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I think this could be rephrased as "Charitable organizations aren't interesting enough to deserve my money." People, especially highly successful people, view

by hooande 13y ago

I think this could be rephrased as "Charitable organizations aren't interesting enough to deserve my money." People, especially highly successful people, view charity as giving money away. Musk's inspirational projects seems much more appealing by comparison. There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. Even what Bill Gates is doing has little impact on people's daily lives here. Eradicating polio is the most noble of goals, but it takes place far away and the benefits are difficult to see. I think the best solution is to make charity cool again. FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome, using the Tennessee Valley Authority to reshape the landscape with bridges and dams. 21st century technology allows us to have a much larger impact on the lives of many more people, regardless of where they live. Elon Mush doesn't have a monopoly on big ideas. As a technology community it's up to us to come up with projects that help people in need while still capturing our imaginations. It doesn't matter if big problems are solved for profit or solved for charity. What matters is that they get solved. The danger is that fiduciary responsibilities will get in the way of doing good, working families will take a backseat to boards of directors and the rich will get richer [1] while everyone else struggles to keep even. This is why it would be better to make charity more interesting as opposed to giving money to dynamic and inspirational profiteers. It's always been difficult to combine making money with being of benefit to the world, but we need to raise the entrepreneurial and creative bar now more than ever. When one of the authors of "Don't Be Evil" decides that his money is better off in the hands of private corporations it should be a warning to all of us. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

