7 ms·

How today's billionaires plan to improve the world

39 points by godelmachine 9y ago

everyone 9y ago
The roaring 2020's
montrose 9y ago
The Economist has a novel approach: look at what's actually happening. "The would-be world-changers are applying innovative and evidence-based approaches in clinics and classrooms, where elected politicians are often too timid to risk failure, captured by entrenched interests or unwilling to spend public money on experimentation."
Bucephalus355 9y ago
This is very concerning. Ultimately, money provides such global power now that it has effectively escaped sovereign jurisdiction. There are barriers on where national power ends, but effectively none on where money can move or what it can do (comparatively). This article could have had the headline “How Today’s Mega Powerful Plan To Improve The World”. This relates to the idea of putting Central Banks outside the scope of most legislatures, it was supposed to insulate them from “greedy democracies”, but instead it created something worse. All of this is the culmination of the migration of the State from governments to Financiers. A replacement of democratic justice with “market justice”. NOTE: I still like Elon Musk. But he’s the exception, and it could be argued that NASA would have done all of this already if their budget hadn’t been frozen for the last 50 years. FYI the budget in 1967 for NASA was, even BEFORE being adjusted to inflation, greater than it was today. Astounding.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Money is not the same thing as power, although power usually makes money abundant. Billionaires have in many ways much less power than even a relatively minor government official or regulator. Zuckerberg learned this the hard way when he spaffed $100 million on New York schools and ended up with zero measurable difference in outcomes. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-donation-155608055.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-... $100 million down the drain, largely because - guess what - the politics of Newark were totally unaffected by all this money. Zuck wanted a new teachers contract that linked pay to performance to be a part of the reform, and $50m of the $100m was devoted to achieving this outcome. It was meant to be used for teacher bonuses and so on. But only the state legislature could make real change there, and they didn't. Instead the contract was renegotiated with seniority protections intact because the union refused to budge on it, and the local government rolled over. The district also spent huge sums of money on "consultants" making $1000/day - $20m of it went down that rabbit hole. In the end Zuck discovered that you can't solve political problems with money, no matter how much you throw around. Trump beat Clinton despite spending 50% as much, even though Obama had been warning after Citizens United that it represented a "serious harm to democracy". People tend to over-estimate the impact money can have on society.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Kind of surprising that the teachers won that one, but good on them. Performance-related pay in education is an absolute minefield, because it's not widget-making or even something as rigourously scientifically subject to assessment as software development(+). Outcomes in education are hugely susceptible to wider social conditions such as whether the parents can afford to feed the kids breakfast. If a system isn't really carefully designed, it ends up creating incentives to dump the hardest to teach kids somewhere. (+) sarcasm - everyone claims that 10x developers exist, and they might be right, but there's no reliable scheme for identifying performance.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    The biggest problems in society are mental ones: - People place way too much value on social connections over hard work. - People have a greatly exaggerated view when it comes to the correlation between status/popularity and skill. - The motto 'people over products' has been taken to such an extreme that products and tangible results seem to have been completely removed from the equation. - Those who have the money to make a difference don't lead, instead, they follow trends. If we solved these problems, society would be much, much better. Unfortunately solving these problems goes against the interests of wealthy people.
- dantheman 9y ago
  SpaceX cost about 1 billion dollars over 10 years. NASA provided ~500 million as part of launch contracts. NASA's budget is ~18 billion a year. So out of 180 billion dollars they would have needed to devote ~500 million and then just fund it themselves. So it's not really a money issue.
  - asaph 9y ago
    This comment ignores the fact that SpaceX built on a foundation NASA helped create. SpaceX stands on the shoulders of giants.
    - ballooney 9y ago
      Also it’s remit is much wider than launchers. It is still hampered by the politic imperative to do all the things that make projects late and slow - spreading all the work around as many states, companies and people as possible. Having a ton of process and paperwork to try and manage it all.
    - melling 9y ago
      “You didn’t build that” - meme http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/you-didnt-build-that http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/you-didnt-build-that
    - DennisP 9y ago
      Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      You can find dozens of videos of Elon or Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX COO) saying how helpful NASA has been to SpaceX.
- DennisP 9y ago
