201–210 of 291 posts
the war in afghanistan cost taxpayers $300,000,000 per day every day for 20 years, for a total of ~$2,000,000,000,000
That is so obscene. So basically every American paid a dollar per day, I guess. (I know, ~most don't pay income taxes, but yeah.)
I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…
Harvard produced many of the people that built a society with staggering and increasing levels of income inequality. Consultants, hedge fund managers, architects of super addictive social media platforms, politicians who write laws favoring corporations over workers, etc. etc.
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Did it really? Wasn't the research leading to mRNA vaccines performed in a grant-funded university lab?
It was Moderna and they are not a grant funded university lab
There is that story about KLF actually setting fire to a million pounds [1]. Why don’t the ultra rich give away more money? Why do they spend it on super yachts, houses with 50 bathrooms, and horridly expensive luxury trinkets? Even more to the point, why do they just hang on to vast sums of money they don’t need in bank accounts or other investments? My conclusion is that there isn’t a reason, in the same way that t…
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> [...] increasing levels of income inequality. What exactly are you talking about? Global inequality has been on a downward trend in the last few decades.
What do you mean by ‘Global Inequality’? Because income and wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in (almost)all developed countries
I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…
> It is ultimately funding education for smart people who are well-positioned to use that education productively, and for research and arts that are meant to benefit humanity. It's not just throwing it away. You have to account for it as the marginal dollar, not the average dollar. If Harvard had less money, and they're competent, they would cut the least effective programs. But because their budget is so large, they…
I'm guessing your intention was to suggest that in the presence of a large surplus (Harvard's massive endowment etc) it is reasonable to assume this goes unspent because it can't be turned into worthwhile education or research. Is that about the sum of the argument?
Meanwhile, somewhere with high impact research but nearly zero in reserves would presumably be more deserving?
I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…
God I just don't buy the "these people will go on to benefit humanity" argument anymore. We don't need more tech companies. We don't need more hedge funds. We don't need to feed our genuinely brightest minds into the wealth consolidation machine. Occasioanlly one of these people will find some one-off bit of brilliance that lifts an entire class of people out of poverty, but that ticket has an expiration date tied to…
What we absolutely don’t need, is autocrats dictating what society needs.
Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy. It’s not perfectly efficient (especially in the short term), but pretty damn efficient.
By throwing off price signals, the market allows us to allocate efforts to things society wants more of. Unfortunately, contrary to the wishes of the King, it turns out society wants more tech companies.
But sometimes we do indeed over-allocate resources to tech companies! Luckily we have the hedge funds incentivized to make profit by arbitraging those prices back to reality (As we’ve just witnessed in tech). I guess we also need more hedge funds.
I take issue with this article under the Effective Altruism concept. 100% agree with the title, that the it is very not impactive. But it isn't actively harmful, which there's a LOT of other ways to spend $300m and actually be harmful. So the article takes issue with buying status overall - agreed. But, saying that Griffin should have donated the money to "better things". Even the article writer points out that Griff…
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You could argue that burning plain quid efficiently distributes the value back to the other holders of quid (deflation). Burning a million quid in some thing like housing, on the other hand, selfishly removes wealth from society and the economy.
It makes me wonder- what would happen if we had wealth taxes on cash, but the money went to... no one?
This is a much better idea than having a zero lower bound and an endlessly growing welfare state. I mean, imagine if you didn't have to pay for municipal garbage collection. You would produce more trash than is optimal as someone else is eating the cost. A guaranteed legal minimum wage that is excessively high (think $50 per hour) also encourages more workers to apply for jobs than is optimal.
The zero lower bound not only contains a price control, it also contains an implicit subsidy that guarantees that the government has to subsidize the difference between the interest rate on the capital market, which may in theory be negative and the guaranteed interest rate on cash. It may not sound like a subsidy since no money is being paid, except if you don't pay the subsidy you get something like the great depression. The economy grinds to a halt. The subsidy has to be paid indirectly, the government has to guarantee to keep borrowing enough money until the interest rate is above 0%. I.e. the government has to take on more debt than is optimal and then it somehow has to recycle it back into the private economy. It will have to micromanage more and more parts of the economy simply because of some illogical decision to say "the private capital market ends at the zero lower bound". This is why I am in favor of negative interest rates above some threshold like $250k.