novalis78 13y ago
"his money is better off in the hands of private corporations it should be a warning to all of us" - where else should it be? why is "private" with a vision worse than "public" squandering funds?
- lnanek2 13y ago
  The biggest goal for public spending is to spend it in the representative's state. See various bridges to nowhere, non-sensical military and space projects funded or kept alive over better ones just because a parts supplier was in state, etc.. It's pretty easy to have something with a better goal and better result than that.
  - username223 13y ago
    "Better goals" like marginally more effective web ads?
    - marris 13y ago
      Not what Musk does, but thanks for playing.
aaron-lebo 13y ago
> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome, using the Tennessee Valley Authority to reshape the landscape with bridges and dams. Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else. Regardless, government spending is definitely not charity in any traditional sense. Not to mention, that was a very difficult time. Spending money on a project like that was perhaps necessary just to keep things going. Getting back to your original point, can you make spending cool, or transfer of money from the wealthy to the poor cool by private means (charity) when it isn't required?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else. Almost everyone giving away money got it from somewhere else.
  - nova 13y ago
    From mutual agreement in exchange of goods and services, or by force. Not the same. Only thieves and governments do the latter.
    - squidfood 13y ago
      I dunno. I think the system of laws by which we elect people, they set taxes, build a road, and if we don't like the exchange we turn them out, is as close to "mutual agreement" as a city or larger-sized group of people can come up with...
      - technologue 13y ago
        Wrong Wrong Wrong. Could not be more wrong. Freedom of Contract is one of the most important concepts of free market capitalism. People must have the right to review the terms of contract, decide to sign or not and be held to the terms, and there should be penalties for breach on both sides and conditions for dissolution of the contract. The "Social Contract" you are talking about is no contract at all. It is imposed by force, you are given no chance to sign, a false choice (red or blue!) and only 1/385millionth of a say in it. There is no remedy for breach and no conditions for dissolution. It is the very opposite of voluntary exchange and mutual agreement. DO NOT conflate the two, or go back to whatever liberal arts school terribly educated you.
larrys 13y ago
"this could be rephrased as" Could also be rephrased as "I'm talking out of my ass because if I gave it any serious thought I would realize there was a big problem in putting all my 'change the world eggs' into one basket". And to those who say "well he didn't mean that literally" then apply that same logic anytime any famous person says something w/o thinking it through.
truelove 13y ago
There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. A lot of "truth"? Far-flung speculation is more like it.
- bogs_carut 13y ago
  The possibility of an extinction event on Earth isn't exactly far-flung speculation. A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.
  - JetSpiegel 13y ago
    But... SpaceX is a corporation, so the main point is in fact making money.
    - bogs_carut 13y ago
      I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct. Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect. If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.
    - aryastark 13y ago
      private corporation. Big difference. They also do not plan on going public until their Mars program is established.
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        Fair enough. I didn't know they were private.
  - truelove 13y ago
    The basic point is, perhaps that money would be better spent addressing the potential causes of such an event. Rather than treating it as an inevitability. And fantasizing about what we can do to help the 0.001% who will be rich enough to buy themselves a way out.
pan69 13y ago
My take on this that Larry Page is more of a "find a cure for the disease" rather than a "treat the symptoms" kinda guy. To be honest, I can find myself in a statement like that.
- dfc 13y ago
  To be honest, who would not want to "find [one's self] in a statement" (who writes like this?) like "I want to find a cure for the disease"? Bill Gates and Malaria: Trying to find a cure (vaccine) and is treating the symptoms in the interim.[^1] Would you want to "find yourself" in that statement? [^1]: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Malaria http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...
  - latj 13y ago
    "It seems as if he's making a larger point, which is that the right company run by the right person can have a major effect." Benevolent dictatorship is an excellent form of governance. The problem is it doesnt scale well and is hard to extend beyond the life of the dictator. Instead of going to mars, Page could just buy houses for 1 million poor families in the U.S. That would probably have a greater effect.
  - trillium 13y ago
    Yes, but I've heard some people say that the Gates foundation is not very good at approaching malaria. If you asked me to choose between them and Musk to approach malaria, my instinct is to go with Musk.
    - dfc 13y ago
      {{who?}} {{weasel-words}}
    - yardie 13y ago
      > I've heard some people say Ah yes, the goto phrase of every shitrag that calls themselves a newspaper. "I've heard some people say drinking my own urine replenishes the body with electrolytes."
JumpCrisscross 13y ago
>I think the best solution is to make charity cool again Both charities and corporations are political economic vehicles. Inherently preferring one over another isn't rational. Charities incentivise participation through altruism and the promise of political access. Corporations through self-interest and power. Corporations can make water pumps as easily as charities can find frivolous ends. If we are saying charities are less efficient than corporations, that is one thing. I think the statement is more about time horizons. Governments and foundations have long inherent time horizons. But short electoral and fund-raising cycles turn them myopic. Charities, similarly, must raise funds on an on-going basis. This makes them, on average, more short-sighted than even corporations. Particularly corporations backed by horizon-seeking visionaries such as Elon. Page is not denigrating the work of charities per se. He is observing that today is being kept at the expense of tomorrow. The portfolio deserves balancing, and the best way to do that, he thinks, is through long-viewed companies.
dsuth 13y ago
I don't think that gives Page enough credit. I'd phrase it as "Charitable organisations aren't effective enough to deserve my money". Elon Musk is, above all, a do-er. He has shown the capability to not only think big about very relevant problems, but implement solutions. I suspect it's those qualities that give Page confidence that his money would make more of a difference in Musk's pockets.