  SpaceX spent less than a billion dollars developing the Falcon Heavy. NASA has been spending a couple billion a year on the SLS, a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle engines that will cost over a billion dollars per launch. It's not lack of money that's keeping NASA from doing what SpaceX has done. (SLS is bigger than the Falcon Heavy, but it's smaller than the BFR. There's a good chance the BFR will fly before the SLS.)
expertentipp 9y ago
By taking away the resources from the population and giving in return some charity campaigns and campaigns improving their personal image? (it's hard getting to the top by being nice, generous, and caring).
- jstanley 9y ago
  Yes, such evil people, "taking resources from the population" by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay.
  - expertentipp 9y ago
    > by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay. Exclusively on certain markets - large, developed, and rich enough. While on other markets taking advantage of cheap labor and loose employee protection... and while paying the taxes in none of these markets... you forgot to add.
- brbrodude 9y ago
  With no society, no running water, no roads and no expendable poor/cheap people moving the gears, it just wouldn't be possible for them to get even close to this ammount of wealth, then they evade taxes, buy politics and do everything to keep things their way, have things their way, take all that they can, then when they're in effect absolute rulers under their sphere and took so much, they get to play on how to bettering society. The problem to me is very clear, this so called help is the other side of the Koch brother's, the think tanks lie factories, the manipulation of the masses, the corruption of Science, of Media, of Public Debate, of Democracy & etc. They'll just use all this power to create a world they see as better, but obviously never touching on the structure that gave them all that. And if a switcheroo is needed the infrastructure will already be in place. It should never have happened in the first place, that much power from this flawed economics is just like having absolute monarchs, aristocrats or church rule again, it should be limited(by a system which balances it, just like the separation of powers in government). Ps.: The free market is not that system.
hownottowrite 9y ago
Cached: https://archive.is/BYAdr https://archive.is/BYAdr Note: The print title of this article was "The billionaires and the Falcon Heavy". Probably more appropriate given the actual content. Spoiler: Article contains lightweight, anti-tech snobbery...
hutzlibu 9y ago
Unlike most people, I am not against mega rich in general, or asume, that they are all evil. But what just came to my mind with this sentence: ".. and Henry Ford ruthlessly made fortunes and then established foundations to enlighten the masses and ensure world peace long after their death. " ... is how it is meant regarding Ford. Enlightening the masses about the jews evil conspiracy and ensuring world peace by helping nazi domination?
- dantheman 9y ago
  Ford may have had bad political views, but the Ford foundation has had a huge effect on the world, especially during the cold war. https://www.fordfoundation.org/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/
- sametmax 9y ago
  That's how people end up seeing the victors. No matter what they do. Take Bill Gates. 20 years ago he was evil incarnate, his company caught in lying, cheating, corrupting. Now his PR team made sure he is regarded as one of the good ones. For the last few years, you saw post in HN, reddit, imgurs, all singing the goodness of his heart. And then comments followed. No matter how many article you had decades ago stating all the wrong MS did, it's all water under the bridge. No ones remember. Clean slate. Now people are even saying that Bush Jr. was "not so bad". In 10 years, people will say Trump was ok.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Partly Bill's PR team. Mostly the fact that he's committed most of his billions to helping the poor and healing the sick.
    - bromuro 9y ago
      Yeah how many of those billions are part of that economy that is actually causing the harm (wars, famine, poverty, etc) that they are then proud to “fight”? c’mon how can people believe in such narrative? like the new one with Elon Musk... it is impossible even to try criticize them. Their hypocrisy is too smart and too well organized to be fought.
jonballant 9y ago
Foundations like the Bill Gates Foundation will invest in other companies to increase their return on investment even when those companies can be detrimental to the cause they are supporting. Here is an example from Durban where the Gates foundation was working to improve sanitation but Gates had invested in oil companies contributing to the problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/residents-blame-durban-oil-refineries-for-health-problems https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/resident...
sametmax 9y ago
Our society have failed if we need to wait for people accumulate a lot of riches no matter the consequences so that eventually they may decide, once they had had and done everything they want, to invest it back in a cause they deem worthy.
zabana 9y ago
.
- psergeant 9y ago
  You’re the first person I’ve seen suggest it isn’t, so perhaps the onus is on you?
- samsolomon 9y ago
  Can you please provide a valid reason that it is no longer credible? I am a long time Economist reader. The publication is consistent in quality and its viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with its views, but it does not lack credibility.
