Get $15 off a Skylight Calendar at SkylightCal.com/FACTUALLY! 🌏 Get Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/ADAMCONOVER It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ You can watch full episodes of Lovett or Leave It at www.youtube.com/@lovettorleaveitpodcast/ ! Sponsored by DeleteMe. Take back control of your personal information: visit joindeleteme.com/Adam and use code ADAM for 20% off!
Get some checks together write the amounts of money on them go drive to a black community knock on the door get an adult and sign the check over to them directly if you want to help out people in poverty then give them the money directly to help them they are full grown adults they know how to spend and what they need with the money
The discussion about MacKenzie Scott not donating to the amazon strike fund is really illuminating because it illustrates the biggest problem with the "rich people give away money" model of charity. Someone who is rich, and owes their wealth to the current system, is almost never going to consider a solution to society's ills that necessarily involves the destruction of their own wealth and power.
Or, maybe... and hear me out here... she's the ex-wife of the owner of Amazon and doesn't want any more drama? She's giving money away hand over foot to other causes
Exactly. I've been yelling at effective altruist friends for ages, "please consider trying ways to change the system, not just ways to work within it!". at the same time I want leftie friends to study effective altruism's writings and lift parts the left can use; I'm most optimistic about the general idea of making big lists of options and doing the one that seems most promising, a common idea outside EA but one I think should be far far more common. Unfortunately the EA way is to have a central authority make that list, and I think a leftie way to do it should be to *teach each other how to make a list of the options you have for contributing to a better world*. Central authority precludes diversity of tactics, and we must have diversity of tactics to get anywhere.
@@cptnoname perhaps. She could donate to another union cause or a more generalised labour cause like a group that tries to change how wait staff are paid. The main issue highlighted by Adam and Amy and the OP here is the fact that charity truly is a form of palliative care for society's illnesses and the only way to solve the problem truly is to prevent it in the first place. Given that most of our problems stem from systemic issues and not external factors, this requires changing the systems around us and that is necessarily going to be confrontational and "self-harming" for an extremely wealthy person because the current systems that lead to their extreme wealth are the result of decades of manipulation and enactment of policy via the lobbyists and the bought and paid for political class. I.e. the problem isn't MacKenzie Scott as an individual but the overall system of wealth accumulation that she is a part of the "rich people give away money" model. She received billions worth in stocks from which stems the wealth she is giving away, if she moved against the extreme financilization of everything, she'd lose the ability to have so much money to give away. Don't look at this as an indictment of her ethics, look at it as an indictment of the systems within which even the most ethical are required to operate. The issue being discussed for the entire episode is that the pressing need is not for more charity but for systemic change. (p.s.: my comment is not an attack on you here, just using your comment as a jumping off point to refocus on the core issue for anyone who might be thinking the same thing and missing the forest for the tree -- this might or might not include you, I don't know).
@@sugoruyothat discussion is preposterous. Guaranteed the person who started this thread has contributed $0 to the same fund. The argument seems to boil down to "giving away BILLIONS is not good enough because there are still problems with the system" is so naive it'd almost be funny if it weren't so sad. Firstly, an individual cannot buy an institutional revolution. That's a multigenerational endeavor to be undertaken by the entire population. Secondly, that requires a willful ignorance for the very obvious issues such a donation would raise. Her own argument is to "the system is corrupt." Almost anyone watching this video would draw a direct line from that statement to politics and lobbying, but she then suggests fixing the system by contributing to MORE lobbying organizations??? Diminishing Scott's absolutely unprecedented altruism by pointing out a contrived, if ironic, talking point for the sake of being contrarian is just flat out embarrassing. Some people will never be satisfied. It's so gross.
@@itmeurdadbut this argument is utterly defeatest, as living within the system we currently do, without class traitors within higher brackets of power, the only solutions to fighting against the power that empowers itself is through hoping you can wait out the rich with strikes or through physical force with violent resistance which is often just as likely to bring about fascist regimes as it is liberation. Yes, it is icky that money is how you fight for power in our current system, but that doesn't mean we should reject or not suggest the benefits of a windfall of money in the movement to get into the broken system so we can dismantle it without all the needless suffering
As a public school teacher, can confirm: constantly having to "prove" your effectiveness at non-quantifiable things (like learning) leads to nothing but micromanagement, cheating, and number crunching that ultimately helps no one.
Working on non-quantifiable things leads to attempts to make those things quantifiable. We can't actually tell whether kids are learning, but we can look at their test scores and get those up. (Whether/how well test scores correlate to learning is another matter.)
As Theodore Roosevelt once said: "No amount of charity can make up for the means of acquiring such wealth." This holds true to this day all, over a hundred years later.
It's a nice idea, but I think a very important point was missed in talking about it. While you can have a living wage (a wage that allows people to work one job and afford the cost of living in their area), a giving wage is currently impossible. As long as the essentials for life are commoditized, any attempt at a giving wage will quickly reduce itself to a living wage as the people who seek profit off of your desire to survive raise their prices to reflect everyone's newfound ability to pay for survival.
@@cenauge The solutiuon is easy, live on the means of poorer earners in your area and give away the rest. A giving wage is all up to you, I have a friend who's only reason to negotiate salary is for his peers, then he gives about half of his income away to different charities. So he only negotiates his salary to be able to give more away. However it is much easier to increase your living expenses so they fit to your salary. Therefore I propose we should have a part of our tax that we could decide where it goes. Like I do not want to use my tax money on police, but I could pay more for school and healthcare. But I will not walk over to my local hospital with moneybags, I'd rather save that for a rainy day.
I'd love to just live a normal life where I don't have to worry about food, water, or freezing to death because we have to walk to get groceries, in the winter, in the US :/
Having worked for a food bank for 3 years I've learned much. 1 thing i can say is check the CEO PAY vs the folks who actually do the work...nothing worse then having a CEO making 6 figures whining about getting a raise 2 months late while telling staff she can't afford to pay you an extra $1. For me i worked as IT admin, social media mngr, photographer, security, & 6 other jobs for $34k while watching the CEO drive a Bently bitching about how she didn't get the charmin someone donated & threaten to stop letting staff get food as a result. We had to go to other food banks to feed our families!! Volunteer and do some research before donating cash...
I never donate to anything without doing some research first. Never ever ever donate at the till when asked. You are very correct about charity administration taking all the money and paying their staff eff all.
I always check CEO pay as a % of charity revenue, before donating to any charity. If the CEO makes too much, resulting in less then 93% money ending up to intended recipients, I do not give to that charity. You would be surprised how most of the American charities fail this test. If I were to ever work for one, my test would be even more stringent.
This is what happens to people when they're separated from others. If they spent meaningful time with the people they're trying to help or provide for, they'd be less whiney and greedy, and more appreciative and generous.
used to work at a non profit that worked with adults with developmental disabilities. workers were payed minimum wage. they always said there wasn't enough money for raises, the health insurance kept getting worse and more expensive, and there was never enough to spend on the individuals they supported. after I left someone who I used to work with (who had been fired for reporting illegal things the company was doing) who used to work in banking looked into the financials since they were public and every year the top 5ish people running the company were getting fat wages. they made it look like the CEO was such a good person because she was taking such a paycut from working other CEO jobs. She was still making 6 figures and giving herself a fat raise each year.
Jimmy Carter managed to do a lot of good without becoming obscenely wealthy or going to prison. Habitat for Humanity, Guinea worms, all sorts of stuff. So he did both, more local charity and overseas charity. Jimmy Carter is a great role model, even if the far right has tried to mock him for decades.
You do understand the difference between being a competent president and a good person? He was a terrible president, like Obama and Biden. Their policies were terrible. Trump was obnoxious, yet his policies were amazing. And the Left "resisted" to the point that Biden has allowed out borders to be open and has jeopardized nations safety. Look at NYC. Eric Adams is begging for the wall to be built.
People don’t realize money alone isn’t the best way to solve poverty. This is why I get so frustrated with the emphasis on taxes rather than focusing on fair wages. A proper pay received soon after performing the labor required is worth so much more than the same amount of money coming in from financial aid at a later date. So many people work and should not be in poverty needing financial assistance in the first place. Companies actually paying people for their labor means people will be able to invest rather than rack up debt. It will also mean we will need to pay less taxes in the long run to essentially subsidize wages that should have been coming from companies. We don’t need so many charities if people just got paid properly for their labor in the first place.
Also, it dilutes the amount of money people get back. Because there are administrative costs for government programs. To me, the taxes help us play catch-up. The rich need to give their fair share so we can invest in education, transportation, and other infrastructure projects. Then we need to get paid more so we can keep the gap small.
The way to 'solve' poverty is to make it impermissible for individuals to amass obscene wealth, because obscene wealth in the hands of a few only happens when the vast majority of the people who actually create wealth are kept in poverty through low wages and public policies that drive structural inequality. But for that to happen, governments would have to legislate and enforce both higher minimum wages and profit-sharing for lower-level employees and restrictions on corporations' ability to inflate the price of consumer goods and services. That will never happen, especially in the U.S., until the right-wing stops being able to effectively use the cries of "socialism!" and "government overreach!" and "the tyranny of regulation and the 'administrative state'" to get their base to ignore their own economic interests and instead vote for a political platform that serves corporate interests and rich people who demand tax cuts. The base of the GOP can't do that without also having to put aside their racism, sexism, white nationalism, religious bigotry, their endless desire to "own the Libs", and their refusal to share with those they regard as the "undeserving poor".
How about democratically decided companies? Workers collectively decide pay structures, employment, et cetera. I am pretty sure, as a whole, workers would decide a fair pay structure
The employee owned business model is the ticket. Level playing field as far as wages go. Greed is revealed quickly and dismissed. Many, many perks with this model.
As a Formula 1 fan, the whole Mission Winnow debacle with Ferrari made me realize that a large number of philanthropic endeavors were just money-laundering fronts so that rich and powerful people could avoid both taxes and scrutiny. The ultimate issue I see with philanthropy is that most people see philanthropy as a permanent way to help those in need rather than as a stopgap to allow the needed systemic changes to take hold. Or to solve acute, unforeseeable problems.
I like how Charlie Munger's only "philanthropy" was a windowless dormitory. Of course the backlash resulted in it being built with windows. But it's so expensive for students, it recoups the costs in just over 3 years. It was just rent seeking. Munger is now in the great windowless dormitory in the ground.
There's a lot of "I'm a philanthropist, so anything that increases my wealth is good because it leads to more philanthropy" going around in certain circles.
Another grave I'll happily piss on if given the chance! Good riddance. I couldn't believe how many people believed his own mythological bullshit: "he was humble and didn't spend lavishly!" Yeah, sure, and how many active brain cells are left in your head?