amirmc 13y ago
> "As a technology community it's up to us to come up with projects that help people in need while still capturing our imaginations." Some problems have boring (and known) solutions that are never going to 'capture the imagination'. Like clean water, sanitation and vaccines. I think it's dangerous to create a culture where we forgo a project simply because it doesn't sound exciting. Impact should be what matters. Larry Page can do what he wants with his money but he's completely wrong to conflate capitalism and philanthropy.
sanoli 13y ago
"doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week." The people who say stuff like this are always far, far away from the experience of not having anything to eat. It could be true that Musk's projects in the long run could have do more good for humanity in the long run, but also in a different sense. How is colonizing Mars, or having electric cars does more good for a whole continent that hasn't solved dozens of problems well below any technological/energetic one? What I'm saying is, it might do more good for the developed world, but not for Africa. Bill Gates was right when he criticized Google's balloon internet project. What the african population really needs is different. To say otherwise is to be too removed from the real, basic, almost elementary problems that are still present in the continent. (edit: I meant no offense to the parent with my first sentence. But I've been to Africa, and I live in a 3rd world country with some very, very poor regions. Space programs have very little effect on life there.)
- Cederfjard 13y ago
  I haven't considered the subject thoroughly enough to have an opinion either way, but your comment made me think of this letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
- bottled_poe 13y ago
  The real issue I have with this argument is that we can have both. The question is about priority. How do we measure the benefit to human civilization of colonizing mars in 2020 instead of 2030? Is it worth postponing the elimination of world hunger?
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  While you are right, I can relate to Page's view. Feeding people, for hunger-squashing sake, is a very immediate solution to a very immediate symptom. Does it attack the cause? Probably not. Using Africa as an example: If Africa's land can't feed the people there, for some intrinsical reason, then feeding people in Africa is unsustainable, and we'd better move them elsewhere. If Africa's land is capable of feeding the people there, then the real question is: Why can't it today? Are we going for the cause, or for the symptom? It could be that by eliminating hunger temporarily we'd start a virtuous cycle of some kind, but it'd be a totally random side-effect. In the grand scheme of things, feeding people for hunger-squashing sake, while noble and charitable and christian-good, amounts to very little. Colonizing Mars is the first guarantee that humans don't go the way of the Dodo in a Great Dying event[1]. Earth had five of those, and we still have to prove ourselves less stupid than dinosaurs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinc...
Mz 13y ago
I think the best solution is to make charity cool again... It doesn't matter if big problems are solved for profit or solved for charity. What matters is that they get solved. I think a lot of problems can be solved using a for profit model. I think, overall, it tends to be for the best if you can find a for profit model that is viable for the problem in question. I think the problem is not that it is for profit, I think the problem is that some for profit models are just not well suited to solving certain problems. This is an idea I have thought a great deal about. I have a serious medical condition. I have spent the last 13 years getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. I have come to believe that one of the problems is that doctors make their money off of treating illness. They do not actually make their money off of keeping you well. The more your treatment drags out, the more money they make. I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well. So doctors in China only make money if you are well. I do not know how accurate this is or how effective, but, as someone who is getting well in part by avoiding the medical establishment, I feel very strongly that our current "health care system" is very broken and one of the things wrong with it is not that it is monetized but how it is monetized. I have thought long and hard about how to try to share information about what worked for me. Given the negative reception my story gets almost everywhere I go, it may not be possible to help anyone else. But one thing I am clear about: I do not want to be "a consultant" and monetize the information much the way doctors get paid. Doctors in the U.S. mostly trade short term gains for long term costs. I got well by trading long term gains for short term costs as much as I could. When doctors put people like me on strong drugs, the drugs have a long handout listing the horrible side effects. But then as people like me get sicker and sicker, it is blamed on our disorder, not on the drug side effects. I have no desire to join doctors in following this model that allows them to charge big bucks and claim credit for the short term improvements while blaming long term deterioration on my condition. I believe that is a failed system and I believe the way it is monetized is part of why it goes down like that. I think charity also tends to fail. Think of the very negative connotation for the phrase "charity case." I don't think we help people that much when we first have to write them off as losers before we do anything for them. Given that I have been homeless for over two years and left the soup kitchens and most other homeless services as soon as I could, yeah, I think my opinion on that is informed and not merely pontification of an unclued privileged person trying to justify not giving money away. I don't have an answer. I mostly cannot get people to even engage me in discussion on the topic (of how I got well). But I agree much more with your statement about solving big problems and not caring if it is for profit or for charity than I do with your idea of making charity cool again. I do not really want charity. Charity has helped keep me alive but it is not going to get me off the street or restore me to a middle class lifestyle. I need to be taken seriously as a competent professional to achieve that. Being viewed as "a charity case" is the opposite of the professional respect and business connections I would prefer to achieve.
Spearchucker 13y ago
"...but it takes place far away and the benefits are difficult to see..." This worries me. It's like saying that because the people affected aren't here, in America, it's not worth doing.
melling 13y ago
