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.
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.)
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.
$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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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."
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...
>Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is fairly naive and also misses the fact that corporations have been around for a very long time too and don't have a great moral track record either. The Dutch East India Company at its peak dwarfed any modern corporation in terms of wealth and power[1] and was incredibly exploitative and corrupt. The British East India Company caused Opium addiction in China and kickstarted the colonisation of India. Industrial capitalists created (and still create) inhumane working conditions for their workers. If you count the whole sum of human misery created by the economic demands of the slave trade it becomes harder to even confidently assert that governments or religions have caused more evil.
This is not necessarily to say that corporations have caused more evil than governments or politics, but they do have a long track record of evil too and shouldn't be given "the benefit of the doubt" any more than any other organisation with a large amount of power.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
(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.)
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-...
$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.
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.
- 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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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/B00HN...
[2] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2330/1
"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."
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...
This is fairly naive and also misses the fact that corporations have been around for a very long time too and don't have a great moral track record either. The Dutch East India Company at its peak dwarfed any modern corporation in terms of wealth and power[1] and was incredibly exploitative and corrupt. The British East India Company caused Opium addiction in China and kickstarted the colonisation of India. Industrial capitalists created (and still create) inhumane working conditions for their workers. If you count the whole sum of human misery created by the economic demands of the slave trade it becomes harder to even confidently assert that governments or religions have caused more evil.
This is not necessarily to say that corporations have caused more evil than governments or politics, but they do have a long track record of evil too and shouldn't be given "the benefit of the doubt" any more than any other organisation with a large amount of power.
[1] http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...
Well, by launching many rockets burning hundreds of tons of kerosene each, SpaceX kinda offsets Tesla's clean energy efforts.
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.