidden gems I could not find out till I learn some key words to make my search meaningful to the search engines.
kitcar 11y ago
For what its worth, a billionaire once told me the following quote: There are two types of people that give money to charity - those that want to, and those that have to (the context of the conversation was the idea of charity as atonement for sins)
littletimmy 11y ago
I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”
- rcarrigan87 11y ago
  Wow, need to read more of him.
- veidr 11y ago
  That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves). For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun). It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。
  - Retra 11y ago
    >those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst? Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
    - Retric 11y ago
      What long term value? The system is already gone. If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
qq66 11y ago
I would argue that the third motive is one that does not generate as much American philanthropy as it should. Events like the French Revolution usually seem more imminent in hindsight than they did at the time.
MrZongle2 11y ago
"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued." I sometimes wonder if this is one of the motivations behind the guaranteed minimum income movement.
justicezyx 11y ago
No its not about revolt by the poor. Because there is basically no effective law enforcement on the rich, the poor are in real danger of harmed or even killed by the rich, and the rich would not be punished accordingly. Caveat, the poor do get punished accordingly. As always. There are regular cases of the rich kids drive a fancy car drunk, kills a few, and silently received a few years in jail, where the poor will probably get half life time. Then in a year or so, the guy suppose in jail suddenly appear on the street... Jesus, you got to be worried walking on street and killed by a drunk rich kid... All in all, it was not motivated by preventing revolt. The Chinese riches in generally are just too evil...
Animats 11y ago
"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich." Very much so. China is a communist country. Here's the China Communist Party's current policy statement.[1] "The basic line of the CPC at this stage is to unite the people of all ethnic groups to, with economic construction at the core, adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles, adhere to reform and opening-up, and in a spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle, to build China into a prosperous, democratic and civilized modern socialist country. The Four Cardinal Principles -- adhering to the socialist road, adhering to the people's democratic dictatorship, adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party of China -- have been established by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China as the basis to maintain the nation." Well within living memory, China's government was sentencing rich people to death for crimes against the state. That's one reason many rich people in China try to get money out of the country and get out themselves. There might be a policy change, and they could be sent to labor camps in the western provinces. It's happened before, and might happen again. [1] http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm
joeyo 11y ago
The (slightly cynical) argument could be made that the concessions made by capital to labor in the United States in the early 20th century were to prevent revolts (of the sort that happened in Europe and elsewhere) and especially to reduce the chance a Communist Revolution taking hold. I note that that era was marked by significant industrialist philanthropy as well.

hndude 11y ago

>I wonder if there are similar motivations for super rich American philanthropists. My guess is they're less worried about revolt and more motivated by vanity. This is a bit more pessimistic view but what about the raise in minimum wage for fast food workers (in NY) to $15 an hour? I daresay those employees are less likely to participate in Occupy Wall Street protests now, not that the balance of power in this country has actually changed any.

bsenftner 11y ago
All $15 an hour does it raise them to the new subsistence level. The aware of them still want major changes.
- zardo 11y ago
  "All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." As true today as it was in 1776. If people can eak out a living, the majority will be satisfied.

vijayr 11y ago

If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued. One could say the same about salaried employees - give them enough to stay. Too little - they revolt or leave, too much - they save the money and still leave after they've saved enough

dreamfactory2 11y ago
Nobody in their right mind saves with current interest rates and cheap credit combined with consumerism keeps enough people in hock across the income spectrum
- keyboardwarrior 11y ago
  More like sparse array.
- plonh 11y ago
  People in their right mind are able to not fall prey to consumerism and hock.

DasIch 11y ago

That's not an element specific to China. Wealth inequality is fairly well accepted to be a threat to social stability and the economy. People tend to see such inequality is unfair and at some point they are going to discover their revolutionary side. It's therefore not merely in the interest of rich people to be philanthropists, it's also in the interest of governments to achieve a certain balance. I think the latter is a far bigger reason for philanthropy. It's hard to argue for taking money away from people who are already engaged in philanthropy. That is also mirrored in the article. The government isn't entirely happy with this rich second generation, philanthropy helps with that.

vvvv 11y ago

That is exactly the control mechanism that was used by a number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent the Arab Spring revolutions from happening within their borders. They handed out billions of cash to the populace. "...the Saudi state began spending $130 billion to pump up civil servant salaries (paying two extra months’ salaries)" "In Kuwait, at around the same time, the state increased civil servant salaries by 115 percent at a cost of more than $1 billion, and at an additional cost of $5 billion, gave a cash handout of Kuwaiti Dinar (KD) 1000 to its citizens and promised free distribution of foodstuffs for fourteen months" http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61403.pdf http://www18.georgetown.edu/data/people/mk556/publication-61...

themartorana 11y ago
What will become of the already unstable Middle East when oil begins its inevitable (likely slow) decline as a dominant power source?
- tehwebguy 11y ago
  My guess? Not much. Seems like they would find some other investments to make in the meantime.
- douche 11y ago
  Look at the state of the Middle East between the rise of sea-borne trade that withered the old overland Silk Road trade routes and the current petro-states.
- AngrySkillzz 11y ago
  Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.
  - codyb 11y ago
    And it looks (at least in Saudi Arabia's case) that they were trying to diversify towards renewables in a vast way [0], although my google search also turned up more recent articles indicating they're pushing that back [1]. The thing about the Saudi Arabian royal family is that they're all guaranteed allowances and the family grows at a near exponential rate since they all have multiple wives. I couldn't find any good sources on numbers but in a book about Saudi Arabia by former CIA operative Robert Baer "Sleeping with the Devil: How the US Sold it's Soul for Saudi Crude" [3] [4] I believe he estimated the current number to be about 60,000 (Wikipedia estimates 15,000 so I may be remembering that wrong [5]), aka an unsustainable population growth in royal family members. [0] - http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 http://www.arabnews.com/news/458342 [1] - http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabia-delays-109-billion-solar-program-eight-years.html http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/01/saudi-arabi... [3] - http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/dp/1400052688 http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/... [4] - (heartily recommended, although because most of these things are classified, truly it is his word. In his other book about Iran, his conclusion was to bring Iran to the playing table and recognize them as a regional and world power, so it doesn't seem to follow a strictly American narrative, and in my opinion, gives him a bit of credence. Others may beg to differ, I'm not sure.) [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

