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Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right. No, Bruce Wayne is incredibly myopic. I
by cperciva 12y ago
Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right.
No, Bruce Wayne is incredibly myopic. If you have billions of dollars and you want to fight crime, the last thing you should be doing is developing fancy equipment so that you can personally go after criminals one by one. If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs.
- jrochkind1 12y agoGetting off-topic of course, but the key insight here is that Bruce Wayne does NOT really want to 'reduce crime'. Instead, he wants to take revenge on criminals, like the criminals who killed his parents. 'reduce crime' isn't the same as 'fight crime', he requires the FIGHT part, and the revenge part. Yeah, that makes him somewhat less sympathetic, but isn't that what everyone likes about batman these days, the darkness?
- magicalist 12y agoYep. See Watchmen (the book, not the movie) for an extended look into what kind of batshit people would ever want to be a "superhero".
- krapp 12y agoRelevant: http://wondermark.com/939/ http://wondermark.com/939/
- dragonwriter 12y ago> If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs. To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-priming charity would probably also be increasing that capacity and enabling Wayne to shift more money into those approaches productively, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat counteracted by the rather extraordinary frequency of supervillian-initiated civic destruction in Gotham, which probably has a negative impact on capacity-development efforts.)
- TeMPOraL 12y agoSo we could say that Bruce Wayne knows well how to purchase fuzzies and utilons separately [0]. He spends a lot of his resources to help effectively by donating to local charities, and he gets the fun and good feelings from helping people by chasing criminals himself as Batman. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_separately/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...
- Dylan16807 12y agoI wouldn't say that. After a certain amount of charity work is done, the Batman work gets to be as effective on a per-dollar basis by reducing crime through the method of intimidation.
- angersock 12y agoBatman's superpower is literally class inequality and money.
- kordless 12y agoHe's not called the "Dark Knight" without reason.
- swang 12y agoMark Zuckerberg tried just dumping money into a school system. Didn't work because the school system was itself corrupt
- dangayle 12y agoExactly this. That money is already done and gone, with little to no benefit to the children themselves. Such a shame.
- spacehome 12y agoAnd removing lead paint and lead from automobile exhaust and putting more cops with better technology on the street and funding abortions and birth control and funding internet pornography and keeping funding prisons to criminals in there longer.
- Cyph0n 12y agoWell stated.