The sheer number of wealthy people taking from people who think theyre making a difference and then not giving anything back and maybe using it for personal gain not even a thank you; is staggering.
@@yurisonovab3892 not one of the billionaire class is willing to reduce their own wealth by a single dime to reduce economic inequality. That includes MacKenzie Scott. I admire her effort to "empty the vault," but nothing she's doing would prevent the vault from being full in the first place. The reason that's important is that a lot of the causes she supports are made dramatically worse by the neoliberalism which allows her to do this in the first place.
That is indeed the way SBF and the effective altruism boys see charity. As something that enriches their lives, not the people receiving their " charity." I think the point being made in the video is that charity is most effective when the giver is willing to sacrifice control of their giving for the benefit of the receiver. My favorite quote on this is from Dr.Who. "Do what is right without witness or reward, but because it is right."
In Buddhism they say "the giver should be thankful", there is a very amusing koan about it, I always remember it when I think I'm great because of some nice thing I did or when I feel guilty because I didn't do more... Be grateful for how the connection with the people you gave to enriched your life. I like what she said about connecting with the organisation. The best way to know your money is actually helping is to volunteer with the organisation for a few years if you can, which philanthropists would have the free time to do if they gave a hoot. It doesn't have to be white savior bull, they can volunteer locally or do office work for an organisation supporting people abroad
@@Kornheiser10 hes not saying hoarding it is philanthropy. Hes saying that the damage they have done seems so bad that philanthropy couldnt help. At least thats how i took his statement
I never knew philanthropy meant anything about charity. I just always thought it was just a synonym for like investor or a rich person, because I never really heard the word used in terms of charity, but rather to emphasis how rich someone.
Hey Adam loved the discussion here. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that you always talk about how messed up things are right now, but I always feel like I get some takeaways from your videos as to what I can do in my own life to try to affect change, and it's a breath of fresh air. Keep on fighting the good fight!
I have way more complex feelings about the catholic church after starting work related to the state utility assistantance program. St Vincent DePaul helps so many people out when the state program fails in various ways, like the scale they operate on is astounding for a church organization. Tithing to the catholic church pays for this, but that same tithe also goes to the legal defense of priests who have done terrible things. It's something I think about a lot. If we lived in an equitable society this wouldn't be a question, but we don't.
I'm a broken record about this right now but I really wanna see what would happen if people who are in on solidarity, mutual aid, direct action were to ponder what the leftie flavor of "make big list of options, try to estimate soberly which one will be most effective, do that" would be. Because I think the EA crowd limit themselves to altruism, and they measure using utilitarianism, in ways that don't quite work. But I really hope that comparing options in depth can catch on, and I'd really love to see folks teaching each other how to compare options. as someone who's been around EA for years and years, the deep consideration of options was always what seemed good, and the bad stuff like centralizing those lists and just leaving it up to a single authority what the best option is always left a bad taste in my mouth.
@@laurenpinschannels the lefty form of what you are talking about would be some type of democratic economic planning. Read up on economic planning it’s literally what you’re describing. It gets a bad wrap because of attitudes surrounding the Soviet Union in the west but there are different models of planning and it doesn’t necessarily need to look like the Soviet model. Check out Cybersyn in Chile for a planning model that was not the Soviet model
I was thinking more starting from an individual level and building in local communities, but maybe we're saying the same thing, not sure - I'm not a fan of outsourcing it to some external system, I'd much prefer to have everyone thinking carefully about it and talking about it. But maybe! I'd love to see a list of pros and cons of different ways of comparing pros and cons as a local community :)
@@laurenpinschannelswell the lefty way is almost always going to involve some form of a (semi-)planned economy. Solidarity, mutual aid and direct action are the key operating pillars of anarchists (not exclusively) so you're looking at a bottom-up approach that starts local and expands to a form of federation for regional and wider issues when it comes to decision making. Bear in mind, in any economic system that involves planning and regulating output of goods and services to meet need first and demand after within reason you don't have the same set of economic forces acting in the same ways as we've had for the last couple hundred years. We ponder that list of options all the time but you have to consider the fact that direct action means we're not posting about it on social media, we go out there and do the thing. Sometimes the thing can't even posted about as an after-thought because it lives in a legal grey area or public attention on it would expose vulnerable people, for example. The thing is the list of options available to us under current conditions is very different from what would be available to the overall population if society operated under the solidarity, mutual aid, direct action "values" of deciding what to do. There are occasions where this can be glimpsed (e.g. when there's an emergency), if you want an example of what it can look like with wider support search for these terms in relation to hurricane relief in the US states on the path of a given hurricane or how mutual aid groups organised food provision at the height of the pandemic in major cities like NYC. Also, do bear in mind that EA folks don't analyse their options that deeply. It tends to be reductive down to a very quantitative "number of people helped per dollar spent" kinda deal with little concern for the quality of the help or the degree to which it fights the problem at its root. E.g. it's not very helpful to donate insulin if you're not going to fight the systems that put it out of reach of people in need.
I kinda hate to comment here before reading her book, though I definitely plan to and really enjoyed this interview... But I'm far less optimistic when it comes to expecting change from within the nonprofit industrial complex ("NPIC"), no matter how "radical" any nonprofit may be with their intentions. The NPIC as a whole is controlled by and designed to work in favor of capitalists with the sole intent of upholding the status quo (I've got two long-form videos on this to date as part of a series I'm working on, so I won't repeat everything I've said in those here lol, and I'm still releasing content on the subject but just don't have as much time as I'd like - because capitalism, unfortunately). And in a society where there's literally no direct democratic participation beyond electing a supposed "lesser of two evils" and *hoping* they'll have your/our best interest at heart (when, spoiler alert, they fucking don't, simply by nature of their position of power they hold and the systemic alienation of political power from the masses by the state), those are the people who control the laws, regulations, etc. nonprofits are forced to abide by, full stop. And nonprofits come with too many limitations and restrictions for any real radical work to be done through them that has a lasting impact in virtually any way, which is why it's important that the worker classes organizing need to refrain from doing so through the nonprofit sector (even if some of the "perks" make it tempting). There's a reason why an entire anthology compiled by INCITE! is titled "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex" - because no amount of throwing money at nonprofit organizations is going to give us the much needed radical shifts that we need. It might make a few people feel like they're doing something good for others, and some nonprofits indeed help in some ways to *alleviate* the problems caused by capitalism and the state, but they're never enough to end the problems at their root causes, nor are they meant to be by design. And instead of so much money going to salaries and overhead and other nonprofit expenses, it would be so much more beneficial AND equitable to mobilize and advocate for approaches like mutual aid instead. And the point she made about working as a social worker or some other trenchwork role for a nonprofit as opposed to being a rich fuck working for a corporation and donating money... I disagree with that, too. Both as someone who's been on the receiving end of nonprofits my whole life and as someone who's worked for a few nonprofits. I'm definitely not saying the rich fuck is the better option in any sense. But we can't pretend like the average nonprofit worker doesn't also develop an "us vs. them" mentality by virtue of them becoming professionals in a sector that professionalizes suffering of others at its core, akin to that being a flaw that y'all even mentioned in this interview regarding "effective altruism", where people on the receiving end are more like quantifiable numbers that the "altruistic" capitalists have a savior complex attitude toward. And the people on the receiving end of nonprofits and/or social services definitely experience a power imbalance between themselves and the people who are employed by a nonprofit, because of the inherent need they have for the resources that nonprofits hoard from their own communities and distribute at their own leisure, because they possess the power to do so. In other words, the nonprofit sector trains its workers to form what Paul Kivel refers to in an essay of his as "the buffer zone", and you're basically still postured in hierarchical form as being above the people being "served" by your nonprofit, all while this buffer zone is systematically designed to uphold hierarchical, violent, capitalist, etc. power structures in our society at large. Not to mention, you also can't separate the "means" from the "ends" of what you're trying to achieve long-term with any kind of movement or social change, in general. So if we want liberation from capitalism, we can't achieve that by making ourselves worker cogs in a capitalist machine, and that very much includes nonprofits both as the soft power they exert over us as well as their very structure that is a product of the capitalist enterprises they mirror and are based on in their approaches to social, environmental, and economic problems (I've got another video I'm working on that'll address why and how nonprofits and for-profits are way more similar than they are different, but the vast majority of nonprofits are deliberately and inherently modeled after for-profit business structures and often have the same goals and approaches - both sectors are market-based, seek expansion and growth, are hierarchical, form dichotomies and disparities of power and agency between "employers vs. employees", lack democratic participation from the people doing the actual fucking labor in the trenches being underpaid and exploited, among a ton of other issues, including the fact that their very existence upholds and justifies capitalist exploitation, period.) Zoe Baker, a radical leftist philosopher who just published a book earlier this year called "Means and Ends", has an excellent and brief/accessible video on her RUclips channel where she explains "means ends unity theory" and some of the concepts in said book/her PhD work, but she further elaborates also on how the kind of work we do transforms us in the process and thereby shapes the outcomes of our work innately, as well as how it reshapes our attitudes more generally. I highly recommend watching it. But any kind of work that's done in the nonprofit sector, a sector that ONLY exists because of capitalist exploitation AND because it was designed by and for self-serving wealthy elites, is not going to be engaging its workers in ways that transform them for the better, to say the least. That is, if by "better" we mean bringing us closer to true liberation and not gratuitous back-patting. Again, I'm definitely gonna read Schiller's work, and I look forward to it immensely given so many of the things she discussed here. And I love so much that you had her on here, Adam, and you raised some awesome points, too. But the very fact that the state and wealthy capitalists control the entire nonprofit sector to work in their benefit on an ongoing basis, ignoring a whole web of other issues I'm completely leaving out of this rambling sesh too, it seems like it would make it impossible to work toward lasting change and movement-building from within the NPIC... I feel it's also important to briefly mention that one of the main functions of the nonprofit sector, also cited in "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded", is to divert anyone who has a desire to help others into a path that bureaucratizes and professionalizes suffering. And in conjunction with the academic industrial complex, it trains empathetic and compassionate people to be steered away from more radical forms of dissent and instead conditions them to prioritize their careers by funnelling said workers through very rigidly narrow paths to how they can "help", and through very specifically designated causes per militant particularism at that, rather than trying to press for a revolution en masse of any kind, or even at the most base level trying to challenge capitalism or be more political in a broader sense, due to the fact that nonprofits also are strongly discouraged from being viewed as "too political" for various systemic reasons (e.g. losing nonprofit status, scaring away potential donors/supporters, losing grant funding). But honestly, this diversion of compassionate people into the NPIC where they become demoralized and/or burned out is imo one of the biggest issues with the entire sector. Because who knows how many radical activists we might otherwise see out in the streets and mobilizing their communities if they weren't instead serving these systems that condition them to play along with the current systems in place while at best asking for minor reforms and simultaneously absolving capitalists of their responsibility for the problems they alleviate on micro-level scale. And granted, some people do become further radicalized by their frustrations with nonprofits while working for them (including myself), not by doing radical work in them but out of demoralization since the sector prevents them from being as radical as they desire. But I think that's pretty rare considering how many more people become depleted and are conditioned to feel hopeless from within the sector that exploits them and spits them back out in a "pipeline" fashion. And that's a lot of caring and empathetic people diverted away from dissent considering that the nonprofit sector is the third largest employment sector next to retail and manufacturing, employing roughly 10-11% of American workers. Imagine how much more radical work could be done in our society if those workers, a significant portion of whom are working for nonprofits because they genuinely care and want to help others, decided to revolt instead. Not saying there will be a mass exodus anytime soon lol, but still... On a brighter note though, seeing all the comments here and on some of the other videos you've done on topics related to the NPIC, it's encouraging that so many people don't buy any of it for a second. TLDR; The NPIC functions as a vital form of soft power exerted over us that works in favor of the state and capitalism, and it's designed to reproduce their own power, contain and monitor dissent, and uphold the status quo. So I really don't think we can seek meaningful liberation from exploitation by conforming to said system that inherently is designed and controlled by our exploiters.