No, what he said is that they don't have big ideas. Charities aren't going to move humanity forward and make big changes. They are also very inefficient with the money. I believe Vinod Khosla has discussed his dislike of charities. Someone like Elon is taking a dollar and turning it into $100. Where does it make more sense to put the money?
WalterBright 13y ago
> It's always been difficult to combine making money with being of benefit to the world In a free market, money is made by providing a benefit.
dgesang 13y ago
> There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. How about doing neither and instead use the money to solve some of the problems the earth suffers from today? Colonizing Mars, seriously, wtf ...
- sirsar 13y ago
  Reaching for a stretch goal has a way of solving a lot of problems on the side. The space race didn't cure polio, but it did give us smoke detectors, memory foam, improved water filtration, and many others that I can't list off the top of my head. Here's a wikipedia article dedicated to them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies And here's the mandatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 13y ago
> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome Yeah, like the FDR war bonds to finance war activities in WWII in order to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground ? Using even popular children cartoons for propaganda : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zmpod_zbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zmpod_zbE Seriously, if you want to use an example of someone who did good things, choose actually a good person in the first place.
- gdy 13y ago
  > to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground You say that like it was a bad thing.
onetwofiveten 13y ago
The big problem with corporations (as far as I see it) is that they act as a dehumanising mechanism for representing shareholders. An individual who has tight control over a company (like Elon Musk) can shoot for long term goals in order to achieve their noble aspirations. However, in most cases, the legal obligation of the directors of a corporation to represent the interests of their shareholders seems to default to purely financial interests. A board of directors aren't really obligated to represent the humanitarian or altruistic interests of their shareholders. In fact, typically financial interests are only served in the short term. This means the capital that a shareholder represents is only ever set to work to meet financial interests. It's up to the shareholder to then divert their profit from their own investments into charities. This seems very inefficient to me. My solution is to include a much richer mechanism for representing shareholder interests locked into the company charter. Shareholders could vote on what things they valued, and on values that they assign to those things. Then, instead of a quarterly bottom line that represents monetary value, the bottom line would also include those externalities that the shareholders voted on. For example, you could have a company where most investors were patriots who cared about the economy. They could vote to assign a value to every month of employment that the company provides to an American worker. So, when the bottom line was calculated, each full time worker was treated like an extra source of income. This means when the board of directors considers whether or not to close down a factor and outsource to Mexico, the reduction in costs has to justify the expense to the patriot virtues of the investors. The obvious objection is that if you only valued jobs you might run a company into the ground. However, running the company into the ground also gets rid of all the jobs. So it's not something the board of directors would want to do. Balancing short term gains over long term company growth is something directors have to do anyway. This example really illustrates the power of this approach. In our current system, a company can move a factory to Mexico even if all its shareholders want to keep jobs in the USA. Those shareholders could then earn a significant amount of dividends from the move, and then try to invest those dividends charitably in order to express their patriotic virtues. However, no charity is going to be able to replace all those lost jobs for the price of those dividends. Charities just aren't efficient and reliable enough. A valuable addition to the charter would be to make it so that the votes and results were made public. People who claim themselves job-creators would be able to put their money where their mouth is - and called to account if they failed to do so.
crag 13y ago
"There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week." There is? Tell me, how would colonizing Mars help the average man? Frankly I can't think of any higher calling to donate to than environmental groups. Now there are good groups and bad groups (both nationally and local) - and it's up to you to do your research. Well, I guess if our environment goes to hell, building a colony on mars might be a good idea. But somehow I doubt the "average" man would be able to afford a house on Mars.
mantrax 13y ago
"I think the best solution is to make charity cool again." No, charity doesn't need your branding efforts. It needs accountability. Throwing money at a generic "charity" initiative is the best way to see your money disappear in the pockets of a handful of corrupted individuals. When giving for charity, you need to be able to see what exactly results from what you gave. Say, $10 million required to build a hospital with this and that, all written in specs, and by year 2016. People pool money, and if the funding goal is reached, the providers keep the people taking the money accountable to build the hospital to specs. And not "give for charity", feel good, go back to your life, and achieve absolutely nothing because no one is held accountable. The latter is what 90% of charity is like. It's only remotely better than throwing money at lottery tickets and hoping it results in good things. And then you're surprised why Larry Page has the common sense to say the things he says.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  What you mention definitely occurs, but the 90% hyperbole is totally unnecessary. It's nowhere near that percentage of philanthropic efforts.
- nzp 13y ago
  So if you were Page, you would hold Musk to the same accountability standards? (Anyway, I don't think this accountability thing has anything to do with Page's motives).
dharmach 13y ago
Ultimately it all comes down to empathy and compassion. When your child, spouse, or parent is sick, you will not go and develop a tool for improving life of future generations. The people in scientific or innovation fields are rarely motivated by empathy; they are driven by something that is cool, interesting and exciting. Charitable organizations are not effective enough, that's a separate issue.
gmoore 13y ago
"People, especially highly successful people, view charity as giving money away"....that's a shame really. It's more accurately viewed as investing in the commons.

