131–140 of 291 posts
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What is your point?
Probably he means that by giving money to an “elite” school, it just makes it more likely that it will end up hurting the “non-elites”. I don’t necessarily agree with that point by the way because there are students who will have their cost of attendance potentially offset by this donation.
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Partly, but it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago who helped lay the framework for the "shareholder primacy" theory that really paved the way for the poor longterm corporate management of the last couple of decades.
"Shareholder primacy" led to the invention of modern vaccines and mRNA discoveries. Was this a poor longterm corporate investment?
Could this be some tax and investment dance? Perhaps the money will be used by Harvard to buy a security he holds or has options on washing his hands clean of SEC oversight. Then he executes on the predictable market move, makes the money back and writes down the donation for taxes. Meanwhile, Harvard is still holding whatever long term position they opened so they too are happy. Their cover story is some rather chea…
I think neither a 40-billionaire nor Harvard would risk legal trouble by pulling off such an easily auditable maneuver.
The idea that people tossing around hundreds of millions of dollars are on the up and up otherwise they would have consequences doesn't seem to have much historical evidence supporting this dynamic
The Paradise papers leak outlined a lot of these schemes
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But what? What would be lost without the 300 million? If you can’t be specific then I think it’s to the authors point. I mean, just consider that he spent 300 million and the impact isn’t obvious. At least in your fish example they used it for the intended purpose for some period of time and there is still some low utilization for dried fish. It’s also half of 300 million so it seems they did more with less despite i…
You don’t think doing more good with the same resources is a good thing? Is it not better to save two lives than one life, all else equal?
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> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old. Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candl…
The Harry Potter fan fiction thing was something they got together and voted for. It’s not something they’d criticize because they chose it themselves. I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants. The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process,…
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are actual reasons to sponsor HPMoR, which you seem to ignore. Perhaps you disagree with those reasons - but there are still reasons.
> The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
It kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind; when you examine any large-enough organization under a microscope, you'll probably find something. Why not grind it against the millions of people who aren't donating to charity?
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 there wasn’t really a reason KLF burned a million quid. Counterfactualising the lives of the rich and powerful is a profound waste of time.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_...
Invest it in a beverage company whose customer base is conservative, frat boys, and the working class then aggressively rebrand it with everything they oppose front and center. Proceed to lose six billion dollars of capitalization in six days.
At this level, these donations are less about the actual concrete impact but moreso the press and prestige of the funding event itself.
Trying to fit these gifts into the philanthropy mindsets of maximum impact, long termism, EA, etc is missing the point.