nickpp 9y ago
Well I guess any individual or organization has capacity for good or evil in them. But, in mankind history so far, the large organizations responsible for most evil in the world were religious and governmental. Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Especially since their track of record during the last century is net positive (much more good things coming out of them than bad). And especially considering the “new” way they made their money, through adding value instead of the old way through being born into is, stealing and pillaging...
- ponderatul 9y ago
  Net positive how? How do you measure that, when you take into account oil companies and banks for example?
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Banks are a net positive. Without them we have no modern economy. Occasionally the economy destabalizes as part of a cycle, but it (historically) restabalizes. The media pays an outsized lens to the corruption of Big Banks, but without their basic activity many modern quality of life improvements would be infeasible.
    - bhaak 9y ago
      The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.
      - dsacco 9y ago
        > The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? Implicit in this question is the idea that the destabilizing effects are actually a large amount of the banking activity. I would argue they are not, we just hear about that far more often because it's bad news, and bad news is more interesting. The rote, mundane functionality of all banks, including the big ones, is mostly under the radar and (in my opinion) vastly underappreciated with respect to banks' occasional tendency to throw the system out of whack. In particular, I would posit that the latter is more a manifestation of common economic activity than it is to a centralized and consolidated banking infrastructure. Or, more succinctly, that economic activity at the modern scale does not sustain itself without these banks working more or less as they do now. There are certainly improvements to be made, for sure. But I personally discount the possibility that those improvements would radically reshape banking infrastructure or significantly reduce the volatility cycle we encounter every decade or two.
aurelianito 9y ago
Ultra riches are the new nobility. People that are not bounded by the rules the rest of us must abide to. Some pf them do good things with their power, and some of them do bad things. The main issue, for me, is that we don't get to choose or control. They are like old time's Kings and queens.
DennisP 9y ago
From the article: "The billionaires’ most useful function, then, is not to bring about change themselves, but to explore and test new models and methods for others to emulate. Using their access to policymakers, they encourage the adoption of the ideas that work." I think it's hard to argue against this; it's something that governments don't often do well. We need risk-takers who can try out new new approaches, get things done cheaply, and commit to a plan over the course of multiple election cycles. Space launch is a case in point. I just read a book about solar power satellites [1], that went through the history of advanced launch programs in the U.S. Nothing ever got done because every few years, the new set of elected officials decided they wanted a different plan. So all the ideas for new plans finally were abandoned, and now we've settled on an extremely risk-averse approach: the SLS, a disposable rocket using technology from the Space Shuttle. Politicians like it because it keeps the big contractors happy and puts jobs in a lot of districts, but it can't hope to expand access to space in the way the BFR is likely to do, because it will cost several billion dollars per launch [2]. If we don't like depending on billionaires, then we'd better figure out how to make daring and creative governments. Until we do, I'm glad there are people willing and able to spend their own money on fixing the problems that governments aren't fixing. I don't understand the view that only our governments should try to make the world better. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HNZ0Z96 https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HN... [2] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1
muse900 9y ago
For me personally, whats very concerning is that we are in 2018, prolly a few years away from having flying cars and whatnot. And yet its much easier to find a cellphone than it is to find food and water. There are literally people still dying of starvation and yet there is something to be done about it. We've evolved into buying more and more stuff, improving our everyday life by little bits such as upgrading from iphone 7 to 8, while there are still people out there that don't have something to put in their stomach, don't have the means to basic healthcare and don't have a roof over their head for when its cold and raining. If you so want to improve the world, start off the basics and then move on.
roman_savchuk 9y ago
>Mr Musk has gone further still. Rather than using his business wealth to support philanthropy in an unrelated area, he runs two giant companies, Tesla (a clean-energy firm that sells electric cars) and SpaceX (which builds the Falcon rockets), that further his ambitious goals directly. Well, by launching many rockets burning hundreds of tons of kerosene each, SpaceX kinda offsets Tesla's clean energy efforts.
- el_cid 9y ago
  Well by getting the human race closer to colonizing other rocks floating in space, it kinda offsets SpaceX burning hundreds of tons of kerosene for each rocket.

