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Ezra Kline interviewed Anand Giridharadas for the Ezra Kline Show podcast back in September[0]. Very interesting. Anand basically argued that the global elite

Ezra Kline interviewed Anand Giridharadas for the Ezra Kline Show podcast back in September[0]. Very interesting. Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished, but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status. [0] https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-winner-take-all-ezra-klein-podcast https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-win...

JacobJans 8y ago
Progress is real. https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_14_2017_02_AL2017GFO_GF-GFO_&WT.tsrc=GFGFO https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_14... > the number of childhood deaths per year has been cut in half since 1990. > Extreme poverty has been cut in half over the last 25 years. > In 1988, when the global campaign was launched to end polio, there were 350,000 new cases each year. > Last year, there were 37.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Progress is real. Who is driving that progress? Is it the global elite in general, is it a handful of rich people who do actually make a difference, or are their efforts just noise and something else is driving the progress? I genuinely don't know; hoping someone has the data.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    I'm thinking it's a mix of government action, organizations like the UN / UNESCO and the Red Cross, and both governments and donators that donate to said organizations so that they can do their work without needing to scrounge for money.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      Many of these large governmental or bureaucratic organizations suffer from extreme inefficiency and ineptitude. The Red Cross's complete failings in Haiti have been widely reported. NPR ran a particularly scathing report [1] on it that includes nothing short of quite forward allegations of fraud. The Red Cross, for their part, make claims about what they did and provide extremely high level claimed expenditures, but then refuse to provide specific details of programs and costs. As the article mentions when you donate to the Red Cross first they immediately take a cut of that money for themselves. Then its distributed to other charities which then take an administrative cut. And then in carrying out the program there are more 'administrative' cuts. In one program NPR reviewed, administrative costs alone ate up 1/3rd of all donations. Later in the article the Red Cross, upon discovering NPR is investigating their efforts, sends an email to NPR suggesting that, 'NPR and ProPublica were "creating ill will in the community, which may give rise to a security incident.. We will hold you and your news organizations fully responsible." When the Red Cross says things like it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians - they include among those 130,000 "people who went to a seminar on how to fix their own homes, people who received temporary rental assistance, and thousands of people who received temporary shelters — which start to disintegrate after three to five years." In total the Red Cross's half a billion dollars in Haiti ended up creating 6 permanent homes. And this sort of inaction is not an isolated incident. [1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
      - fjsolwmv 8y ago
        Large corporations are inefficient also. People work all day sewing clothes but all the profits are siphoned off by foreign capitalists.
    - Retric 8y ago
      In 1990, more than 60% of people in East Asia were in extreme poverty. The dramatic shift had little to do with the UN/UNESCO or Red Cross and a lot to do with local governments not failing as hard as they did 50 years ago.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      You must be kidding. These elements are minor contributors. By far and large the opening of the world to free markets is what has solved many of these issues. If what you claim was true, then we would have solved poverty 40 years ago already. Just look at China and South-East Asia in general. They are coming out of poverty by becoming rich, not because someone is parachuting goods every day.
      - goatlover 8y ago
        > not because someone is parachuting goods every day. Charity of that sort arguably undermines local economies and makes people dependent on future charity. That's why poverty is better addressed by supporting free markets.
        ekianjo 8y ago
        Yes, we totally agree on that. Free markets give an incentive for individuals to work for themselves.
  - hkmurakami 8y ago
    Wrt polio, that's a Rotary International led effort, which is a very dispersed organization with 1.2 million members around the world contributing time and money to various causes. "Rotary, along with our partners, has reduced polio cases by 99.9 percent worldwide since our first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. We are close to eradicating polio, but we need your help. Whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, here are some ways to make a global impact and protect children against polio forever." https://my.rotary.org/en/take-action/end-polio https://my.rotary.org/en/take-action/end-polio