by hooande 13y ago

novalis78 13y ago

"his money is better off in the hands of private corporations it should be a warning to all of us" - where else should it be? why is "private" with a vision worse than "public" squandering funds?

lnanek2 13y ago
The biggest goal for public spending is to spend it in the representative's state. See various bridges to nowhere, non-sensical military and space projects funded or kept alive over better ones just because a parts supplier was in state, etc.. It's pretty easy to have something with a better goal and better result than that.
- username223 13y ago
  "Better goals" like marginally more effective web ads?
  - marris 13y ago
    Not what Musk does, but thanks for playing.

aaron-lebo 13y ago

> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome, using the Tennessee Valley Authority to reshape the landscape with bridges and dams. Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else. Regardless, government spending is definitely not charity in any traditional sense. Not to mention, that was a very difficult time. Spending money on a project like that was perhaps necessary just to keep things going. Getting back to your original point, can you make spending cool, or transfer of money from the wealthy to the poor cool by private means (charity) when it isn't required?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else. Almost everyone giving away money got it from somewhere else.
- nova 13y ago
  From mutual agreement in exchange of goods and services, or by force. Not the same. Only thieves and governments do the latter.
  - squidfood 13y ago
    I dunno. I think the system of laws by which we elect people, they set taxes, build a road, and if we don't like the exchange we turn them out, is as close to "mutual agreement" as a city or larger-sized group of people can come up with...
    - technologue 13y ago
      Wrong Wrong Wrong. Could not be more wrong. Freedom of Contract is one of the most important concepts of free market capitalism. People must have the right to review the terms of contract, decide to sign or not and be held to the terms, and there should be penalties for breach on both sides and conditions for dissolution of the contract. The "Social Contract" you are talking about is no contract at all. It is imposed by force, you are given no chance to sign, a false choice (red or blue!) and only 1/385millionth of a say in it. There is no remedy for breach and no conditions for dissolution. It is the very opposite of voluntary exchange and mutual agreement. DO NOT conflate the two, or go back to whatever liberal arts school terribly educated you.

larrys 13y ago

"this could be rephrased as" Could also be rephrased as "I'm talking out of my ass because if I gave it any serious thought I would realize there was a big problem in putting all my 'change the world eggs' into one basket". And to those who say "well he didn't mean that literally" then apply that same logic anytime any famous person says something w/o thinking it through.

truelove 13y ago

There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. A lot of "truth"? Far-flung speculation is more like it.

bogs_carut 13y ago
The possibility of an extinction event on Earth isn't exactly far-flung speculation. A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  But... SpaceX is a corporation, so the main point is in fact making money.
  - bogs_carut 13y ago
    I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct. Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect. If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.
  - aryastark 13y ago
    private corporation. Big difference. They also do not plan on going public until their Mars program is established.
    - JetSpiegel 13y ago
      Fair enough. I didn't know they were private.
- truelove 13y ago
  The basic point is, perhaps that money would be better spent addressing the potential causes of such an event. Rather than treating it as an inevitability. And fantasizing about what we can do to help the 0.001% who will be rich enough to buy themselves a way out.

pan69 13y ago

My take on this that Larry Page is more of a "find a cure for the disease" rather than a "treat the symptoms" kinda guy. To be honest, I can find myself in a statement like that.