39 points by godelmachine 9y ago

The roaring 2020's

The Economist has a novel approach: look at what's actually happening. "The would-be world-changers are applying innovative and evidence-based approaches in clinics and classrooms, where elected politicians are often too timid to risk failure, captured by entrenched interests or unwilling to spend public money on experimentation."

Bucephalus355 9y ago

This is very concerning. Ultimately, money provides such global power now that it has effectively escaped sovereign jurisdiction. There are barriers on where national power ends, but effectively none on where money can move or what it can do (comparatively). This article could have had the headline “How Today’s Mega Powerful Plan To Improve The World”. This relates to the idea of putting Central Banks outside the scope of most legislatures, it was supposed to insulate them from “greedy democracies”, but instead it created something worse. All of this is the culmination of the migration of the State from governments to Financiers. A replacement of democratic justice with “market justice”. NOTE: I still like Elon Musk. But he’s the exception, and it could be argued that NASA would have done all of this already if their budget hadn’t been frozen for the last 50 years. FYI the budget in 1967 for NASA was, even BEFORE being adjusted to inflation, greater than it was today. Astounding.

peoplewindow 9y ago
Money is not the same thing as power, although power usually makes money abundant. Billionaires have in many ways much less power than even a relatively minor government official or regulator. Zuckerberg learned this the hard way when he spaffed $100 million on New York schools and ended up with zero measurable difference in outcomes. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-donation-155608055.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-... $100 million down the drain, largely because - guess what - the politics of Newark were totally unaffected by all this money. Zuck wanted a new teachers contract that linked pay to performance to be a part of the reform, and $50m of the $100m was devoted to achieving this outcome. It was meant to be used for teacher bonuses and so on. But only the state legislature could make real change there, and they didn't. Instead the contract was renegotiated with seniority protections intact because the union refused to budge on it, and the local government rolled over. The district also spent huge sums of money on "consultants" making $1000/day - $20m of it went down that rabbit hole. In the end Zuck discovered that you can't solve political problems with money, no matter how much you throw around. Trump beat Clinton despite spending 50% as much, even though Obama had been warning after Citizens United that it represented a "serious harm to democracy". People tend to over-estimate the impact money can have on society.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 9y ago
  Kind of surprising that the teachers won that one, but good on them. Performance-related pay in education is an absolute minefield, because it's not widget-making or even something as rigourously scientifically subject to assessment as software development(+). Outcomes in education are hugely susceptible to wider social conditions such as whether the parents can afford to feed the kids breakfast. If a system isn't really carefully designed, it ends up creating incentives to dump the hardest to teach kids somewhere. (+) sarcasm - everyone claims that 10x developers exist, and they might be right, but there's no reliable scheme for identifying performance.
- jondubois 9y ago
  The biggest problems in society are mental ones: - People place way too much value on social connections over hard work. - People have a greatly exaggerated view when it comes to the correlation between status/popularity and skill. - The motto 'people over products' has been taken to such an extreme that products and tangible results seem to have been completely removed from the equation. - Those who have the money to make a difference don't lead, instead, they follow trends. If we solved these problems, society would be much, much better. Unfortunately solving these problems goes against the interests of wealthy people.
dantheman 9y ago
SpaceX cost about 1 billion dollars over 10 years. NASA provided ~500 million as part of launch contracts. NASA's budget is ~18 billion a year. So out of 180 billion dollars they would have needed to devote ~500 million and then just fund it themselves. So it's not really a money issue.
- asaph 9y ago
  This comment ignores the fact that SpaceX built on a foundation NASA helped create. SpaceX stands on the shoulders of giants.
  - ballooney 9y ago
    Also it’s remit is much wider than launchers. It is still hampered by the politic imperative to do all the things that make projects late and slow - spreading all the work around as many states, companies and people as possible. Having a ton of process and paperwork to try and manage it all.
  - melling 9y ago
    “You didn’t build that” - meme http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/you-didnt-build-that http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/you-didnt-build-that
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    You can find dozens of videos of Elon or Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX COO) saying how helpful NASA has been to SpaceX.
DennisP 9y ago
SpaceX spent less than a billion dollars developing the Falcon Heavy. NASA has been spending a couple billion a year on the SLS, a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle engines that will cost over a billion dollars per launch. It's not lack of money that's keeping NASA from doing what SpaceX has done. (SLS is bigger than the Falcon Heavy, but it's smaller than the BFR. There's a good chance the BFR will fly before the SLS.)