I frequently think about this kind of thing at work at my job in a non profit. I want to do more, to be pushing for a truly free society based on aid that doesn't have the nightmare maze of red tape we have through the capitalist state. But every day I come home feeling like a wrung out rag, I barely make enough to live an OK life (only bc my partner makes more), and I remember I'd be dead pretty quick without my insurance providing my expensive medication. It's hard to see a way out, isolated in this cycle of work and exhausted rest. My mental illness gets way worse when I've worked jobs that help no one, at least I can alleviate a little suffering with this. If I could find more energy and get rid of my pain, maybe I could do more on my days off. It's hard to see a way out of this cycle as a society when so many people, even outside of non profits, are stuck in this cycle of depending critically on the system that we know is fucked Thanks for reading my rant, anyone who got this far. It's makes me feel better to talk about it, makes the slog almost bearable. Makes me hope we can end it eventually
This was such a great talk. A giving wage reminds me of the potlatch tradition of native peoples that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. The idea of ongoing reciprocity where "wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away." It genuinely seems like a much better mark of everyday prosperity than GDP or stock prices.
GDP and "net worth" are so awful. It's not even a market-capitalist idea, it's literally just people lying to everyone about how rich they really are (and everyone else pays the cost of that). It's yet another absurdly self-centred view of the universe. Unfortunately, most people have absolutely no experience with how the stock market works; I'd recommend Railroad Tycoon 3 for everyone in schools, even if just for a few hours. It gives you a distinct _experience_ of the problems with stock markets. Plutocracy game is another (very cynical :D) look at the world of the rich, and a great insight into why barons trading company shares are incompatible with a good life for anyone else - and why even a large number of "good" actors within the system have no chance of ever using it to make people's lives better. The whole thing bred and nurtured extremely selfish, egoistic people and gave them ridiculous amounts of power over other people. Especially in the US (and Russia), those people took being horrible human beings to a professional level. You really can't tell the difference between these guys and the Mafia. I don't think "having enough to give away" is enough in a society where employees exist (and I do believe a lot of people _are_ happier when they can shift some of their responsibility on someone else). Because someone who pays their employees (and customers!) better and cares about their well-being is IMO much more worthy than someone who exploits their employees and customers to the bone, just so he can "give away to charities" or build a university in their name or whatever. At least you'd want a nice balance. Neoliberalism should take a good hard look at the classics, like Bastiat - who fought state power not because he thought they were infringing on his freedoms, but exactly because the rich and influential used it to further their _own_ interests, to the detriment of others. State should be a counter-weight to the ever-hungry egoistic powermongers (inside and out). You really get a feeling that these guys call up on the authority of the great authors of the past, without ever having read or understood them.
Potlachs and traditions where “wealth” is defined as the person who can give the most help to a community have always struck me as the most hopeful paths for society.
Potlaches of coastal Indians in Western Washington bankrupted (or whatever you call losing all your stuff because you don’t have money) many tribes until they outlawed them.
Hi @TheAdamConover ! I rellay appreciate the critiqe and nuanced perspectives you and Amy Chiller put forward. I am personally engaged with a local EA movement in Sweden, and I just want to make it clear that there are other perspectives within the EA community. Donations are only a part of the philosophical viewproint, and generally the ideas are easy to integrate with older progressive schools of thought, at least compared to most other modern philosofical movements.
I did not notice a single mention of the infamous Autism Speaks “charity” - but I _did_ get from this episode a good idea of how they are part of a much, much larger problem.
Not a subject I've given much consideration to, but Amy's articulate perspectives and insights are very intriguing. I really enjoyed your guy's conversation
Hi, 68-year-old Musician/artist here who has been watching this corporate thing develop my whole life. Great show, great guests! Keep up the good work!✌
This is the first episode that really didn't hit for me. Early on, when talking about effective altruism, a lot of the argument seemed to rest on "you can tell that this is a bad method because it feeds the ego of these people." The reality is that no matter how you get a self-centered person to give money, their act of giving is going to be--in larger or smaller part--self-centered. If living humans have liabilities, if there aren't perfect vessels for receiving charity, that would also include the people you want to part from their money for a good cause (no perfect donors). The idea of the banker that would rather be a social worker is not a thing that manifests in reality, but the banker who fancies themselves as being a kind of benevolent social patron most certainly is and should be squeezed for every available dollar. Sure, they can always decide that they're no longer in the giving business, but that was always the case. Most finance guys start in that state. And the idea that crypto has debunked the idea of effective altruism is an odd one; if you build a house on a beach and the house collapses, that does not debunk the concept of housing so much as the concept of using sand as a foundation. Crypto was a scam and anything tied to crypto was going to take a hit.
Seeing the reluctance to support the Amazon strike fund really strikes a chord. It vividly underscores the flaw in the wealthy individuals donate money example. Reminds me of my own journey; life took a complete 180 after investing with a finance genius, Emily avamilligan. Just goes to show, challenging the status quo can bring about incredible transformation.
@@DanielWeel-bp7oi Absolutely, challenging the status quo is crucial. As for the finance genius, it's Emily Ava Milligan. Her insights and strategies not only transformed my finances, but also empowered me to contribute to meaningful causes. Life changing move
as someone who is rather on board with the idea of trying to be highly effective with things, I have had a lot of philosophy-of-effective-altruism friends; I have passed this on to them and will pitch it regularly, but if there's anything that survives out of the effective altruism philosophy, what I'd want it to be would be the idea of trying to compare options and evaluate them in detail to figure out what will do a better job achieving the outcome of making that better world. it's a core, basic thing - the motivation of evidence based approach in the very most abstract form, without even tying it to the utilitarianism.
Even utilitarianism had gotten its name tarnished. Eliezer Yudkowski and the LessWrong cult are to blame for that, as well as the tarnished reputation of effective altruism. Look up criticisms of "Roko's Basilisk", particularly with respect to Yudkowski's reverence towards it. Then look up Yudkowski's involvement with Effective Altruism, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's responsible. He's the one who messed it up.
My only "effective altruist" quality I guess is that I just want to give to orgs with the least BS admin overhead. 100 dollars to save a kid with diabetes for a month or 10,000 to save a kid with cancer for a month, doesn't matter if of the 10 dollars I give to save the diabetic, 8 are going to some CEO, if 8 of the 10 are going to the kid with cancers research or chemo or whatever
Then I'd suggest considering looking further outside of just altruism for ways to build interpersonal connection and reciprocal mutual aid with people near you; go to local organizations, meet people, host events, etc. And invite homeless people, offer them a shower a change of clothes. Or other things like this. Then make a list of a bunch of inventive options and sort it by what you think is likely to work, go out and try some, and come back and see how right you think you were about which things were promising.
A couple handfuls of people should not have more influence than the government. Tax breaks for the rich lead to them buying government to get more tax breaks. Then, they give money, like they know better how to use that money that would have gone to the government as tax. They often do things like build art museums as monuments to themselves, but that's their choice and not the choice of the people who sponsored their choices through subsidizing their tax payments. But how many Americans would rather have clean drinking water, better streets, flood control, better health care, etc? Instead of redirecting our taxes to the rich who "know better how to spend it", We The People should be deciding where it is most needed.
Excited to see a shirt from Transfigure Print Co, a Midwestern queer-owned printing collective where every purchase not only supports the artists who design & print the shirts, but a percent of every sale goes to supporting trans people both through direct mutual aid AND for wrap around services at charities for things like housing & healthcare. That's the kind of org I always enjoy supporting!
If you donate to be able to write if off then it's not charity, it's assholness. First pay your tax to contribute to local community like we all do and then donate wherever you want to without getting any benefits from it. It's horrible that the whole system falls on the back of poor and middle class who pay the biggest taxes.
Hey Adam I remember you talked about this subject twice on Adam ruins everything on "Adam ruins giving" and "Adam ruins doing good" it's really a shame when people give out of the goodness of their hearts and it doesn't make a difference or when people can do things to help but don't or when a person does something that seems charitable but it's really just a PR stunt keep up the good work Adam we're living in strange times and we need people like you who aren't afraid to say "the emperor has no clothes"
Thank you so much for this amazing discussion! As a person who works at a large, corporate nonprofit environment, the incentive to acquire the largest donations from the wealthiest people insinuates a pandering to those wealthy interest. It's unfortunate how a majority of our resources come from a very few families and corporations. Truly, t's appalling. When those interests begin to contradict the mission of an organization, the very thing that such an org claims to solve becomes an entrenched issue to buoy the orgs existence as a tax haven for those interests. I could say so much more, but I'll just reiterate how very important these conversations are. Adam, thank you for elevating this issue.
In the Netherlands we have Wilde Ganzen (wild geese). Every Sunday there is a tv program where an organization somewhere in the world asks for help for a certain project, and how much money they need. When you like the project you sponsor it. It’s an old organization. And you can be certain that your money effectively was used for the project.
"Effective altruism has a lot of purchase among tech wealth" Of course, the tech bros who think everything is a logic problem and the business men who think they know everything because they have money. The more I learn of the tech industry the more I dislike the people in it.