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    I don't think there is any one-size-fits-all answer, but one major contributor is rarely given credit -- nuclear weapons. Bear with me, I'm serious. When you look back at our history war is nearly always the cause for the greatest suffering. It causes starvation, 'involuntary migration', and so many other things. Whatever has been built up in an area, it does a wonderful job of tearing down. Look at Libya for one of the most stark contemporary examples. Libya was steadily developing and seeing increased prosperity as a model of what Africa could become. Now, it's been reduced to neglected, unstable, and impoverished rubble since we 'freed' them. And this didn't used to just be a story of Mideastern nations. This was the story of the world. The one thing that changed this was nukes. Mutually assured destruction is why the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not World War 3. And it's why direct unrestrained confrontation between developed nations has really become a thing of the past. Countries like China would never have been able to develop if not for the peace and stability that nuclear weapons have enabled. We can even look to nations like India. It's surreal to imagine that until 1947 that entire nation was just a property of the British Empire. Even the notion of a British Empire is surreal! But now that they have gained their independence and are a nuclear nation, they are also gradually increasing in prosperity as Indian decisions are being made to put Indians first. And as a nuclear power their decisions, independence, and developments are all effectively guaranteed, at least until we develop technology that can effectively render nukes harmless. Like so many things in life, some of the greatest progress comes not from directed efforts, but from paradoxical places you would never even imagine to look in the pursuit of your goal.
- CPLX 8y ago
  Meanwhile suicides and death by opiates have skyrocketed across the actual country Gates lives in, exacerbated by the incredible increase in inequality that Gates actively helped create. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Some things are much better, some are much worse. But Gates doesn’t have stats on the concentration of ownership of global resources in that post because it’s not a KPI for him.
  - JacobJans 8y ago
    You may want to read this year's letter: https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter#ALChapter1 https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter#ALChapter1
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    Starvation and disease is not chosen. Suicides and opiates are. (and if you are a maslow hierarchy fan, you will notice that life has gotten extremely good for these problems to exist) Things are much much better, equating these is irresponsible. EDIT: Lets not overthink the very obvious intention and meaning behind my comment.
    - ada1981 8y ago
      Starvation and disease is chosen in the sense that the developed world chooses to ignore it. I’d consider suicide and addiction more of a context than a “choice”.
    - monktastic1 8y ago
      > Starvation and disease is not chosen. Suicides and opiates are. This confuses proximate and root causes. Someone may "choose" to pull the trigger and end their life, or choose to swallow one more blissful pill to avoid confronting their miserable existence, but they probably would not have knowingly chosen the circumstances that now leave them with that horrible choice.
    - Retric 8y ago
      It's not that simple. Oopiates where prescribed in huge numbers knowing that many people would become addicted to them. Disease vectors are often under peoples control. Do you hike in the woods and risk lime disease? Poverty is often a little of everything. It's far easier to become poor than stop being poor, but it's not some inescapable prison.
- monktastic1 8y ago
  There is real progress, but it also matters what we measure. A good example[1] is India building hydroelectric dams, which often submerge fragile ecosystems and displace their agrarian societies of sometimes hundreds of thousands. The villagers go from earning "nothing" to earning $1/day according to our money system. They have been "lifted out of poverty," despite now living in disgusting slums in a city as foreign to them as it would be to us. Their culture (and perhaps knowledge of regenerative agriculture) are lost forever. We don't measure the carbon sequestration capacity lost by the now-inundated land, or the huge amounts of methane that the swamped vegetation releases. We just know we created "green energy." The villagers' risk of dying in those slums from many awful diseases has thankfully plummeted, but their profound communal loss will likely manifest in the form of depression or anxiety -- which are on the rise globally. Could that rise be a symptom of our realizing that while the "numbers" get better and better, it's occurring at the cost of obliterating the planet in possibly irreparable ways? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of good, too. But there's a lot that gets missed in choosing what and how we measure. [1] This example is lifted largely from a favorite author, Charles Eisenstein, from his new book "Climate: A New Story." You can read up on the Tehri dam. If it breaks (and some seismologists think it's a real possibility), it will cause untold more devastation.