expertentipp 9y ago

By taking away the resources from the population and giving in return some charity campaigns and campaigns improving their personal image? (it's hard getting to the top by being nice, generous, and caring).

jstanley 9y ago
Yes, such evil people, "taking resources from the population" by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  > by offering goods and services that people want to buy at prices they want to pay. Exclusively on certain markets - large, developed, and rich enough. While on other markets taking advantage of cheap labor and loose employee protection... and while paying the taxes in none of these markets... you forgot to add.
brbrodude 9y ago
With no society, no running water, no roads and no expendable poor/cheap people moving the gears, it just wouldn't be possible for them to get even close to this ammount of wealth, then they evade taxes, buy politics and do everything to keep things their way, have things their way, take all that they can, then when they're in effect absolute rulers under their sphere and took so much, they get to play on how to bettering society. The problem to me is very clear, this so called help is the other side of the Koch brother's, the think tanks lie factories, the manipulation of the masses, the corruption of Science, of Media, of Public Debate, of Democracy & etc. They'll just use all this power to create a world they see as better, but obviously never touching on the structure that gave them all that. And if a switcheroo is needed the infrastructure will already be in place. It should never have happened in the first place, that much power from this flawed economics is just like having absolute monarchs, aristocrats or church rule again, it should be limited(by a system which balances it, just like the separation of powers in government). Ps.: The free market is not that system.

hownottowrite 9y ago

Cached: https://archive.is/BYAdr https://archive.is/BYAdr Note: The print title of this article was "The billionaires and the Falcon Heavy". Probably more appropriate given the actual content. Spoiler: Article contains lightweight, anti-tech snobbery...

hutzlibu 9y ago

Unlike most people, I am not against mega rich in general, or asume, that they are all evil. But what just came to my mind with this sentence: ".. and Henry Ford ruthlessly made fortunes and then established foundations to enlighten the masses and ensure world peace long after their death. " ... is how it is meant regarding Ford. Enlightening the masses about the jews evil conspiracy and ensuring world peace by helping nazi domination?

dantheman 9y ago
Ford may have had bad political views, but the Ford foundation has had a huge effect on the world, especially during the cold war. https://www.fordfoundation.org/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/
sametmax 9y ago
That's how people end up seeing the victors. No matter what they do. Take Bill Gates. 20 years ago he was evil incarnate, his company caught in lying, cheating, corrupting. Now his PR team made sure he is regarded as one of the good ones. For the last few years, you saw post in HN, reddit, imgurs, all singing the goodness of his heart. And then comments followed. No matter how many article you had decades ago stating all the wrong MS did, it's all water under the bridge. No ones remember. Clean slate. Now people are even saying that Bush Jr. was "not so bad". In 10 years, people will say Trump was ok.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Partly Bill's PR team. Mostly the fact that he's committed most of his billions to helping the poor and healing the sick.
  - bromuro 9y ago
    Yeah how many of those billions are part of that economy that is actually causing the harm (wars, famine, poverty, etc) that they are then proud to “fight”? c’mon how can people believe in such narrative? like the new one with Elon Musk... it is impossible even to try criticize them. Their hypocrisy is too smart and too well organized to be fought.

jonballant 9y ago

Foundations like the Bill Gates Foundation will invest in other companies to increase their return on investment even when those companies can be detrimental to the cause they are supporting. Here is an example from Durban where the Gates foundation was working to improve sanitation but Gates had invested in oil companies contributing to the problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/residents-blame-durban-oil-refineries-for-health-problems https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/resident...

sametmax 9y ago

Our society have failed if we need to wait for people accumulate a lot of riches no matter the consequences so that eventually they may decide, once they had had and done everything they want, to invest it back in a cause they deem worthy.

zabana 9y ago

psergeant 9y ago
You’re the first person I’ve seen suggest it isn’t, so perhaps the onus is on you?
samsolomon 9y ago
Can you please provide a valid reason that it is no longer credible? I am a long time Economist reader. The publication is consistent in quality and its viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with its views, but it does not lack credibility.