There's a lot of difference between "tech bro" and "someone who works in a tech company". At the moment, spoiled rich idiots with too much money from their parents are in control of the tech _industry_ , and that's where most of the awful is coming from. The VCs and such jumped on the bandwagon because they never cared about anything other than money, even if it means 99 out of 100 companies they "fund" are destroyed and their work made worthless, while once in a while they hit jackpot and make a lot of money (while also usually ruining the company in the process, harming the employees and the customers). I think it's really important to fight advertising on every step. Most of the awful companies in the world live on advertising (in relatively free countries, of course - if you're a totalitarian dictatorship, you can do whatever the hell you want :D ). Shut it off, and things quickly get much better - just look at tobacco companies (though after a lull, they are coming back - unsurprisingly, as the opposition slowly died down and they can again go full tilt on awful practices). Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change in the 20s, and looked for ways to fight it - but figured out it's more profitable to just control public opinion through the media and advertising. They're absolutely unapologetic about all this. It's extremely rare to see and advertising that's actually informing you about some new product that might be good for you - it's almost all about force-feeding you horse shit. Those same tech bros are _all_ about advertising and bamboozling other idiots with too much money. It's not just the tech industry, though - just look at junk food, fast fashion, cosmetics - it's all built up on endless advertising making you feel like you _must_ have what they're selling, or you're going to be left behind. Just for one small example, the way Listerine made everyone think they have "halitosis" (which they invented), treated it like a medical condition (while using "doctors" in their advertising), and how the product they're selling is literally doing the opposite (the alcohol drying out your mouth, promoting bacterial growth and thus making you take more Listerine to flush out and aromatize your mouth), and harms your health - but so many people are already hooked and can't live without it.
My charity of choice was always just "money to the local food bank." I just personally feel that making sure the most vulnerable people in my community had something to eat would make any other problems more bearable. It's hard to fix anything else in your life if you're hungry, if you're lamenting an empty dinner table on the holidays.
Everything she said in her first breath told me I was in for a treat By the end of the video, I can happily say this was a massive understatement What a phenomenal guest and excellent show! Great work y’all!
One thing I dislike about this fun and campy vibe to a discussion is that it glosses over the problems with chuckles even though I get it, this isn't some academic presentation... But right around 28:00 in discussing this failing of utilitarian philosophy meets the real world is so parallel to every major criticism of socialism and communism. I would love to say I am a communist but how can I when every label of communism is attached to Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. it is always like sure that belief system sounds good on paper but here is what the real world produces....and then I would have to be able to dive deep and spend 45 min extricating myself from those authoritarian tyrants who use the label of communism to unite the working masses while never believing in anything further than how they can use the message to further personal gain... Anyway this feels the same, which makes the argument feel like a watered down echo chamber without any good analysis or suggestions.
I've had this discussion lately as some people were bitching about people donating food and clothing and not money. Some people are not rich and still do want to donate what they can. To say only money donations isn't covering those folks.
"Effective Altruism" may be B.S. BUT, as a nonprofit developer, i certainly use evidence, data, and analysis in designing my social intervention. Every nonprofit should! If you're saying that nonprofits shouldn't use evidence, data, and analysis in designing their social intervention, they're not going to accomplish anything. If you're arguing against evidence, data, and analysis, that's B.S. too.
They're saying that you shouldn't be *exclusively* using a kind of "social good calculus" to decide which social interventions to go for to begin with, not how to implement them for maximum effectiveness.
On the notion of always giving money and not things: I think if a company overproduces shoes it’s to give them to people than to destroy them or send them to a landfill.
I've had this argument with a conservative friend of mine. He thinks that charity should replace government as the primary safety net for people in need. Why shouldn't the rich person in the big house on the hill take care of the less fortunate people around them (aka peasants)? I tried to explain that system has been tried - it was called feudalism. Of course, rich people and churches love that idea. It gives them power over the people they "help". They hate the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to help people because voters control that system.
I love when Adam does a topic that he admits to having fallen prey to to different extents. Really drives home that no matter how much someone might be a (to quote the video) "smartest good boy" we just can't possibly parse, process, and analyze all the data in our lives.
Peter Singer gets name checked here, but I feel like they give short shrift to his arguments. The Big Article he wrote (which is a pretty easy read) is called "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and is definitely worth a read.
Not only is it better to donate money to a food bank, they actually typically have deals with grocery stores and the like. This deal often garners then a 3/1 ratio. Every dollar that's given, has a buying power of $3.
Political movement-building work is also just incredibly difficult to quantify. There's no direct number you can point to (in the way that effective altruists would like), between the money you give to a movement org, strike, etc, and the improvement in life quality (or even lives saved!) as a result of their activism. And that org is making a contribution that's part of a broader ecosystem, making it hard to quantify exactly. That's why it's also important to have people who understand the needs of movements making decisions with philanthropic money, not just people who have amassed wealth by working in lucrative fields.
Adam makes a comment like 50 minutes in about about people hating the way tax revenue is spent now (ignoring the whole "Taxes aren't actually where government revenue comes from in the US, at least" part) and democracy being messy. I just wanted to point out that, that's a function of our particular model of democracy. If we all, for instance, had a direct 1 to 1 vote on what money should be spent on, then those things wouldn't be funded; the things that are popular to be funded would be the things that got funded. It's because of the representative aspect of our democracy that unpopular spending even can exist. That's not to say democracy wouldn't still be messy, just to say that what Adam is talking about isn't a general feature of all democratic models, just the one we have now.
I think this can be summed up by the panhandler debate. Sometimes I give them money, but for years I didnt. I worried that they would spend it on drugs, which would hurt them. I could never stomach giving them food, it seemed presumptive to assume they were hungry or that I knew what they could eat anyway. So I just didnt give. Then i decided that all money was essentially the same, and if a dude made $25 panhandling and i gave him $5 and he spent $5 on a hit and $20 on food, then maybe my $5 went to the food. Whose to say. And he does still get food, because he is alive, which means he is eating. Then I remembered that many drug addicts would die from the DTs without a hit, and I gav up trying to figure out qhat was smart or right and now i just give money to people sometimes if they are askkng for it.
I don't really get the automatic tie from efficiency to control. I get that it's subscribing to some measure of efficiency. And in that there might be some control but not for me the giving. Also why should I value how relationships should affect my giving. Isn't working in one charity an ultimate control with lower value provided for the benefit of emotional validation rather than how much good it actually does. For me giving to charities that are effective sort of ignores my view of what I want as in not controlling. There are certainly flaws with absolutism and what's measured and measurable so it's more of an issue with execution not perverse incentive. I help people with whom I actually have a relationship and thats normal for me. I wouldn't even call that charity. Charity for me is giving to those who I don't have a relationship. Not to make one artificially but to add some good. I can reverse the argument of value of life and quality of life. How much hubris would it take for me to value quality of life closer to me but still no actual relationship against whole live and higher impact I can make elsewhere. I'm not married to either but it seems that my giving to causes that are close or what I think is important is more paternalistic than giving away that control so that people who know more about it than my bias.
"Efficiency" is definitely one of those things that...really doesn't refer to a concrete and definite thing most of the time. The "efficiency" of the "effective altruism" crowd is a _choice_ of metric, not an unveiling of some underlying reality, so the tendency to reach extreme conclusions justified by that choice was always going to be shady.
@@M_M_ODonnell I get that, the very next sentence I show issues with efficiency measure, still it's not my control nor do I use one oracle of that I also use government metrics of operating costs Vs benefits etc. Throwing that away seems like falling for nirvana fallacy. Also I spread things around not only the one recommendation usually proportionally. Still the automatic from efficiency measure to control is a bit much. Same could be said about choosing lower operating costs when it may be detrimental to some causes just because charity is being run poorly or has intrinsic higher overhead. Only entirely blinded giving would result in total loss of control but that might be even worse than some choice of the matter. Over reliance on optimisation and not acknowledging that the measure is imperfect sure can lead to shady places but using that as one of the deciding factors shouldn't be demonized. And basing giving on level of relation or direct work seems at least odd. I don't volunteer on a regular basis because my money goes further than my time but there are situations when I do. In times of sudden greater need like with start of Russian aggression on Ukraine me and couple friends organised some transports. Etc. But my hour of work that I would spend at a local charity provides less benefit than that hourly wage at my job (like the example of bankers) and it's a valid point not just something to scoff at. I wouldn't donate all my time anyway not all the money I make but your for cash conversion is clear
The thing that sits heavy on me is "Take the money and we all vote on it" is we get money going to things like what is going on in the middle east right now.
When i was developing my activist sensibilities in the late 00s/early 2010s a lot of talk was going on around charitable orgs with high overhead and how that's bad. I was a firm believer in that at the time. Now having spent the early part of my career working in donor funded orgs I've changed my tune. Donor funds are sacred and should be spent with care and that means making sure staff are compensated well enough to live comfortably and are treated well while at work. Cause-work can be so exploitative and donors can be truly awful to staff.
When I was a kid, I used to listen to this musician named Rich Mullins a lot. I think the worst thing you can say about him is that he was a Christian. By the time he died in 1997, he was "worth" $6 million, but he had it all in a blind trust and only received an allowance (I'm not sure how much that was, but I'm sure it was less than the full amount 🤦)
Worked with a charity golf thing that donated the proceeds to teen/young adult charity. They loved the donations due to no strings attached- use it the best way they can. They used, but did not like religious foundations donations, due to the myriad of demands on what the money cannot go to. A lot of the money could have been used to help young mothers and such, but noooo, cant have greater economic freedom for them.
If you make a lot of money, you must ask yourself if the industry you're in is causing some of the problems you are donating to "fix." It might do the most good for your job to die or be seriously reformed, and it might do a hell of a lot of good for you to be paid less and others paid more.
3 things: #1 Patagonia broke my heart. #2 I've always questioned why corporations are giving away money when perhaps they took too much in the first place. #3 I used to work for a company who asked their workforce to donate their own unpaid time and then the company claimed it as it's own donation to the community. I don't have a lot of sympathy for humanity anymore.
I think the real detriment of this m/billionaire philanthropy model is that regular middle/lower class people think that they are off the hook for helping others. "That CEO/actor/etc just gave a million bucks, so what is my $100 going to do?" Also, it allows people to discount, and even fight against, the welfare programs that are funded by our taxes. We can debate efficacy, but these programs help a lot of people and at least half of Americans talk shit and resist funding these programs.