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
  Sometimes, dead is better. Have you seen some of the industrial cities in India and China? I think I'd rather check out at 30 in a world where I could actually breathe.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    There are cities in the west that used to be that bad too, but... you do you, I guess.
    - jstewartmobile 8y ago
      As an event, yes. As an everyday thing, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog And I have never seen this in the USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmryr65iTwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmryr65iTwM It is all so unnecessary. Meanwhile, our elites will not abide a blow to their quarterly earnings for anyone, so the formula is: make money polluting China, go live in Canada; make money polluting India, go live in the USA.
- kingraoul3 8y ago
  Thanks to the PRC!
- pron 8y ago
  Of course progress is real (even if sometimes exaggerated). But one of the things that annoy me most is that some people, ahemstevenpinkerahem, use it to shut up those who very often make it happen. Change is real, but it happens in large part due to whiners and their political action (who are then often rebutted with, yeah, that change we had a generation ago was necessary and important, but now you're going too far/just whining/we've "given" you enough).
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Cherry-picking can generate support for any argument.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    As well as tasty pies and jams.
    - PeanutNore 8y ago
      I prefer the peach pickin' jams of the Allman Brothers Band
- andrepd 8y ago
  Let me fix that. >Some progress is real. Let me similarly point three cherry-picked stats that show the world is getting worse, to point out how flawed that reasoning is. * The percentage of the population living under democracies has gone down since 2000. * Wealth concentration and income inequality have risen since the 1970s. * Suicides have gone up. If there is one thing I realise is that only technological progress marches on. The rest of "progress" (social, political) almost never goes unequivocally "forwards", and is subject to setbacks and upturns and reversals of previously achieved progress.
qubax 8y ago
> Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished I have a hard time believing this. The elite spend a lot of time looking for ways to help themselves. The elite spend a lot of time looking to enrich themselves. The elite didn't become the elite by being charitable or caring or thinking of others. Also, I don't think this "nature" is just confined to the elite. Everyone is selfish. > but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status. People who love wealth and power don't want to diminish their wealth and power? I basically agree with the guy but nothing he said is new or insightful.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  You should hang out with wealthy people. A large portion of our conversations(as a 10%er) is about how we can create products, services, or nonprofit organizations that help people. This also seems to neglect that Exchange has both parties benefiting.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Assuming you are part of those people: Have they seen ONE such project from start to end that made real difference? Like I don't know, here's something egotistic: help one family -- buy them a beach house, supply them with tech and some financial reserves, AND help them build a profitable consultancy so they don't hang on your neck until you die? Something communal: or just build a well-funded school where they personally pay the fair wages of the teachers? For 10 years? I've been hearing a lot about the wealthy thinking of how to help. IMO it always stops at thinking only. At this point I've come to think they want to feel good about themselves but not really make a difference.
    - mkirklions 8y ago
      Without a doubt, have you not seen the progress humanity has 'selfishly' experienced.
      - 8y ago
ataturk 8y ago
