Larry Page's view that the last best hope for humanity is some white guy with the hubris to tell the residents of Camden that his not being allowed to sell $60,000 luxury cars is the most pressing issue they faced, didn't surprise me. The American notion of Manifest Destiny isn't dead. It's not even past.
The mistake that many people of the developed world seem to make is to think that the Page's of the world see us as a distinct class apart from the billion global poor who live on less than $1 a day. It's a straight line from their suffering being just the business cost of sending rockets to Mars, to our $60,000 a year lives being the cost of doing it at scale.
Right now, we can be comfortable in sharing Page's and Elop's abstractions. People we know aren't effected. When it comes our time, the best we can hope for is to be the Sixth Army on the Volga and get some lip service that our suffering was honorable and our death glorious and will go down in history a thousand years hence.
Look up your street to the left, then down it to the right. If you don't see a native American, it's probably you.
I do feel for people dying of Polio in third world countries. But it is just silly to think that Gates style philanthropy of saving those people is going to change the world, though. It just means a few more people in third world countries will live who might not, and those countries might perform a little better GDP wise and take care of their people a little bit better, and a microscopic few of those people may someday make a change in the world by inventing something or creating some huge company or something.
Meanwhile, getting everyone in the US to use electric vehicles instead of gas would make a huge difference in the world. A society where transportation costs are much lower will be a very different society. Throw in Google self driving cars and we may not be mostly jammed into crime ridden cities any more, for example, since commuting would be a few pennies of electricity sitting in a cabin sleeping or working on a laptop instead of driving.
Polio eradication is only one of many health initiatives funded by the Gates Foundation. It is an outlier in terms of total lives saved and was selected because the funding could leverage several generations of polio mortality reduction initiatives (iron-lungs, Saulk vaccine, Rotary PolioPlus) over into complete eradication.
Sure, you probably don't know any of those people. They don't have laptops or cars or spare cabins in the woods. And they certainly don't hang out at libertarian circle jerks.
Gates-style philanthropy is on a course to eradicate polio. That's a potentially huge impact. Sure, the effects of polio are limited to a few poor people right now (mostly because herculean effort was already exerted to get it there), but if we can eradicate it, it means that not only is the current suffering eased, but we will never again have to spend any resources on polio, nor have people suffer from it.
Gates style philanthropy is like compound interest, it is small in the beginning but has outsized returns over decades. Having a few more percent of the population surviving childhood each year does not have a "little better GDP" results, it changes a country from China 1964 to China 2014.
In truth, there's a lot of injustice in this world, and that's not something that can be legislated or marketed away or even corrected except in some small way by charitable people doing charitable things on their own or in small groups. We shouldn't feel guilty for good fortune, but we can still help lift the lost, weak, innocent, dying.
Corporations, charities, and governments cannot, and will not, do that: they are an expensive middleman; more than that, they are an abstraction layer that insulates us from the pain of others.
Chattel slavery was eradicated solely through government action and radical philanthropy. Political equality for women has likewise advanced by those same means.
There's a cost and sometimes we display a weakness of character for not paying it.
Minnie balls, Spenser Rifles, trenches, revetments and mechanized transport by rail and steamship contributed to the 1,000,000 deaths in the US Civil War. Slavery didn't go down without a fight and that fight was industrial.
The mistake that many people of the developed world seem to make is to think that the Page's of the world see us as a distinct class apart from the billion global poor who live on less than $1 a day. It's a straight line from their suffering being just the business cost of sending rockets to Mars, to our $60,000 a year lives being the cost of doing it at scale.
Right now, we can be comfortable in sharing Page's and Elop's abstractions. People we know aren't effected. When it comes our time, the best we can hope for is to be the Sixth Army on the Volga and get some lip service that our suffering was honorable and our death glorious and will go down in history a thousand years hence.
Look up your street to the left, then down it to the right. If you don't see a native American, it's probably you.