More importantly, "the rich bastard who owns my company who keeps wages as low as possible and then uses a smidgen of the extra profits to fund charities, I can hardly be expected to contribute even more" :D
I agree with your general sentiment but, given that the "middle class" (no such thing in reality, just "working class who are slightly better off") is facing rapid disintegration as we transition from a production economy to an asset economy (i.e. we're quickly moving to a Neo-feudal system), I think we need to temper our expectation of the average individual donating money to charity when most of us can barely afford to live anyway. Charity/philanthropy is not particularly helpful; systemic change is what is needed. If you do feel the need to donate money to a charity find something that is small and targeted enough to have direct effects. A charity is not going to cure cancer but it can provide that LGBT kid who just ran away from an abusive parent with a place to leave and maybe even legal help. If you want to fix economic inequality, you need to push society towards a radically different, much more equitable model of managing and distributing resources and that's not achieved by funding a charity, much less by a billionaire giving away money they shouldn't have had in the first place. As for the welfare programs, again those shouldn't be needed in the first place but the illness of hating on redistributive mechanisms (welfare, universal access to healthcare and education etc.) is a particularly WASP kind of attitude that likes to connect one's place in the socioeconomic order to their "work ethic", advocating for the idea that "more work = more good". That's great a way of getting people to keep their heads down and consenting to their own exploitation.
@@sugoruyo Yeah, there's certainly some aspect of the rich bastards getting us to basically enslave ourselves. They just couldn't be bothered to even do that themselves :D
@@LuaanTi that’s the trick. They didn’t have to. They exploited a pre-existing ideology that came from Protestantism between the development of Enlightenment ideas and the Industrial Revolution and it meshed very well with the transition from agrarian and mercantile economies.
I think monetary methods of resource distribution fall into this same trap (example: capitalism), where quantity becomes more valuable than quality, and now we have product obsolescence built into business models, businesses throwing out perfectly usable products instead of giving them away, consumerism is part of our culture, etc.
I know of a way to know if I'm being truly altruistic. If I'm angry at the person but even so decide to help and if I continue being angry and feel nothing good at all from that. Then you know I'm being altruistic because I get literally nothing from helping someone else. If I feel good that means I'm getting something in exchange therefore it's no longer altruism. So by being angry at people I can distance myself from validation and know exactly what I'm going for.
I'm only about 15 min's in so forgive me if this does get addressed, I just wanted to comment on the idea of giving a item vs giving money and the reasoning, conscious or unconscious, that giving items makes us feel better about it then giving money and a lot of the rationale behind not just donating money directly is rooted in a parental controlling, not trusting the people to spend it kinda attitude. This may be true but I also think that a lot of people like to donate specific items, like for example, Christmas Dinner, instead of just money because a lot of us grew up with Unicef and other non profit organizations that have had scandals about how the money was spent but if I buy a turkey dinner for a family on christmas day at least I know they got a turkey dinner and not 1/3 a dinner, also we have started doing this ourselves by posting it online rather then going through organizations.
I fully agree people should receive a giving wage. I've done a living wage for the past 10 years living paycheck to paycheck. Didn't save much for retirement so I didn't have enough money to further my education if I wanted to improve my job prospects. Years ago my uncle told me these days jobs don't pay as much as they used to. When he was in his 20s, jobs paid enough so that people could afford rent or a mortgage, cost of living, putting away a little for emergency fund and/or for college for kids, AND still have enough left to put into a separate savings account for twice a year vacation. Nowadays, people are struggling to just pay the bills. Not many have an emergency fund today. People cannot give let alone invest in their own retirement.
38:25 I think that little statement there hits the nail on the head. It's about power. Charity and philanthropy from the ultra-wealthy is a form of soft political power.
Different groups want the say in how the money is spent. Individualism vs collectivisms decisions. Analytical decisions making vs emotional decision making. In depth, well rounded, multifaceted approach, compared to a single decision that “fixes” the issue.
The first sentence is showing Adams ignorance. The world IS getting much better in many ways. Global health has improved immensely in the last few decades and continues to do so. Deaths from malaria, TB and many other deceases have dropped, access to medical treatments have increased worldwide. Extreme poverty have gone down by a lot, with the trend reversing due to Covid and hopefully will start to decline soon again. This is in large part because of charitable work, which is sometimes funded by billionaires and a lot of the time funded by average citizens who donate money and through taxes that go to foreign aid programs etc.
@@jumpingturtle8830 I don’t agree with that, but even if true it’s not relevant to the faulty point Adam is making. The world is getting better in many important ways.
I know Adam had probably planned this weeks in advance but given the recent revelations about Jirad the Compleationist and his family's charity, Open Hand foundation, it is relevant to many who watch gaming content on RUclips.
The fundamental flaw in these sort of charities is that the need they purport to address is a manufactured need, caused by allowing or lobbying for governments to fail in their fundamental duties. If your working people can't afford their needs, you need to legislate to raise wages. If people not in paid work can't afford their needs, you need to raise welfare. If your health care services or schools or other essential services aren't providing for your people's needs, this again is the responsibility of the government that you elect and you pay taxes to. You don't fix it by stepping in with your own money - you fix it by holding your government to account. Send the philanthropists back to donating to their local ballet and opera societies. Letting them feed their egos by encouraging the government in dereliction of its duties is not beneficial to anyone.
Peter Singer's philosophy is hella ableist, though-he has expressed so much contempt for disabled folks that many people in the disability community see his approach as eugenics.
My impression was his writing on the topic was about infants with profound mental disabilities and/or untreatable severe pain. And not about eg paraplegics or people who are deaf-blind. Is this not the case?
@@eshansingh1 It does not strike me as contempt for disabled folks to say that infant euthanasia might be used for some conditions that will be incompatible with joining communities as an adult. That is what I addressed. But I don't think it would be eugenics either. We're talking about conditions that will make reproduction unlikely (eg by making them unlikely to survive to adulthood or unable to consent as an adult). So euthanasia would have little effect on the "gene pool", which is what eugenics tries to affect. In fact, Singer's examples would be the opposite of eugenic if anything. He specifically argues for euthanasia followed by the couple attempting to have another child soon after. Extreme conditions like he describes are often due to recessive mutations inherited from both parents. The 2nd child would have a 50% chance of being a carrier for the mutation. A eugenics policy would like to eliminate such mutations, so his ideas would be counterproductive for eugenics.
The irony of a discussion about people like SBF not making decisions on best way to give money, and then insinuating that you know better than Mackenzie Scott on how best to help the world.
it feels cliche to say but, aren't we all familiar with the starfish story? One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?” The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!” After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said…” I made a difference for that one.” Remember to help "the one" when you can.
So if I donate to your channel, I get my name on an episode? 🤔I feel like I just heard something about the giver being coddled into giving... Love you. Seriously, I do.
Get $15 off a Skylight Calendar at SkylightCal.com/FACTUALLY!
🌏 Get Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/ADAMCONOVER It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌
You can watch full episodes of Lovett or Leave It at www.youtube.com/@lovettorleaveitpodcast/ !
Sponsored by DeleteMe. Take back control of your personal information: visit joindeleteme.com/Adam and use code ADAM for 20% off!
Get some checks together write the amounts of money on them go drive to a black community knock on the door get an adult and sign the check over to them directly if you want to help out people in poverty then give them the money directly to help them they are full grown adults they know how to spend and what they need with the money
And that thought has never entered to your mind because you're not as smart as you think or you're kind of racist
So are you saying white people dont in fact know whats best for everyone else?? Shocking
The discussion about MacKenzie Scott not donating to the amazon strike fund is really illuminating because it illustrates the biggest problem with the "rich people give away money" model of charity. Someone who is rich, and owes their wealth to the current system, is almost never going to consider a solution to society's ills that necessarily involves the destruction of their own wealth and power.
Or, maybe... and hear me out here... she's the ex-wife of the owner of Amazon and doesn't want any more drama? She's giving money away hand over foot to other causes
Exactly. I've been yelling at effective altruist friends for ages, "please consider trying ways to change the system, not just ways to work within it!". at the same time I want leftie friends to study effective altruism's writings and lift parts the left can use; I'm most optimistic about the general idea of making big lists of options and doing the one that seems most promising, a common idea outside EA but one I think should be far far more common. Unfortunately the EA way is to have a central authority make that list, and I think a leftie way to do it should be to *teach each other how to make a list of the options you have for contributing to a better world*. Central authority precludes diversity of tactics, and we must have diversity of tactics to get anywhere.
@@cptnoname perhaps. She could donate to another union cause or a more generalised labour cause like a group that tries to change how wait staff are paid. The main issue highlighted by Adam and Amy and the OP here is the fact that charity truly is a form of palliative care for society's illnesses and the only way to solve the problem truly is to prevent it in the first place.
Given that most of our problems stem from systemic issues and not external factors, this requires changing the systems around us and that is necessarily going to be confrontational and "self-harming" for an extremely wealthy person because the current systems that lead to their extreme wealth are the result of decades of manipulation and enactment of policy via the lobbyists and the bought and paid for political class.
I.e. the problem isn't MacKenzie Scott as an individual but the overall system of wealth accumulation that she is a part of the "rich people give away money" model. She received billions worth in stocks from which stems the wealth she is giving away, if she moved against the extreme financilization of everything, she'd lose the ability to have so much money to give away.
Don't look at this as an indictment of her ethics, look at it as an indictment of the systems within which even the most ethical are required to operate. The issue being discussed for the entire episode is that the pressing need is not for more charity but for systemic change.
(p.s.: my comment is not an attack on you here, just using your comment as a jumping off point to refocus on the core issue for anyone who might be thinking the same thing and missing the forest for the tree -- this might or might not include you, I don't know).
@@sugoruyothat discussion is preposterous. Guaranteed the person who started this thread has contributed $0 to the same fund.
The argument seems to boil down to "giving away BILLIONS is not good enough because there are still problems with the system" is so naive it'd almost be funny if it weren't so sad.
Firstly, an individual cannot buy an institutional revolution. That's a multigenerational endeavor to be undertaken by the entire population. Secondly, that requires a willful ignorance for the very obvious issues such a donation would raise.
Her own argument is to "the system is corrupt." Almost anyone watching this video would draw a direct line from that statement to politics and lobbying, but she then suggests fixing the system by contributing to MORE lobbying organizations???
Diminishing Scott's absolutely unprecedented altruism by pointing out a contrived, if ironic, talking point for the sake of being contrarian is just flat out embarrassing.
Some people will never be satisfied. It's so gross.
@@itmeurdadbut this argument is utterly defeatest, as living within the system we currently do, without class traitors within higher brackets of power, the only solutions to fighting against the power that empowers itself is through hoping you can wait out the rich with strikes or through physical force with violent resistance which is often just as likely to bring about fascist regimes as it is liberation. Yes, it is icky that money is how you fight for power in our current system, but that doesn't mean we should reject or not suggest the benefits of a windfall of money in the movement to get into the broken system so we can dismantle it without all the needless suffering
As a public school teacher, can confirm: constantly having to "prove" your effectiveness at non-quantifiable things (like learning) leads to nothing but micromanagement, cheating, and number crunching that ultimately helps no one.