We are living in another "Gilded Age" whether we realize it or not. And when populations hit a tipping point, the elite will start a big war to thin out a few hundred million people or maybe 3-4 billion this time. It is the same as it ever was. Google, Facebook, and all the other big tech companies could have helped liberate humanity--we were talking about privacy and open government in the late 1990s. It was all set to be implemented, then 9/11 happened and a new Iron Curtain fell on the US. All by design by those who can't allow the rabble to have any true freedom. When I look at what Google and the others have become now, I just feel ill--this is a major power play where they are aiding and abetting outright tyranny in China and will happily aid and abet the same crimes in the West as long as it suits their goal of power consolidation. Worse, they are now aligned with the far left, which makes utterly no sense except from a "gaining total domination" mindset. It's sick. The left is not "for the people." Show me one historical example! That talk was always a false front for naked brutality. Before you downvote me, realize what is at stake here. Read some damn history books and come to understand what happened to the Greeks and the Romans and why.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think I agree with you but you shouldn't make this into a left/right issue. It has nothing to do with this. It has all to do with elites pursuing their own interests at the expense of most everybody else.
- kenmicklas 8y ago
  I'm with you up until the left has never been "for the people", like wat?
maxxxxx 8y ago
"Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished, but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status." That explains why everybody is talking about philanthropy, LGBT, women's rights, diversity, racism and whatever instead of maybe paying their janitors and other low ranking staff a living wage.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  Or, in between lamenting the state of politics, maybe taking a look at the polarization machine they've built with youtube recommendations, facebook/twitter feed, etc etc.. But that might impact revenue.
- CM30 8y ago
  Yeah. Though it's just about how they avoid talking about liveable wages, but also how issues related to economic inequality in general seems to have quietly shuffled away by lots of politicians and political figures, or how so much political talk in general seems to be about 'social' issues now. And I'd say the reason for this is twofold: 1. Making social issues the big topic of discussion means millionaires, celebrities and companies can pretend to be 'progressive' while not actually doing anything meaningful to make the world better or help people escape poverty. 2. Stuff like Occupy likely scared the hell out of those with power/property/whatever, which led to a mission to get people fighting among themselves rather than against those with actual power.
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    The wake of austerity spawned both Occupy here in the US and nationalist groups like Golden Dawn et al in Europe. Today, nationalist groups and media in the US receive millions of dollars in support. I can't help but think someone took a look over at how Europeans neutralized dissent and thought they had a good thing going.
- Viliam1234 8y ago
  It's okay if the top 0.1% own the whole planet as long as we make sure that all ethnic groups and sexual minorities are represented among them. /s
arendtio 8y ago
I don't want to downplay the issues at hand, but when we talk about poverty and wealth, we should always be aware of the definition. AFAIK poverty is often defined as a relative ratio, leading to very different absolute conditions in different countries. For example, in the US or Europe, it is presumably something very different than in Africa. For my taste, Anand Giridharadas mixes those things a bit too loosely. One moment he is talking about the elite that is fighting for a better future in Africa and the next minute he talks about how the funding of public schools in the US is organized. Sure, his point is that the US elites are helping Africa because (it is cheaper and) it doesn't endanger the system of their wealth in the US, but I wonder if helping the people in Africa isn't more urgent than the ones in the developed part of the world. That said, I like how he presents and explains his view to the audience at Google.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  That's pretty problematic. A major reason for the rise of nationalistic movements in the US and Europe is that a lot of middle class people feel left behind. If people realize that the elites of their countries prefer to invest somewhere else while letting their own countries decay we will see a lot more social upheaval and rightfully so.
  - arendtio 8y ago
    > we will see a lot more social upheaval and rightfully so. No. You either don't know what 'social upheaval' means in the minds of nationalists or I wonder why you would judge it as 'rightfully'. There is absolutely nothing rightful about killing people. I don't know if that movement is just a based on feeling 'left behind', maybe as a symptom. I mean, there are serious issues connected to all of this. For example, there are companies in Europe which systematically conquer specific African industries (e.g., milk products), which is one of the reasons why the Africans migrate (no job -> no food -> certain death). The worst about it is that the same industries receive EU subsidies. So the European people pay money which causes the Africans to come to Europe (great job). After all, stopping the European companies from doing that wouldn't solve the problem as the US or the Chinese would just see the opportunity, but I doubt that shutting down the own country is a proper solution to that problem either (and nationalists don't stop there).