dfc 13y ago
To be honest, who would not want to "find [one's self] in a statement" (who writes like this?) like "I want to find a cure for the disease"? Bill Gates and Malaria: Trying to find a cure (vaccine) and is treating the symptoms in the interim.[^1] Would you want to "find yourself" in that statement? [^1]: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Malaria http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...
- latj 13y ago
  "It seems as if he's making a larger point, which is that the right company run by the right person can have a major effect." Benevolent dictatorship is an excellent form of governance. The problem is it doesnt scale well and is hard to extend beyond the life of the dictator. Instead of going to mars, Page could just buy houses for 1 million poor families in the U.S. That would probably have a greater effect.
- trillium 13y ago
  Yes, but I've heard some people say that the Gates foundation is not very good at approaching malaria. If you asked me to choose between them and Musk to approach malaria, my instinct is to go with Musk.
  - dfc 13y ago
    {{who?}} {{weasel-words}}
  - yardie 13y ago
    > I've heard some people say Ah yes, the goto phrase of every shitrag that calls themselves a newspaper. "I've heard some people say drinking my own urine replenishes the body with electrolytes."

JumpCrisscross 13y ago

>I think the best solution is to make charity cool again Both charities and corporations are political economic vehicles. Inherently preferring one over another isn't rational. Charities incentivise participation through altruism and the promise of political access. Corporations through self-interest and power. Corporations can make water pumps as easily as charities can find frivolous ends. If we are saying charities are less efficient than corporations, that is one thing. I think the statement is more about time horizons. Governments and foundations have long inherent time horizons. But short electoral and fund-raising cycles turn them myopic. Charities, similarly, must raise funds on an on-going basis. This makes them, on average, more short-sighted than even corporations. Particularly corporations backed by horizon-seeking visionaries such as Elon. Page is not denigrating the work of charities per se. He is observing that today is being kept at the expense of tomorrow. The portfolio deserves balancing, and the best way to do that, he thinks, is through long-viewed companies.

dsuth 13y ago

I don't think that gives Page enough credit. I'd phrase it as "Charitable organisations aren't effective enough to deserve my money". Elon Musk is, above all, a do-er. He has shown the capability to not only think big about very relevant problems, but implement solutions. I suspect it's those qualities that give Page confidence that his money would make more of a difference in Musk's pockets.

amirmc 13y ago

> "As a technology community it's up to us to come up with projects that help people in need while still capturing our imaginations." Some problems have boring (and known) solutions that are never going to 'capture the imagination'. Like clean water, sanitation and vaccines. I think it's dangerous to create a culture where we forgo a project simply because it doesn't sound exciting. Impact should be what matters. Larry Page can do what he wants with his money but he's completely wrong to conflate capitalism and philanthropy.

sanoli 13y ago

"doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week." The people who say stuff like this are always far, far away from the experience of not having anything to eat. It could be true that Musk's projects in the long run could have do more good for humanity in the long run, but also in a different sense. How is colonizing Mars, or having electric cars does more good for a whole continent that hasn't solved dozens of problems well below any technological/energetic one? What I'm saying is, it might do more good for the developed world, but not for Africa. Bill Gates was right when he criticized Google's balloon internet project. What the african population really needs is different. To say otherwise is to be too removed from the real, basic, almost elementary problems that are still present in the continent. (edit: I meant no offense to the parent with my first sentence. But I've been to Africa, and I live in a 3rd world country with some very, very poor regions. Space programs have very little effect on life there.)

Cederfjard 13y ago
I haven't considered the subject thoroughly enough to have an opinion either way, but your comment made me think of this letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
bottled_poe 13y ago
The real issue I have with this argument is that we can have both. The question is about priority. How do we measure the benefit to human civilization of colonizing mars in 2020 instead of 2030? Is it worth postponing the elimination of world hunger?
sergiosgc 13y ago
While you are right, I can relate to Page's view. Feeding people, for hunger-squashing sake, is a very immediate solution to a very immediate symptom. Does it attack the cause? Probably not. Using Africa as an example: If Africa's land can't feed the people there, for some intrinsical reason, then feeding people in Africa is unsustainable, and we'd better move them elsewhere. If Africa's land is capable of feeding the people there, then the real question is: Why can't it today? Are we going for the cause, or for the symptom? It could be that by eliminating hunger temporarily we'd start a virtuous cycle of some kind, but it'd be a totally random side-effect. In the grand scheme of things, feeding people for hunger-squashing sake, while noble and charitable and christian-good, amounts to very little. Colonizing Mars is the first guarantee that humans don't go the way of the Dodo in a Great Dying event[1]. Earth had five of those, and we still have to prove ourselves less stupid than dinosaurs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinc...

