World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything' • Hacker News Board

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#101

Post by eru » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 2:30 AM UTC

jakarta wrote: post #44

makmanalp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ad hominem if I've ever seen it. Especially in corrupt societies, I feel like jobs would fare much better than donations by: 1) Increasing economic activity which is required for growth 2) Making sure the money goes to where it's supposed to, and used the way it's supposed to. (Remember the stolen OLPCs? Donations don't always make it to the destination if they're juicy targets.)

A number of countries experimented with shock treatment capitalism as a means of quickly bringing their economies up to speed. Take Russia or Bolivia as examples of what can go wrong. In each case, they quickly freed up their economy and tried to privatize everything. The problem was, they had no real legal system in place to properly check that activity. Key national industries went into the hands of just a few weal…

As a counterexample, Poland did not do too bad. Or did it?

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#102

Post by secretasiandan » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 2:40 AM UTC

lionhearted wrote: post #96

I disagree with him, but there's merit in what he says. Let me give you an example. I had coffee in an NGO-operated cafe in Siem Riep, Cambodia. All profits went to running a small school for 10 kids. I did the quick math on a napkin, and realized they were doing far worse as an NGO/charity than they would be to help people as a for-profit business. Observe: With a 20% net profit after all expenses (which I think the…

You haven't made an argument against an NGO operated cafe, you've made an argument against an NGO operated cafe that pays out all its earnings.

Also, assuming that they have any sort of tax or cost advantage (if only from people willing to donate time/effort), for the same amount of business they have more money to put towards their purpose, be it for investment in more cafes or for educating more students now.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#103

Post by CamperBob » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 2:49 AM UTC

ESchmidtSeesYou wrote: post #97

CamperBob wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did proprietary software need to happen to spur innovation? To the extent that the Wintel monopoly resulted in lower hardware costs, it's hard to see any intellectually honest Linux or BSD user arguing otherwise. You would not be able to buy 3+ GFLOPS systems with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of mass storage for less than $1000 without the kind of mass standardization that, history suggests, can emerge only from mo…

Oh, really? You're actually making the opposite argument: divided technical leadership is what drove most progress in personal computing. Unless you yearn for the days of the IBM mainframe... The Economics of the Microsoft Case, by perhaps the best technology economist there is, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.24.7...

Divided technical leadership was, indeed, important, up until the point where the hardware platforms converged. At that point it became a stumbling block to progress in application software.

The problem was that the hardware platforms were converging in terms of functionality, but not at the all-important register and ISA level. Consequently the OSes were not converging at all. Let's assume I don't have time to read a 27-page .PDF -- do the authors address the economic impact of the lack of a common platform for application development?

It's possible that somebody would have duct-taped some sort of graphical shell to CP/M and gained some traction, but at best, they'd have ended up doing exactly what Microsoft did by duct-taping a graphical shell to MS-DOS. People who walk into computer stores want to be told what to buy.

In the end it won't matter, if you believe that HTML is the next platform. In that case we'll all end up running dumb terminals anyway, and it won't matter what chips and what OSes are handling the UI. But that was never something that was going to happen in the 25 critical years between 1985 and 2010, when the commodification of high-performance PC hardware took place. We will not see another "window" of opportunity like that, and we absolutely would not have seen that one happen without Wintel, or something very much like it.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#104

Post by CamperBob » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 2:53 AM UTC

brc wrote: post #85

CamperBob wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did proprietary software need to happen to spur innovation? To the extent that the Wintel monopoly resulted in lower hardware costs, it's hard to see any intellectually honest Linux or BSD user arguing otherwise. You would not be able to buy 3+ GFLOPS systems with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of mass storage for less than $1000 without the kind of mass standardization that, history suggests, can emerge only from mo…

I find it hard to argue that, without Bill Gates, we wouldn't have ended up with a monopoly of some type in hardware/OS. Certainly Microsoft won the race, but it's not like every other player on the scene at the time wasn't trying to do the same thing. Every single PC maker/OS developer knew that winning the bulk of the market was the key to success. Thus, they were all following similar strategies. I just think it's…

Possibly. But the question was, was a proprietary OS needed at all? I wasn't defending Microsoft or Intel specifically, just pointing out that the PC revolution damned sure was not going to happen if left up to Apple, Commodore, IBM, and the Unix geeks.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#105

Post by lionhearted » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 3:21 AM UTC

secretasiandan wrote: post #102

lionhearted wrote: post #96

I disagree with him, but there's merit in what he says. Let me give you an example. I had coffee in an NGO-operated cafe in Siem Riep, Cambodia. All profits went to running a small school for 10 kids. I did the quick math on a napkin, and realized they were doing far worse as an NGO/charity than they would be to help people as a for-profit business. Observe: With a 20% net profit after all expenses (which I think the…

You haven't made an argument against an NGO operated cafe, you've made an argument against an NGO operated cafe that pays out all its earnings. Also, assuming that they have any sort of tax or cost advantage (if only from people willing to donate time/effort), for the same amount of business they have more money to put towards their purpose, be it for investment in more cafes or for educating more students now.