JacobJans 8y ago

Progress is real. https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_14_2017_02_AL2017GFO_GF-GFO_&WT.tsrc=GFGFO https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_14... > the number of childhood deaths per year has been cut in half since 1990. > Extreme poverty has been cut in half over the last 25 years. > In 1988, when the global campaign was launched to end polio, there were 350,000 new cases each year. > Last year, there were 37.

EliRivers 8y ago
Progress is real. Who is driving that progress? Is it the global elite in general, is it a handful of rich people who do actually make a difference, or are their efforts just noise and something else is driving the progress? I genuinely don't know; hoping someone has the data.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I'm thinking it's a mix of government action, organizations like the UN / UNESCO and the Red Cross, and both governments and donators that donate to said organizations so that they can do their work without needing to scrounge for money.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Many of these large governmental or bureaucratic organizations suffer from extreme inefficiency and ineptitude. The Red Cross's complete failings in Haiti have been widely reported. NPR ran a particularly scathing report [1] on it that includes nothing short of quite forward allegations of fraud. The Red Cross, for their part, make claims about what they did and provide extremely high level claimed expenditures, but then refuse to provide specific details of programs and costs. As the article mentions when you donate to the Red Cross first they immediately take a cut of that money for themselves. Then its distributed to other charities which then take an administrative cut. And then in carrying out the program there are more 'administrative' cuts. In one program NPR reviewed, administrative costs alone ate up 1/3rd of all donations. Later in the article the Red Cross, upon discovering NPR is investigating their efforts, sends an email to NPR suggesting that, 'NPR and ProPublica were "creating ill will in the community, which may give rise to a security incident.. We will hold you and your news organizations fully responsible." When the Red Cross says things like it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians - they include among those 130,000 "people who went to a seminar on how to fix their own homes, people who received temporary rental assistance, and thousands of people who received temporary shelters — which start to disintegrate after three to five years." In total the Red Cross's half a billion dollars in Haiti ended up creating 6 permanent homes. And this sort of inaction is not an isolated incident. [1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Large corporations are inefficient also. People work all day sewing clothes but all the profits are siphoned off by foreign capitalists.
  - Retric 8y ago
    In 1990, more than 60% of people in East Asia were in extreme poverty. The dramatic shift had little to do with the UN/UNESCO or Red Cross and a lot to do with local governments not failing as hard as they did 50 years ago.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    You must be kidding. These elements are minor contributors. By far and large the opening of the world to free markets is what has solved many of these issues. If what you claim was true, then we would have solved poverty 40 years ago already. Just look at China and South-East Asia in general. They are coming out of poverty by becoming rich, not because someone is parachuting goods every day.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      > not because someone is parachuting goods every day. Charity of that sort arguably undermines local economies and makes people dependent on future charity. That's why poverty is better addressed by supporting free markets.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        Yes, we totally agree on that. Free markets give an incentive for individuals to work for themselves.
- hkmurakami 8y ago
  Wrt polio, that's a Rotary International led effort, which is a very dispersed organization with 1.2 million members around the world contributing time and money to various causes. "Rotary, along with our partners, has reduced polio cases by 99.9 percent worldwide since our first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. We are close to eradicating polio, but we need your help. Whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, here are some ways to make a global impact and protect children against polio forever." https://my.rotary.org/en/take-action/end-polio https://my.rotary.org/en/take-action/end-polio
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I don't think there is any one-size-fits-all answer, but one major contributor is rarely given credit -- nuclear weapons. Bear with me, I'm serious. When you look back at our history war is nearly always the cause for the greatest suffering. It causes starvation, 'involuntary migration', and so many other things. Whatever has been built up in an area, it does a wonderful job of tearing down. Look at Libya for one of the most stark contemporary examples. Libya was steadily developing and seeing increased prosperity as a model of what Africa could become. Now, it's been reduced to neglected, unstable, and impoverished rubble since we 'freed' them. And this didn't used to just be a story of Mideastern nations. This was the story of the world. The one thing that changed this was nukes. Mutually assured destruction is why the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not World War 3. And it's why direct unrestrained confrontation between developed nations has really become a thing of the past. Countries like China would never have been able to develop if not for the peace and stability that nuclear weapons have enabled. We can even look to nations like India. It's surreal to imagine that until 1947 that entire nation was just a property of the British Empire. Even the notion of a British Empire is surreal! But now that they have gained their independence and are a nuclear nation, they are also gradually increasing in prosperity as Indian decisions are being made to put Indians first. And as a nuclear power their decisions, independence, and developments are all effectively guaranteed, at least until we develop technology that can effectively render nukes harmless. Like so many things in life, some of the greatest progress comes not from directed efforts, but from paradoxical places you would never even imagine to look in the pursuit of your goal.