Working on non-quantifiable things leads to attempts to make those things quantifiable. We can't actually tell whether kids are learning, but we can look at their test scores and get those up. (Whether/how well test scores correlate to learning is another matter.)
@@darthbob88 Also this leads to the test scores becoming the sole goal. What or whether children learn becomes secondary to the scores themselves.
As Theodore Roosevelt once said: "No amount of charity can make up for the means of acquiring such wealth." This holds true to this day all, over a hundred years later.
I think it's worse today.
I LOVE the "giving wage" sentiment. I don't need to be rich but I'd love to be making a giving wage.
It's a nice idea, but I think a very important point was missed in talking about it. While you can have a living wage (a wage that allows people to work one job and afford the cost of living in their area), a giving wage is currently impossible. As long as the essentials for life are commoditized, any attempt at a giving wage will quickly reduce itself to a living wage as the people who seek profit off of your desire to survive raise their prices to reflect everyone's newfound ability to pay for survival.
@@cenauge The solutiuon is easy, live on the means of poorer earners in your area and give away the rest.
A giving wage is all up to you, I have a friend who's only reason to negotiate salary is for his peers, then he gives about half of his income away to different charities. So he only negotiates his salary to be able to give more away.
However it is much easier to increase your living expenses so they fit to your salary. Therefore I propose we should have a part of our tax that we could decide where it goes. Like I do not want to use my tax money on police, but I could pay more for school and healthcare. But I will not walk over to my local hospital with moneybags, I'd rather save that for a rainy day.
Kiva! For 25 dollars you can lend 100s of dollars over time
I'd love to just live a normal life where I don't have to worry about food, water, or freezing to death because we have to walk to get groceries, in the winter, in the US :/
Having worked for a food bank for 3 years I've learned much. 1 thing i can say is check the CEO PAY vs the folks who actually do the work...nothing worse then having a CEO making 6 figures whining about getting a raise 2 months late while telling staff she can't afford to pay you an extra $1. For me i worked as IT admin, social media mngr, photographer, security, & 6 other jobs for $34k while watching the CEO drive a Bently bitching about how she didn't get the charmin someone donated & threaten to stop letting staff get food as a result. We had to go to other food banks to feed our families!! Volunteer and do some research before donating cash...
I never donate to anything without doing some research first. Never ever ever donate at the till when asked. You are very correct about charity administration taking all the money and paying their staff eff all.
I always check CEO pay as a % of charity revenue, before donating to any charity. If the CEO makes too much, resulting in less then 93% money ending up to intended recipients, I do not give to that charity.
You would be surprised how most of the American charities fail this test. If I were to ever work for one, my test would be even more stringent.
This is what happens to people when they're separated from others. If they spent meaningful time with the people they're trying to help or provide for, they'd be less whiney and greedy, and more appreciative and generous.
If a company can't afford to pay its staff an honest wage, the CEO is definitively being paid more than they're worth.
used to work at a non profit that worked with adults with developmental disabilities. workers were payed minimum wage. they always said there wasn't enough money for raises, the health insurance kept getting worse and more expensive, and there was never enough to spend on the individuals they supported. after I left someone who I used to work with (who had been fired for reporting illegal things the company was doing) who used to work in banking looked into the financials since they were public and every year the top 5ish people running the company were getting fat wages. they made it look like the CEO was such a good person because she was taking such a paycut from working other CEO jobs. She was still making 6 figures and giving herself a fat raise each year.
Jimmy Carter managed to do a lot of good without becoming obscenely wealthy or going to prison. Habitat for Humanity, Guinea worms, all sorts of stuff. So he did both, more local charity and overseas charity. Jimmy Carter is a great role model, even if the far right has tried to mock him for decades.
"Jimmy Carter is a great role model" and "even if the far right has tried to mock him for decades." are probably not unconnected.
Jimmy Carter is a good man.
Ok, so why open a business like Ring if you can't become wealthy?
A business isn't a charity.
Why open an Amazon or Google??
You do understand the difference between being a competent president and a good person?
He was a terrible president, like Obama and Biden. Their policies were terrible.
Trump was obnoxious, yet his policies were amazing. And the Left "resisted" to the point that Biden has allowed out borders to be open and has jeopardized nations safety.
Look at NYC. Eric Adams is begging for the wall to be built.
I dunno...to become obscenely powerful? Is that the right answer to this weird question?@@youtubesucks1499
People don’t realize money alone isn’t the best way to solve poverty. This is why I get so frustrated with the emphasis on taxes rather than focusing on fair wages. A proper pay received soon after performing the labor required is worth so much more than the same amount of money coming in from financial aid at a later date. So many people work and should not be in poverty needing financial assistance in the first place. Companies actually paying people for their labor means people will be able to invest rather than rack up debt. It will also mean we will need to pay less taxes in the long run to essentially subsidize wages that should have been coming from companies. We don’t need so many charities if people just got paid properly for their labor in the first place.
Also, it dilutes the amount of money people get back. Because there are administrative costs for government programs.
To me, the taxes help us play catch-up. The rich need to give their fair share so we can invest in education, transportation, and other infrastructure projects. Then we need to get paid more so we can keep the gap small.
The way to 'solve' poverty is to make it impermissible for individuals to amass obscene wealth, because obscene wealth in the hands of a few only happens when the vast majority of the people who actually create wealth are kept in poverty through low wages and public policies that drive structural inequality. But for that to happen, governments would have to legislate and enforce both higher minimum wages and profit-sharing for lower-level employees and restrictions on corporations' ability to inflate the price of consumer goods and services. That will never happen, especially in the U.S., until the right-wing stops being able to effectively use the cries of "socialism!" and "government overreach!" and "the tyranny of regulation and the 'administrative state'" to get their base to ignore their own economic interests and instead vote for a political platform that serves corporate interests and rich people who demand tax cuts. The base of the GOP can't do that without also having to put aside their racism, sexism, white nationalism, religious bigotry, their endless desire to "own the Libs", and their refusal to share with those they regard as the "undeserving poor".
How about democratically decided companies? Workers collectively decide pay structures, employment, et cetera. I am pretty sure, as a whole, workers would decide a fair pay structure
@@joshuagharis9017 Companies like that exist: they're called cooperatives.
The employee owned business model is the ticket. Level playing field as far as wages go. Greed is revealed quickly and dismissed. Many, many perks with this model.
As a Formula 1 fan, the whole Mission Winnow debacle with Ferrari made me realize that a large number of philanthropic endeavors were just money-laundering fronts so that rich and powerful people could avoid both taxes and scrutiny. The ultimate issue I see with philanthropy is that most people see philanthropy as a permanent way to help those in need rather than as a stopgap to allow the needed systemic changes to take hold. Or to solve acute, unforeseeable problems.
I like how Charlie Munger's only "philanthropy" was a windowless dormitory. Of course the backlash resulted in it being built with windows. But it's so expensive for students, it recoups the costs in just over 3 years. It was just rent seeking. Munger is now in the great windowless dormitory in the ground.
There's a lot of "I'm a philanthropist, so anything that increases my wealth is good because it leads to more philanthropy" going around in certain circles.
@@M_M_ODonnellOh so that's why Bill Gates the third can donate so much money he's only gotten richer.
@@M_M_ODonnellwe used to call that a 'circle jerk'
Another grave I'll happily piss on if given the chance! Good riddance. I couldn't believe how many people believed his own mythological bullshit: "he was humble and didn't spend lavishly!" Yeah, sure, and how many active brain cells are left in your head?
@@M_M_ODonnell Welcome to capitalism where it's Profits over People!
I hadn't heard of your guest. But, 10 min in, I made my mom watch it along with me. We enjoyed this - One of your best interviews so far.
The sheer number of wealthy people taking from people who think theyre making a difference and then not giving anything back and maybe using it for personal gain not even a thank you; is staggering.
its all of them.
if they didn't do it they wouldn't be wealthy in the first place, so yes its all of them
@@yurisonovab3892 not one of the billionaire class is willing to reduce their own wealth by a single dime to reduce economic inequality. That includes MacKenzie Scott. I admire her effort to "empty the vault," but nothing she's doing would prevent the vault from being full in the first place. The reason that's important is that a lot of the causes she supports are made dramatically worse by the neoliberalism which allows her to do this in the first place.
@@johnbarker5009 its amazing. i put one sentence down and you couldn't even be bothered to read the whole thing before you wrote a wall of text.
@@yurisonovab3892 do you really consider 4 sentences which agree with your point to be "a wall of text?"
As mentor of mine would say, “Charity is the redemption of the giver and not the liberation of the receiver.”
That is indeed the way SBF and the effective altruism boys see charity. As something that enriches their lives, not the people receiving their " charity."
I think the point being made in the video is that charity is most effective when the giver is willing to sacrifice control of their giving for the benefit of the receiver.
My favorite quote on this is from Dr.Who.
"Do what is right without witness or reward, but because it is right."
It is a far cry from redemption, and probably enslavement for receiver.
That's not due to a problem with charity, that's due to a problem with narcissism masquerading as charity
In Buddhism they say "the giver should be thankful", there is a very amusing koan about it, I always remember it when I think I'm great because of some nice thing I did or when I feel guilty because I didn't do more... Be grateful for how the connection with the people you gave to enriched your life.
I like what she said about connecting with the organisation. The best way to know your money is actually helping is to volunteer with the organisation for a few years if you can, which philanthropists would have the free time to do if they gave a hoot. It doesn't have to be white savior bull, they can volunteer locally or do office work for an organisation supporting people abroad
Billionaires do more damage hoarding their wealth than they can ever make up through philanthropy.
How is hoarding $$$ actually damaging?
@@Kornheiser10 by not giving it to the people who are in desperate need of it.
@caremotherfuckingbear but the manner in which to give it away is philanthropy....that's my point, the statement doesn't make sense.
@@Kornheiser10 hes not saying hoarding it is philanthropy. Hes saying that the damage they have done seems so bad that philanthropy couldnt help.
At least thats how i took his statement
I’m so freaking happy to be watching this topic being discussed on your show 💪🏼
Who this Phil N. Trope ?
I never knew philanthropy meant anything about charity. I just always thought it was just a synonym for like investor or a rich person, because I never really heard the word used in terms of charity, but rather to emphasis how rich someone.