Mz 13y ago

I think the best solution is to make charity cool again... It doesn't matter if big problems are solved for profit or solved for charity. What matters is that they get solved. I think a lot of problems can be solved using a for profit model. I think, overall, it tends to be for the best if you can find a for profit model that is viable for the problem in question. I think the problem is not that it is for profit, I think the problem is that some for profit models are just not well suited to solving certain problems. This is an idea I have thought a great deal about. I have a serious medical condition. I have spent the last 13 years getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. I have come to believe that one of the problems is that doctors make their money off of treating illness. They do not actually make their money off of keeping you well. The more your treatment drags out, the more money they make. I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well. So doctors in China only make money if you are well. I do not know how accurate this is or how effective, but, as someone who is getting well in part by avoiding the medical establishment, I feel very strongly that our current "health care system" is very broken and one of the things wrong with it is not that it is monetized but how it is monetized. I have thought long and hard about how to try to share information about what worked for me. Given the negative reception my story gets almost everywhere I go, it may not be possible to help anyone else. But one thing I am clear about: I do not want to be "a consultant" and monetize the information much the way doctors get paid. Doctors in the U.S. mostly trade short term gains for long term costs. I got well by trading long term gains for short term costs as much as I could. When doctors put people like me on strong drugs, the drugs have a long handout listing the horrible side effects. But then as people like me get sicker and sicker, it is blamed on our disorder, not on the drug side effects. I have no desire to join doctors in following this model that allows them to charge big bucks and claim credit for the short term improvements while blaming long term deterioration on my condition. I believe that is a failed system and I believe the way it is monetized is part of why it goes down like that. I think charity also tends to fail. Think of the very negative connotation for the phrase "charity case." I don't think we help people that much when we first have to write them off as losers before we do anything for them. Given that I have been homeless for over two years and left the soup kitchens and most other homeless services as soon as I could, yeah, I think my opinion on that is informed and not merely pontification of an unclued privileged person trying to justify not giving money away. I don't have an answer. I mostly cannot get people to even engage me in discussion on the topic (of how I got well). But I agree much more with your statement about solving big problems and not caring if it is for profit or for charity than I do with your idea of making charity cool again. I do not really want charity. Charity has helped keep me alive but it is not going to get me off the street or restore me to a middle class lifestyle. I need to be taken seriously as a competent professional to achieve that. Being viewed as "a charity case" is the opposite of the professional respect and business connections I would prefer to achieve.

Spearchucker 13y ago

"...but it takes place far away and the benefits are difficult to see..." This worries me. It's like saying that because the people affected aren't here, in America, it's not worth doing.

melling 13y ago

No, what he said is that they don't have big ideas. Charities aren't going to move humanity forward and make big changes. They are also very inefficient with the money. I believe Vinod Khosla has discussed his dislike of charities. Someone like Elon is taking a dollar and turning it into $100. Where does it make more sense to put the money?

WalterBright 13y ago

> It's always been difficult to combine making money with being of benefit to the world In a free market, money is made by providing a benefit.

dgesang 13y ago

> There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. How about doing neither and instead use the money to solve some of the problems the earth suffers from today? Colonizing Mars, seriously, wtf ...

sirsar 13y ago
Reaching for a stretch goal has a way of solving a lot of problems on the side. The space race didn't cure polio, but it did give us smoke detectors, memory foam, improved water filtration, and many others that I can't list off the top of my head. Here's a wikipedia article dedicated to them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies And here's the mandatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/

deleted 13y ago

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ekianjo 13y ago

> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome Yeah, like the FDR war bonds to finance war activities in WWII in order to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground ? Using even popular children cartoons for propaganda : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zmpod_zbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zmpod_zbE Seriously, if you want to use an example of someone who did good things, choose actually a good person in the first place.