CPLX 8y ago
Meanwhile suicides and death by opiates have skyrocketed across the actual country Gates lives in, exacerbated by the incredible increase in inequality that Gates actively helped create. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Some things are much better, some are much worse. But Gates doesn’t have stats on the concentration of ownership of global resources in that post because it’s not a KPI for him.
- JacobJans 8y ago
  You may want to read this year's letter: https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter#ALChapter1 https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter#ALChapter1
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Starvation and disease is not chosen. Suicides and opiates are. (and if you are a maslow hierarchy fan, you will notice that life has gotten extremely good for these problems to exist) Things are much much better, equating these is irresponsible. EDIT: Lets not overthink the very obvious intention and meaning behind my comment.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Starvation and disease is chosen in the sense that the developed world chooses to ignore it. I’d consider suicide and addiction more of a context than a “choice”.
  - monktastic1 8y ago
    > Starvation and disease is not chosen. Suicides and opiates are. This confuses proximate and root causes. Someone may "choose" to pull the trigger and end their life, or choose to swallow one more blissful pill to avoid confronting their miserable existence, but they probably would not have knowingly chosen the circumstances that now leave them with that horrible choice.
  - Retric 8y ago
    It's not that simple. Oopiates where prescribed in huge numbers knowing that many people would become addicted to them. Disease vectors are often under peoples control. Do you hike in the woods and risk lime disease? Poverty is often a little of everything. It's far easier to become poor than stop being poor, but it's not some inescapable prison.
monktastic1 8y ago
There is real progress, but it also matters what we measure. A good example[1] is India building hydroelectric dams, which often submerge fragile ecosystems and displace their agrarian societies of sometimes hundreds of thousands. The villagers go from earning "nothing" to earning $1/day according to our money system. They have been "lifted out of poverty," despite now living in disgusting slums in a city as foreign to them as it would be to us. Their culture (and perhaps knowledge of regenerative agriculture) are lost forever. We don't measure the carbon sequestration capacity lost by the now-inundated land, or the huge amounts of methane that the swamped vegetation releases. We just know we created "green energy." The villagers' risk of dying in those slums from many awful diseases has thankfully plummeted, but their profound communal loss will likely manifest in the form of depression or anxiety -- which are on the rise globally. Could that rise be a symptom of our realizing that while the "numbers" get better and better, it's occurring at the cost of obliterating the planet in possibly irreparable ways? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of good, too. But there's a lot that gets missed in choosing what and how we measure. [1] This example is lifted largely from a favorite author, Charles Eisenstein, from his new book "Climate: A New Story." You can read up on the Tehri dam. If it breaks (and some seismologists think it's a real possibility), it will cause untold more devastation.
jstewartmobile 8y ago
Sometimes, dead is better. Have you seen some of the industrial cities in India and China? I think I'd rather check out at 30 in a world where I could actually breathe.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  There are cities in the west that used to be that bad too, but... you do you, I guess.
  - jstewartmobile 8y ago
    As an event, yes. As an everyday thing, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog And I have never seen this in the USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmryr65iTwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmryr65iTwM It is all so unnecessary. Meanwhile, our elites will not abide a blow to their quarterly earnings for anyone, so the formula is: make money polluting China, go live in Canada; make money polluting India, go live in the USA.
kingraoul3 8y ago
Thanks to the PRC!
pron 8y ago
Of course progress is real (even if sometimes exaggerated). But one of the things that annoy me most is that some people, ahemstevenpinkerahem, use it to shut up those who very often make it happen. Change is real, but it happens in large part due to whiners and their political action (who are then often rebutted with, yeah, that change we had a generation ago was necessary and important, but now you're going too far/just whining/we've "given" you enough).
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Cherry-picking can generate support for any argument.
- ada1981 8y ago
  As well as tasty pies and jams.
  - PeanutNore 8y ago
    I prefer the peach pickin' jams of the Allman Brothers Band
andrepd 8y ago
Let me fix that. >Some progress is real. Let me similarly point three cherry-picked stats that show the world is getting worse, to point out how flawed that reasoning is. * The percentage of the population living under democracies has gone down since 2000. * Wealth concentration and income inequality have risen since the 1970s. * Suicides have gone up. If there is one thing I realise is that only technological progress marches on. The rest of "progress" (social, political) almost never goes unequivocally "forwards", and is subject to setbacks and upturns and reversals of previously achieved progress.