> You haven't made an argument against an NGO operated cafe, you've made an argument against an NGO operated cafe that pays out all its earnings.

Ah, there were some unstated assumptions in my post.

1. NGO leadership are usually from a different talent pool and background than business leadership.

2. Business leadership tend to outperform NGO leadership at growing a business.

This leads to the idea that a cafe operated for charity might produce less good than a cafe operated for business, as described above. I think it was definitely true in that specific case. Whether the NGO could've run in a more expansive, business-like fashion? I don't know. I'm inclined to guess no, but I'd be open to being pleasantly surprised.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#106

Post by jshen » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 3:40 AM UTC

makmanalp wrote: post #40

jshen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except one could say that mexico represents Slim's philosophy and America (and most industrialized countries) more closely represent Buffet's/Gate's philosophies. I think it's clear which philosophy has the better outcome for people in general.

Wow, and this one is a false analogy. Just because one is from America and the other is from Mexico doesn't mean that they've been the sole affectors of their respective countries' welfares, or that the current (good or bad) state of their countries is a direct result of their actions. What is this, fallacy friday?

Mexico has virtually no safety net, a fraction of redistribution of wealth for social good such as infrastructure and education, etc

Using taxes for laying a foundation that provides greater opportunity for society in general is very similar to doing it with charity. Not doing it is very similar to saying, "leave it to the private sector"

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#107

Post by jshen » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 3:40 AM UTC

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #41

jshen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except one could say that mexico represents Slim's philosophy and America (and most industrialized countries) more closely represent Buffet's/Gate's philosophies. I think it's clear which philosophy has the better outcome for people in general.

one could say that, but I don't think anyone would would actually say that with a straight face.

Read my reply to the above commenter

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#108

Post by orangecat » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 3:46 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #42

He's right, and it shouldn't. That's what governments and collective decision-making are for. Private individuals shouldn't be depended on to do anything but further their own interests, even in the charity sphere. They spend money for PR purposes, to strengthen personal connections, or simply because they enjoy the environment it puts them in. The major cause of misery in the world is the lust for power and influenc…

Private individuals shouldn't be depended on to do anything but further their own interests

Except for politicians, they'll be noble.

If he created a lot of good jobs for people with fair wages, and charged fair prices, that's a massive good and can't be denied. He won't, though, because when things are done fairly, there's not a lot of profit to be made.

Utterly unfounded. Counterexamples that come immediately to mind are Steve Jobs and Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#109

Post by danielnicollet » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 4:10 AM UTC

Just read the article and the comments and at the risk of sounding wishy washy, I just think that Carlos Slim probably didn't get good at what he does by excelling at generosity. So, frankly, I think he is the last person I will listen to when giving advice on how to practice charity. Charity and for profit economic development are not mutually exclusive, like all things, they have to be practiced with the right purpose in mind. Some people need charity to become self-reliant later. Some people need an investor.

Re: World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'

#110

Post by scythe » Sat, Oct 16, 2010, 5:30 AM UTC

yters wrote: post #90

scythe wrote: post #46

I think you need to look more specifically at what exactly the Gates Foundation does if you want to answer the questiona at the end of the article. They're known for fighting disease, primarily; disease in third-world countries is a major barrier to industrial expansion into these countries. Further, charity has achieved at least one major victory: the eradication of smallpox, perhaps the greatest achievement in huma…

Now this is purely hearsay, but I've heard it said the creator of the smallpox vaccine regretted what he'd done because the amount of polio it produced greatly outnumbered the lives it saved. It was on the internet so it must be true!

Edward Jenner introduced the variola vaccine in the late 1700s. Polio didn't even become a major problem until after his death!

>In developed countries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, improvements were made in community sanitation, including better sewage disposal and clean water supplies. These changes drastically increased the proportion of children and adults at risk of paralytic polio infection, by reducing childhood exposure and immunity to the disease.

(Edward Jenner died in 1823)