gdy 13y ago
> to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground You say that like it was a bad thing.

onetwofiveten 13y ago

The big problem with corporations (as far as I see it) is that they act as a dehumanising mechanism for representing shareholders. An individual who has tight control over a company (like Elon Musk) can shoot for long term goals in order to achieve their noble aspirations. However, in most cases, the legal obligation of the directors of a corporation to represent the interests of their shareholders seems to default to purely financial interests. A board of directors aren't really obligated to represent the humanitarian or altruistic interests of their shareholders. In fact, typically financial interests are only served in the short term. This means the capital that a shareholder represents is only ever set to work to meet financial interests. It's up to the shareholder to then divert their profit from their own investments into charities. This seems very inefficient to me. My solution is to include a much richer mechanism for representing shareholder interests locked into the company charter. Shareholders could vote on what things they valued, and on values that they assign to those things. Then, instead of a quarterly bottom line that represents monetary value, the bottom line would also include those externalities that the shareholders voted on. For example, you could have a company where most investors were patriots who cared about the economy. They could vote to assign a value to every month of employment that the company provides to an American worker. So, when the bottom line was calculated, each full time worker was treated like an extra source of income. This means when the board of directors considers whether or not to close down a factor and outsource to Mexico, the reduction in costs has to justify the expense to the patriot virtues of the investors. The obvious objection is that if you only valued jobs you might run a company into the ground. However, running the company into the ground also gets rid of all the jobs. So it's not something the board of directors would want to do. Balancing short term gains over long term company growth is something directors have to do anyway. This example really illustrates the power of this approach. In our current system, a company can move a factory to Mexico even if all its shareholders want to keep jobs in the USA. Those shareholders could then earn a significant amount of dividends from the move, and then try to invest those dividends charitably in order to express their patriotic virtues. However, no charity is going to be able to replace all those lost jobs for the price of those dividends. Charities just aren't efficient and reliable enough. A valuable addition to the charter would be to make it so that the votes and results were made public. People who claim themselves job-creators would be able to put their money where their mouth is - and called to account if they failed to do so.

crag 13y ago

"There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week." There is? Tell me, how would colonizing Mars help the average man? Frankly I can't think of any higher calling to donate to than environmental groups. Now there are good groups and bad groups (both nationally and local) - and it's up to you to do your research. Well, I guess if our environment goes to hell, building a colony on mars might be a good idea. But somehow I doubt the "average" man would be able to afford a house on Mars.

mantrax 13y ago

"I think the best solution is to make charity cool again." No, charity doesn't need your branding efforts. It needs accountability. Throwing money at a generic "charity" initiative is the best way to see your money disappear in the pockets of a handful of corrupted individuals. When giving for charity, you need to be able to see what exactly results from what you gave. Say, $10 million required to build a hospital with this and that, all written in specs, and by year 2016. People pool money, and if the funding goal is reached, the providers keep the people taking the money accountable to build the hospital to specs. And not "give for charity", feel good, go back to your life, and achieve absolutely nothing because no one is held accountable. The latter is what 90% of charity is like. It's only remotely better than throwing money at lottery tickets and hoping it results in good things. And then you're surprised why Larry Page has the common sense to say the things he says.

knowaveragejoe 13y ago
What you mention definitely occurs, but the 90% hyperbole is totally unnecessary. It's nowhere near that percentage of philanthropic efforts.
nzp 13y ago
So if you were Page, you would hold Musk to the same accountability standards? (Anyway, I don't think this accountability thing has anything to do with Page's motives).

dharmach 13y ago

Ultimately it all comes down to empathy and compassion. When your child, spouse, or parent is sick, you will not go and develop a tool for improving life of future generations. The people in scientific or innovation fields are rarely motivated by empathy; they are driven by something that is cool, interesting and exciting. Charitable organizations are not effective enough, that's a separate issue.

gmoore 13y ago

"People, especially highly successful people, view charity as giving money away"....that's a shame really. It's more accurately viewed as investing in the commons.