@@catxtrallwaysThat's how you know it's good propaganda. They literally changed English so we'd clap as the rich scammed us.
Imma be honest, I only knew what it means because I mainlined Batman content like directly into my veins as a kid
It's charity when you give 5% of your net worth. It's philanthropy when you give 1% of thousands of other people's money after receiving 2.
"There's a lot of creep about this philosophy"
A lot of creeps, too.
thats_the_joke.gif
Hey Adam loved the discussion here. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that you always talk about how messed up things are right now, but I always feel like I get some takeaways from your videos as to what I can do in my own life to try to affect change, and it's a breath of fresh air. Keep on fighting the good fight!
People have already watched the episode on poverty that builds the foundation to need so many charities in the first place, right?
I have way more complex feelings about the catholic church after starting work related to the state utility assistantance program. St Vincent DePaul helps so many people out when the state program fails in various ways, like the scale they operate on is astounding for a church organization. Tithing to the catholic church pays for this, but that same tithe also goes to the legal defense of priests who have done terrible things. It's something I think about a lot. If we lived in an equitable society this wouldn't be a question, but we don't.
At my parish if you give to SVD that is where the money goes. Also our city has Center of Hope. 100% of gifts go to the poor.
Down with philanthropy up with solidarity, mutual aid, and direct action!
Damn straight!
I'm a broken record about this right now but I really wanna see what would happen if people who are in on solidarity, mutual aid, direct action were to ponder what the leftie flavor of "make big list of options, try to estimate soberly which one will be most effective, do that" would be. Because I think the EA crowd limit themselves to altruism, and they measure using utilitarianism, in ways that don't quite work. But I really hope that comparing options in depth can catch on, and I'd really love to see folks teaching each other how to compare options. as someone who's been around EA for years and years, the deep consideration of options was always what seemed good, and the bad stuff like centralizing those lists and just leaving it up to a single authority what the best option is always left a bad taste in my mouth.
@@laurenpinschannels the lefty form of what you are talking about would be some type of democratic economic planning. Read up on economic planning it’s literally what you’re describing. It gets a bad wrap because of attitudes surrounding the Soviet Union in the west but there are different models of planning and it doesn’t necessarily need to look like the Soviet model. Check out Cybersyn in Chile for a planning model that was not the Soviet model
I was thinking more starting from an individual level and building in local communities, but maybe we're saying the same thing, not sure - I'm not a fan of outsourcing it to some external system, I'd much prefer to have everyone thinking carefully about it and talking about it. But maybe! I'd love to see a list of pros and cons of different ways of comparing pros and cons as a local community :)
@@laurenpinschannelswell the lefty way is almost always going to involve some form of a (semi-)planned economy. Solidarity, mutual aid and direct action are the key operating pillars of anarchists (not exclusively) so you're looking at a bottom-up approach that starts local and expands to a form of federation for regional and wider issues when it comes to decision making. Bear in mind, in any economic system that involves planning and regulating output of goods and services to meet need first and demand after within reason you don't have the same set of economic forces acting in the same ways as we've had for the last couple hundred years.
We ponder that list of options all the time but you have to consider the fact that direct action means we're not posting about it on social media, we go out there and do the thing. Sometimes the thing can't even posted about as an after-thought because it lives in a legal grey area or public attention on it would expose vulnerable people, for example. The thing is the list of options available to us under current conditions is very different from what would be available to the overall population if society operated under the solidarity, mutual aid, direct action "values" of deciding what to do. There are occasions where this can be glimpsed (e.g. when there's an emergency), if you want an example of what it can look like with wider support search for these terms in relation to hurricane relief in the US states on the path of a given hurricane or how mutual aid groups organised food provision at the height of the pandemic in major cities like NYC.
Also, do bear in mind that EA folks don't analyse their options that deeply. It tends to be reductive down to a very quantitative "number of people helped per dollar spent" kinda deal with little concern for the quality of the help or the degree to which it fights the problem at its root. E.g. it's not very helpful to donate insulin if you're not going to fight the systems that put it out of reach of people in need.
I kinda hate to comment here before reading her book, though I definitely plan to and really enjoyed this interview... But I'm far less optimistic when it comes to expecting change from within the nonprofit industrial complex ("NPIC"), no matter how "radical" any nonprofit may be with their intentions.
The NPIC as a whole is controlled by and designed to work in favor of capitalists with the sole intent of upholding the status quo (I've got two long-form videos on this to date as part of a series I'm working on, so I won't repeat everything I've said in those here lol, and I'm still releasing content on the subject but just don't have as much time as I'd like - because capitalism, unfortunately). And in a society where there's literally no direct democratic participation beyond electing a supposed "lesser of two evils" and *hoping* they'll have your/our best interest at heart (when, spoiler alert, they fucking don't, simply by nature of their position of power they hold and the systemic alienation of political power from the masses by the state), those are the people who control the laws, regulations, etc. nonprofits are forced to abide by, full stop. And nonprofits come with too many limitations and restrictions for any real radical work to be done through them that has a lasting impact in virtually any way, which is why it's important that the worker classes organizing need to refrain from doing so through the nonprofit sector (even if some of the "perks" make it tempting). There's a reason why an entire anthology compiled by INCITE! is titled "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex" - because no amount of throwing money at nonprofit organizations is going to give us the much needed radical shifts that we need. It might make a few people feel like they're doing something good for others, and some nonprofits indeed help in some ways to *alleviate* the problems caused by capitalism and the state, but they're never enough to end the problems at their root causes, nor are they meant to be by design. And instead of so much money going to salaries and overhead and other nonprofit expenses, it would be so much more beneficial AND equitable to mobilize and advocate for approaches like mutual aid instead.
And the point she made about working as a social worker or some other trenchwork role for a nonprofit as opposed to being a rich fuck working for a corporation and donating money... I disagree with that, too. Both as someone who's been on the receiving end of nonprofits my whole life and as someone who's worked for a few nonprofits. I'm definitely not saying the rich fuck is the better option in any sense. But we can't pretend like the average nonprofit worker doesn't also develop an "us vs. them" mentality by virtue of them becoming professionals in a sector that professionalizes suffering of others at its core, akin to that being a flaw that y'all even mentioned in this interview regarding "effective altruism", where people on the receiving end are more like quantifiable numbers that the "altruistic" capitalists have a savior complex attitude toward. And the people on the receiving end of nonprofits and/or social services definitely experience a power imbalance between themselves and the people who are employed by a nonprofit, because of the inherent need they have for the resources that nonprofits hoard from their own communities and distribute at their own leisure, because they possess the power to do so. In other words, the nonprofit sector trains its workers to form what Paul Kivel refers to in an essay of his as "the buffer zone", and you're basically still postured in hierarchical form as being above the people being "served" by your nonprofit, all while this buffer zone is systematically designed to uphold hierarchical, violent, capitalist, etc. power structures in our society at large.
Not to mention, you also can't separate the "means" from the "ends" of what you're trying to achieve long-term with any kind of movement or social change, in general. So if we want liberation from capitalism, we can't achieve that by making ourselves worker cogs in a capitalist machine, and that very much includes nonprofits both as the soft power they exert over us as well as their very structure that is a product of the capitalist enterprises they mirror and are based on in their approaches to social, environmental, and economic problems (I've got another video I'm working on that'll address why and how nonprofits and for-profits are way more similar than they are different, but the vast majority of nonprofits are deliberately and inherently modeled after for-profit business structures and often have the same goals and approaches - both sectors are market-based, seek expansion and growth, are hierarchical, form dichotomies and disparities of power and agency between "employers vs. employees", lack democratic participation from the people doing the actual fucking labor in the trenches being underpaid and exploited, among a ton of other issues, including the fact that their very existence upholds and justifies capitalist exploitation, period.) Zoe Baker, a radical leftist philosopher who just published a book earlier this year called "Means and Ends", has an excellent and brief/accessible video on her RUclips channel where she explains "means ends unity theory" and some of the concepts in said book/her PhD work, but she further elaborates also on how the kind of work we do transforms us in the process and thereby shapes the outcomes of our work innately, as well as how it reshapes our attitudes more generally. I highly recommend watching it. But any kind of work that's done in the nonprofit sector, a sector that ONLY exists because of capitalist exploitation AND because it was designed by and for self-serving wealthy elites, is not going to be engaging its workers in ways that transform them for the better, to say the least. That is, if by "better" we mean bringing us closer to true liberation and not gratuitous back-patting.
Again, I'm definitely gonna read Schiller's work, and I look forward to it immensely given so many of the things she discussed here. And I love so much that you had her on here, Adam, and you raised some awesome points, too. But the very fact that the state and wealthy capitalists control the entire nonprofit sector to work in their benefit on an ongoing basis, ignoring a whole web of other issues I'm completely leaving out of this rambling sesh too, it seems like it would make it impossible to work toward lasting change and movement-building from within the NPIC...
I feel it's also important to briefly mention that one of the main functions of the nonprofit sector, also cited in "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded", is to divert anyone who has a desire to help others into a path that bureaucratizes and professionalizes suffering. And in conjunction with the academic industrial complex, it trains empathetic and compassionate people to be steered away from more radical forms of dissent and instead conditions them to prioritize their careers by funnelling said workers through very rigidly narrow paths to how they can "help", and through very specifically designated causes per militant particularism at that, rather than trying to press for a revolution en masse of any kind, or even at the most base level trying to challenge capitalism or be more political in a broader sense, due to the fact that nonprofits also are strongly discouraged from being viewed as "too political" for various systemic reasons (e.g. losing nonprofit status, scaring away potential donors/supporters, losing grant funding). But honestly, this diversion of compassionate people into the NPIC where they become demoralized and/or burned out is imo one of the biggest issues with the entire sector. Because who knows how many radical activists we might otherwise see out in the streets and mobilizing their communities if they weren't instead serving these systems that condition them to play along with the current systems in place while at best asking for minor reforms and simultaneously absolving capitalists of their responsibility for the problems they alleviate on micro-level scale. And granted, some people do become further radicalized by their frustrations with nonprofits while working for them (including myself), not by doing radical work in them but out of demoralization since the sector prevents them from being as radical as they desire. But I think that's pretty rare considering how many more people become depleted and are conditioned to feel hopeless from within the sector that exploits them and spits them back out in a "pipeline" fashion. And that's a lot of caring and empathetic people diverted away from dissent considering that the nonprofit sector is the third largest employment sector next to retail and manufacturing, employing roughly 10-11% of American workers. Imagine how much more radical work could be done in our society if those workers, a significant portion of whom are working for nonprofits because they genuinely care and want to help others, decided to revolt instead. Not saying there will be a mass exodus anytime soon lol, but still... On a brighter note though, seeing all the comments here and on some of the other videos you've done on topics related to the NPIC, it's encouraging that so many people don't buy any of it for a second.