qubax 8y ago

> Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished I have a hard time believing this. The elite spend a lot of time looking for ways to help themselves. The elite spend a lot of time looking to enrich themselves. The elite didn't become the elite by being charitable or caring or thinking of others. Also, I don't think this "nature" is just confined to the elite. Everyone is selfish. > but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status. People who love wealth and power don't want to diminish their wealth and power? I basically agree with the guy but nothing he said is new or insightful.

mkirklions 8y ago
You should hang out with wealthy people. A large portion of our conversations(as a 10%er) is about how we can create products, services, or nonprofit organizations that help people. This also seems to neglect that Exchange has both parties benefiting.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Assuming you are part of those people: Have they seen ONE such project from start to end that made real difference? Like I don't know, here's something egotistic: help one family -- buy them a beach house, supply them with tech and some financial reserves, AND help them build a profitable consultancy so they don't hang on your neck until you die? Something communal: or just build a well-funded school where they personally pay the fair wages of the teachers? For 10 years? I've been hearing a lot about the wealthy thinking of how to help. IMO it always stops at thinking only. At this point I've come to think they want to feel good about themselves but not really make a difference.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    Without a doubt, have you not seen the progress humanity has 'selfishly' experienced.
    - 8y ago

ataturk 8y ago

We are living in another "Gilded Age" whether we realize it or not. And when populations hit a tipping point, the elite will start a big war to thin out a few hundred million people or maybe 3-4 billion this time. It is the same as it ever was. Google, Facebook, and all the other big tech companies could have helped liberate humanity--we were talking about privacy and open government in the late 1990s. It was all set to be implemented, then 9/11 happened and a new Iron Curtain fell on the US. All by design by those who can't allow the rabble to have any true freedom. When I look at what Google and the others have become now, I just feel ill--this is a major power play where they are aiding and abetting outright tyranny in China and will happily aid and abet the same crimes in the West as long as it suits their goal of power consolidation. Worse, they are now aligned with the far left, which makes utterly no sense except from a "gaining total domination" mindset. It's sick. The left is not "for the people." Show me one historical example! That talk was always a false front for naked brutality. Before you downvote me, realize what is at stake here. Read some damn history books and come to understand what happened to the Greeks and the Romans and why.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I think I agree with you but you shouldn't make this into a left/right issue. It has nothing to do with this. It has all to do with elites pursuing their own interests at the expense of most everybody else.
kenmicklas 8y ago
I'm with you up until the left has never been "for the people", like wat?

maxxxxx 8y ago

"Anand basically argued that the global elite spends a lot of time looking for ways to help the global impoverished, but fails to make an impact because they never consider solutions that would erode their own wealth/status." That explains why everybody is talking about philanthropy, LGBT, women's rights, diversity, racism and whatever instead of maybe paying their janitors and other low ranking staff a living wage.

yourbandsucks 8y ago
Or, in between lamenting the state of politics, maybe taking a look at the polarization machine they've built with youtube recommendations, facebook/twitter feed, etc etc.. But that might impact revenue.
CM30 8y ago
Yeah. Though it's just about how they avoid talking about liveable wages, but also how issues related to economic inequality in general seems to have quietly shuffled away by lots of politicians and political figures, or how so much political talk in general seems to be about 'social' issues now. And I'd say the reason for this is twofold: 1. Making social issues the big topic of discussion means millionaires, celebrities and companies can pretend to be 'progressive' while not actually doing anything meaningful to make the world better or help people escape poverty. 2. Stuff like Occupy likely scared the hell out of those with power/property/whatever, which led to a mission to get people fighting among themselves rather than against those with actual power.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  The wake of austerity spawned both Occupy here in the US and nationalist groups like Golden Dawn et al in Europe. Today, nationalist groups and media in the US receive millions of dollars in support. I can't help but think someone took a look over at how Europeans neutralized dissent and thought they had a good thing going.
Viliam1234 8y ago
It's okay if the top 0.1% own the whole planet as long as we make sure that all ethnic groups and sexual minorities are represented among them. /s

arendtio 8y ago

I don't want to downplay the issues at hand, but when we talk about poverty and wealth, we should always be aware of the definition. AFAIK poverty is often defined as a relative ratio, leading to very different absolute conditions in different countries. For example, in the US or Europe, it is presumably something very different than in Africa. For my taste, Anand Giridharadas mixes those things a bit too loosely. One moment he is talking about the elite that is fighting for a better future in Africa and the next minute he talks about how the funding of public schools in the US is organized. Sure, his point is that the US elites are helping Africa because (it is cheaper and) it doesn't endanger the system of their wealth in the US, but I wonder if helping the people in Africa isn't more urgent than the ones in the developed part of the world. That said, I like how he presents and explains his view to the audience at Google.

maxxxxx 8y ago
That's pretty problematic. A major reason for the rise of nationalistic movements in the US and Europe is that a lot of middle class people feel left behind. If people realize that the elites of their countries prefer to invest somewhere else while letting their own countries decay we will see a lot more social upheaval and rightfully so.
- arendtio 8y ago
  > we will see a lot more social upheaval and rightfully so. No. You either don't know what 'social upheaval' means in the minds of nationalists or I wonder why you would judge it as 'rightfully'. There is absolutely nothing rightful about killing people. I don't know if that movement is just a based on feeling 'left behind', maybe as a symptom. I mean, there are serious issues connected to all of this. For example, there are companies in Europe which systematically conquer specific African industries (e.g., milk products), which is one of the reasons why the Africans migrate (no job -> no food -> certain death). The worst about it is that the same industries receive EU subsidies. So the European people pay money which causes the Africans to come to Europe (great job). After all, stopping the European companies from doing that wouldn't solve the problem as the US or the Chinese would just see the opportunity, but I doubt that shutting down the own country is a proper solution to that problem either (and nationalists don't stop there).