nickpp 9y ago

Well I guess any individual or organization has capacity for good or evil in them. But, in mankind history so far, the large organizations responsible for most evil in the world were religious and governmental. Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Especially since their track of record during the last century is net positive (much more good things coming out of them than bad). And especially considering the “new” way they made their money, through adding value instead of the old way through being born into is, stealing and pillaging...

ponderatul 9y ago
Net positive how? How do you measure that, when you take into account oil companies and banks for example?
- dsacco 9y ago
  Banks are a net positive. Without them we have no modern economy. Occasionally the economy destabalizes as part of a cycle, but it (historically) restabalizes. The media pays an outsized lens to the corruption of Big Banks, but without their basic activity many modern quality of life improvements would be infeasible.
  - bhaak 9y ago
    The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      > The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? Implicit in this question is the idea that the destabilizing effects are actually a large amount of the banking activity. I would argue they are not, we just hear about that far more often because it's bad news, and bad news is more interesting. The rote, mundane functionality of all banks, including the big ones, is mostly under the radar and (in my opinion) vastly underappreciated with respect to banks' occasional tendency to throw the system out of whack. In particular, I would posit that the latter is more a manifestation of common economic activity than it is to a centralized and consolidated banking infrastructure. Or, more succinctly, that economic activity at the modern scale does not sustain itself without these banks working more or less as they do now. There are certainly improvements to be made, for sure. But I personally discount the possibility that those improvements would radically reshape banking infrastructure or significantly reduce the volatility cycle we encounter every decade or two.

aurelianito 9y ago

Ultra riches are the new nobility. People that are not bounded by the rules the rest of us must abide to. Some pf them do good things with their power, and some of them do bad things. The main issue, for me, is that we don't get to choose or control. They are like old time's Kings and queens.

DennisP 9y ago

From the article: "The billionaires’ most useful function, then, is not to bring about change themselves, but to explore and test new models and methods for others to emulate. Using their access to policymakers, they encourage the adoption of the ideas that work." I think it's hard to argue against this; it's something that governments don't often do well. We need risk-takers who can try out new new approaches, get things done cheaply, and commit to a plan over the course of multiple election cycles. Space launch is a case in point. I just read a book about solar power satellites [1], that went through the history of advanced launch programs in the U.S. Nothing ever got done because every few years, the new set of elected officials decided they wanted a different plan. So all the ideas for new plans finally were abandoned, and now we've settled on an extremely risk-averse approach: the SLS, a disposable rocket using technology from the Space Shuttle. Politicians like it because it keeps the big contractors happy and puts jobs in a lot of districts, but it can't hope to expand access to space in the way the BFR is likely to do, because it will cost several billion dollars per launch [2]. If we don't like depending on billionaires, then we'd better figure out how to make daring and creative governments. Until we do, I'm glad there are people willing and able to spend their own money on fixing the problems that governments aren't fixing. I don't understand the view that only our governments should try to make the world better. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HNZ0Z96 https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Solar-Power-ebook/dp/B00HN... [2] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1

muse900 9y ago

For me personally, whats very concerning is that we are in 2018, prolly a few years away from having flying cars and whatnot. And yet its much easier to find a cellphone than it is to find food and water. There are literally people still dying of starvation and yet there is something to be done about it. We've evolved into buying more and more stuff, improving our everyday life by little bits such as upgrading from iphone 7 to 8, while there are still people out there that don't have something to put in their stomach, don't have the means to basic healthcare and don't have a roof over their head for when its cold and raining. If you so want to improve the world, start off the basics and then move on.

roman_savchuk 9y ago

>Mr Musk has gone further still. Rather than using his business wealth to support philanthropy in an unrelated area, he runs two giant companies, Tesla (a clean-energy firm that sells electric cars) and SpaceX (which builds the Falcon rockets), that further his ambitious goals directly. Well, by launching many rockets burning hundreds of tons of kerosene each, SpaceX kinda offsets Tesla's clean energy efforts.

el_cid 9y ago
Well by getting the human race closer to colonizing other rocks floating in space, it kinda offsets SpaceX burning hundreds of tons of kerosene for each rocket.