mtgx 11y ago

Relevant recent quote from someone at the UN: > "Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist." http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-refugees-idUSKCN0RQ0RJ20150927 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/27/us-un-assembly-ref... Inequality is a problem for the rich, too, and not just because the poor will eventually revolt on them and take their stuff by force or murder them violently, but also because when most money is concentrated in the hands of only a few, the "economy" becomes weaker and less dynamic, as people can't afford to buy all sorts of stuff anymore (from the rich people's companies). The lesson here is not to postpone solving the inequality problem until the poor are already at their doors or causing riots in the streets.

Shivetya 11y ago

Pretty sure that is the motivation behind many government support programs. keep the people at the bottom placated enough to support you. The trouble is you create a dependent class because the number of people willing to live in such a way is higher than most would expect

moron4hire 11y ago

If they are at all studied in classic literature and world history, it should at least be at the back of their mind, because it's been a known effect since at least the Romans. Where do you think the phrase "bread and circuses" comes from?

Chathamization 11y ago

The impression I get from American philanthropists is that, for many of them, it's another way to show off their wealth. It might not directly benefit them, but neither does buying diamonds or gold jewelry. With philanthropy you get big galas, get buildings named after you, demonstrate how wealthy you are to your peers, etc.

hellbanner 11y ago
This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory in evolutionary biology.
- LiweiZ 11y ago
  Any nice book offering an overview of evolutionary biology applied to our society that you'd recommend?
  - cherry_su 11y ago
    Not quite a book, but you might find the materials for this MIT course on Game Theory and Social Behavior insightful: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-game-theory-into-social-behavior-fall-2013/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-11-insights-from-gam... "We will apply insights from game theory to explain human social behavior, focusing on novel applications which have heretofore been the realm of psychologists and philosophers—for example, why people speak indirectly, in what sense beauty is socially constructed, and where our moral intuitions come from—and eschewing traditional economic applications such as industrial organization or auctions." I learned about signalling theory in this course, among other insights into why society acts the way it does.
    - LiweiZ 11y ago
      Thanks. I occasionally follow news from complexity theory and there are many exciting findings. But there are so many hidden gems I could not find out till I learn some key words to make my search meaningful to the search engines.

kitcar 11y ago

For what its worth, a billionaire once told me the following quote: There are two types of people that give money to charity - those that want to, and those that have to (the context of the conversation was the idea of charity as atonement for sins)

littletimmy 11y ago

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”

rcarrigan87 11y ago
Wow, need to read more of him.
veidr 11y ago
That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves). For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun). It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。
- Retra 11y ago
  >those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst? Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
  - Retric 11y ago
    What long term value? The system is already gone. If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.

qq66 11y ago

I would argue that the third motive is one that does not generate as much American philanthropy as it should. Events like the French Revolution usually seem more imminent in hindsight than they did at the time.

MrZongle2 11y ago

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich. If you give just enough, you'll keep the poor subdued." I sometimes wonder if this is one of the motivations behind the guaranteed minimum income movement.

justicezyx 11y ago

No its not about revolt by the poor. Because there is basically no effective law enforcement on the rich, the poor are in real danger of harmed or even killed by the rich, and the rich would not be punished accordingly. Caveat, the poor do get punished accordingly. As always. There are regular cases of the rich kids drive a fancy car drunk, kills a few, and silently received a few years in jail, where the poor will probably get half life time. Then in a year or so, the guy suppose in jail suddenly appear on the street... Jesus, you got to be worried walking on street and killed by a drunk rich kid... All in all, it was not motivated by preventing revolt. The Chinese riches in generally are just too evil...

Animats 11y ago

"So other than a genuine desire to do good or vanity seeking that can motivate philanthropy, you have a third element in China - preventing a revolt by the poor on the rich." Very much so. China is a communist country. Here's the China Communist Party's current policy statement.[1] "The basic line of the CPC at this stage is to unite the people of all ethnic groups to, with economic construction at the core, adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles, adhere to reform and opening-up, and in a spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle, to build China into a prosperous, democratic and civilized modern socialist country. The Four Cardinal Principles -- adhering to the socialist road, adhering to the people's democratic dictatorship, adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party of China -- have been established by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China as the basis to maintain the nation." Well within living memory, China's government was sentencing rich people to death for crimes against the state. That's one reason many rich people in China try to get money out of the country and get out themselves. There might be a policy change, and they could be sent to labor camps in the western provinces. It's happened before, and might happen again. [1] http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/45981.htm

joeyo 11y ago

The (slightly cynical) argument could be made that the concessions made by capital to labor in the United States in the early 20th century were to prevent revolts (of the sort that happened in Europe and elsewhere) and especially to reduce the chance a Communist Revolution taking hold. I note that that era was marked by significant industrialist philanthropy as well.