But how many generations of admission for his descendants does that buy? If you are trying to analyze this through some effective altruism lens, you are not going to explain it. Leave EA to SBF.
The least impactful way to spend $300M?
171–180 of 291 posts
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#172I 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…
Eh, education is mostly bad for society.
In the sense, that most of education is about signalling, and funneling more money into education just fuels the arms race.
See Bryan Caplan's Case against Education for more details.
(The part of education that's actually about learning has mostly become cheaper than ever, thanks to the power of the Internet. But unless you got a piece of paper from a university, hiring managers seldom care. (Especially outside of tech.))
So donating money to further educational institutions is bad for society. It has a negative impact.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#173I 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…
I'd go one further. There are plenty of actively harmful donations one could make. As one example, most people would probably feel that way about roughly half of political donations.
Actively harmful donations at least have an impact (Classic example: Hitler had arguably the greatest impact of anybody in the twentieth century). This donation probably won’t do much of anything at all, which is notable in and of itself
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#174I 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…
Eh, education is mostly bad for society. In the sense, that most of education is about signalling, and funneling more money into education just fuels the arms race. See Bryan Caplan's Case against Education for more details. (The part of education that's actually about learning has mostly become cheaper than ever, thanks to the power of the Internet. But unless you got a piece of paper from a university, hiring manag…
I have a theory that every internet comment that starts with Eh is always wrong. So far I haven't been let down.
I don't understand how you could possibly say education has negative impact on society. Top universities can and do hire faculty for the purpose of research alongside teaching. Top minds performing research obviously benefits everyone as they can make new discoveries and innovations. That has the side effect of a worse undergrad education as researchers view teaching as a side gig but ultimately necessary to fund the university and it's research ventures
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#175I see your $300M "least impactful" Harvard donation and raise you $4.1 billion Presidential candidates raised and spent in the 24 months of the 2019-2020 election cycle.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> [...] increasing levels of income inequality. What exactly are you talking about? Global inequality has been on a downward trend in the last few decades.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem is that "shareholders" stopped being people and started being large funds. When the shareholders are people with a long-term stake in the company, like the founders, they can make long-term decisions or choose not to want the absolute most profit-maximizing thing because actually they're already pretty rich and maybe some things are more important. When they're fund managers, they want quarterly prof…
Who says large funds don't have long-term stakes and can't help make long-term decisions? Fund managers want perhaps to see quarterly profits for their fund, but that's not the same thing as quarterly profits at the underlying companies. Your fund can also profit, if the stock prices of the underlying companies rise. To give some existence proofs, have a look at how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla etc had rising sha…
The funds managers all own the same companies and thus have little interest in having them compete with each other.
This is why almost every sector of the economy is dominated by a few large firms.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#178[flagged]
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s thinking too much into it. He could have spent 1/10th of that and got those things in return. These billionaires want fame and to be the focus of discussions like this one. They know people will be in awe over such a huge sum of money. That’s what $300M buys you and is so much more interesting than buying a product: attention and fame.
Football clubs in Europe are similar. Billionaires are buying adoration.
That's also one of the riskiest ways to try to buy the love of the masses.
Countless rich guys have become persona non grata in the communities where they bought and mishandled the local club.
There's a few Chelsea or Leicester type stories where the buyer really is loved, a few where fans grudgingly accept they've done well but they'd rather not talk about where the (oil) money came from, and then quite a few where the new owners are reviled.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you being serious? I thought that trickle-down economics theory was pretty much debunked in the eyes of most of the nonelite people.
I never said trickledown economics. I just said that inequality doesn't hurt people. Some rich person having a 5 star steak dinner doesn't take anything away from how much I enjoyed my own dinner. It's not a zero sum game where a rich person enjoying something takes away from what I enjoy.
You ignored the part where money buys power, and ends up tilting the focus of an entire society towards benefiting the rich instead of ensuring the prosperity of its populace.