TLDR; The NPIC functions as a vital form of soft power exerted over us that works in favor of the state and capitalism, and it's designed to reproduce their own power, contain and monitor dissent, and uphold the status quo. So I really don't think we can seek meaningful liberation from exploitation by conforming to said system that inherently is designed and controlled by our exploiters.
I frequently think about this kind of thing at work at my job in a non profit. I want to do more, to be pushing for a truly free society based on aid that doesn't have the nightmare maze of red tape we have through the capitalist state. But every day I come home feeling like a wrung out rag, I barely make enough to live an OK life (only bc my partner makes more), and I remember I'd be dead pretty quick without my insurance providing my expensive medication. It's hard to see a way out, isolated in this cycle of work and exhausted rest. My mental illness gets way worse when I've worked jobs that help no one, at least I can alleviate a little suffering with this. If I could find more energy and get rid of my pain, maybe I could do more on my days off. It's hard to see a way out of this cycle as a society when so many people, even outside of non profits, are stuck in this cycle of depending critically on the system that we know is fucked
Thanks for reading my rant, anyone who got this far. It's makes me feel better to talk about it, makes the slog almost bearable. Makes me hope we can end it eventually
This was such a great talk. A giving wage reminds me of the potlatch tradition of native peoples that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. The idea of ongoing reciprocity where "wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away." It genuinely seems like a much better mark of everyday prosperity than GDP or stock prices.
GDP and "net worth" are so awful. It's not even a market-capitalist idea, it's literally just people lying to everyone about how rich they really are (and everyone else pays the cost of that). It's yet another absurdly self-centred view of the universe. Unfortunately, most people have absolutely no experience with how the stock market works; I'd recommend Railroad Tycoon 3 for everyone in schools, even if just for a few hours. It gives you a distinct _experience_ of the problems with stock markets. Plutocracy game is another (very cynical :D) look at the world of the rich, and a great insight into why barons trading company shares are incompatible with a good life for anyone else - and why even a large number of "good" actors within the system have no chance of ever using it to make people's lives better. The whole thing bred and nurtured extremely selfish, egoistic people and gave them ridiculous amounts of power over other people. Especially in the US (and Russia), those people took being horrible human beings to a professional level. You really can't tell the difference between these guys and the Mafia.
I don't think "having enough to give away" is enough in a society where employees exist (and I do believe a lot of people _are_ happier when they can shift some of their responsibility on someone else). Because someone who pays their employees (and customers!) better and cares about their well-being is IMO much more worthy than someone who exploits their employees and customers to the bone, just so he can "give away to charities" or build a university in their name or whatever. At least you'd want a nice balance. Neoliberalism should take a good hard look at the classics, like Bastiat - who fought state power not because he thought they were infringing on his freedoms, but exactly because the rich and influential used it to further their _own_ interests, to the detriment of others. State should be a counter-weight to the ever-hungry egoistic powermongers (inside and out). You really get a feeling that these guys call up on the authority of the great authors of the past, without ever having read or understood them.
Potlachs and traditions where “wealth” is defined as the person who can give the most help to a community have always struck me as the most hopeful paths for society.
Potlaches of coastal Indians in Western Washington bankrupted (or whatever you call losing all your stuff because you don’t have money) many tribes until they outlawed them.
Hi @TheAdamConover ! I rellay appreciate the critiqe and nuanced perspectives you and Amy Chiller put forward. I am personally engaged with a local EA movement in Sweden, and I just want to make it clear that there are other perspectives within the EA community. Donations are only a part of the philosophical viewproint, and generally the ideas are easy to integrate with older progressive schools of thought, at least compared to most other modern philosofical movements.
I did not notice a single mention of the infamous Autism Speaks “charity” - but I _did_ get from this episode a good idea of how they are part of a much, much larger problem.
What a brilliant woman! Thank you Adam for having her on the show. So many sentiments that previously only lived in my soul have been given words.
Thank you for bringing more attention to this !
Not a subject I've given much consideration to, but Amy's articulate perspectives and insights are very intriguing. I really enjoyed your guy's conversation
Hi, 68-year-old Musician/artist here who has been watching this corporate thing develop my whole life. Great show, great guests! Keep up the good work!✌
This is the first episode that really didn't hit for me. Early on, when talking about effective altruism, a lot of the argument seemed to rest on "you can tell that this is a bad method because it feeds the ego of these people." The reality is that no matter how you get a self-centered person to give money, their act of giving is going to be--in larger or smaller part--self-centered. If living humans have liabilities, if there aren't perfect vessels for receiving charity, that would also include the people you want to part from their money for a good cause (no perfect donors). The idea of the banker that would rather be a social worker is not a thing that manifests in reality, but the banker who fancies themselves as being a kind of benevolent social patron most certainly is and should be squeezed for every available dollar. Sure, they can always decide that they're no longer in the giving business, but that was always the case. Most finance guys start in that state. And the idea that crypto has debunked the idea of effective altruism is an odd one; if you build a house on a beach and the house collapses, that does not debunk the concept of housing so much as the concept of using sand as a foundation. Crypto was a scam and anything tied to crypto was going to take a hit.
Seeing the reluctance to support the Amazon strike fund really strikes a chord. It vividly underscores the flaw in the wealthy individuals donate money example. Reminds me of my own journey; life took a complete 180 after investing with a finance genius, Emily avamilligan. Just goes to show, challenging the status quo can bring about incredible transformation.
Your comment hits close to home, change is tough, and the resistance is disheartening. On a brighter note, any hints on who this finance genius is?
@@DanielWeel-bp7oi Absolutely, challenging the status quo is crucial. As for the finance genius, it's Emily Ava Milligan. Her insights and strategies not only transformed my finances, but also empowered me to contribute to meaningful causes. Life changing move
@@Lucas-oj5wi How can I reach out to her?
@@DanielWeel-bp7oi The simplest method is to séarch for her name and connect with her through her webpage.
@@Lucas-oj5wi counting on it , thanks
as someone who is rather on board with the idea of trying to be highly effective with things, I have had a lot of philosophy-of-effective-altruism friends; I have passed this on to them and will pitch it regularly, but if there's anything that survives out of the effective altruism philosophy, what I'd want it to be would be the idea of trying to compare options and evaluate them in detail to figure out what will do a better job achieving the outcome of making that better world. it's a core, basic thing - the motivation of evidence based approach in the very most abstract form, without even tying it to the utilitarianism.
Even utilitarianism had gotten its name tarnished. Eliezer Yudkowski and the LessWrong cult are to blame for that, as well as the tarnished reputation of effective altruism. Look up criticisms of "Roko's Basilisk", particularly with respect to Yudkowski's reverence towards it. Then look up Yudkowski's involvement with Effective Altruism, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's responsible. He's the one who messed it up.
My only "effective altruist" quality I guess is that I just want to give to orgs with the least BS admin overhead. 100 dollars to save a kid with diabetes for a month or 10,000 to save a kid with cancer for a month, doesn't matter if of the 10 dollars I give to save the diabetic, 8 are going to some CEO, if 8 of the 10 are going to the kid with cancers research or chemo or whatever
Then I'd suggest considering looking further outside of just altruism for ways to build interpersonal connection and reciprocal mutual aid with people near you; go to local organizations, meet people, host events, etc. And invite homeless people, offer them a shower a change of clothes. Or other things like this. Then make a list of a bunch of inventive options and sort it by what you think is likely to work, go out and try some, and come back and see how right you think you were about which things were promising.
Yes!!!! Time to go to bed and listen in existential dread! EtR and take their wealth.
Same 🤣 I feel like so many other Adam fans here probably make that the backbone of their bedtime routines, too...
A couple handfuls of people should not have more influence than the government. Tax breaks for the rich lead to them buying government to get more tax breaks. Then, they give money, like they know better how to use that money that would have gone to the government as tax. They often do things like build art museums as monuments to themselves, but that's their choice and not the choice of the people who sponsored their choices through subsidizing their tax payments. But how many Americans would rather have clean drinking water, better streets, flood control, better health care, etc? Instead of redirecting our taxes to the rich who "know better how to spend it", We The People should be deciding where it is most needed.
Excited to see a shirt from Transfigure Print Co, a Midwestern queer-owned printing collective where every purchase not only supports the artists who design & print the shirts, but a percent of every sale goes to supporting trans people both through direct mutual aid AND for wrap around services at charities for things like housing & healthcare. That's the kind of org I always enjoy supporting!
I am glad you landed on RUclips love your content wish you the best!:)
If you donate to be able to write if off then it's not charity, it's assholness. First pay your tax to contribute to local community like we all do and then donate wherever you want to without getting any benefits from it. It's horrible that the whole system falls on the back of poor and middle class who pay the biggest taxes.
Preach it!
Ask yourself, why is it allowed to write off donations on your taxes?
Protect trans kids!
Hey Adam I remember you talked about this subject twice on Adam ruins everything on "Adam ruins giving" and "Adam ruins doing good" it's really a shame when people give out of the goodness of their hearts and it doesn't make a difference or when people can do things to help but don't or when a person does something that seems charitable but it's really just a PR stunt keep up the good work Adam we're living in strange times and we need people like you who aren't afraid to say "the emperor has no clothes"
Thank you so much for this amazing discussion! As a person who works at a large, corporate nonprofit environment, the incentive to acquire the largest donations from the wealthiest people insinuates a pandering to those wealthy interest. It's unfortunate how a majority of our resources come from a very few families and corporations. Truly, t's appalling. When those interests begin to contradict the mission of an organization, the very thing that such an org claims to solve becomes an entrenched issue to buoy the orgs existence as a tax haven for those interests. I could say so much more, but I'll just reiterate how very important these conversations are. Adam, thank you for elevating this issue.
In the Netherlands we have Wilde Ganzen (wild geese). Every Sunday there is a tv program where an organization somewhere in the world asks for help for a certain project, and how much money they need. When you like the project you sponsor it. It’s an old organization. And you can be certain that your money effectively was used for the project.
"Effective altruism has a lot of purchase among tech wealth"
Of course, the tech bros who think everything is a logic problem and the business men who think they know everything because they have money. The more I learn of the tech industry the more I dislike the people in it.
There's a lot of difference between "tech bro" and "someone who works in a tech company". At the moment, spoiled rich idiots with too much money from their parents are in control of the tech _industry_ , and that's where most of the awful is coming from. The VCs and such jumped on the bandwagon because they never cared about anything other than money, even if it means 99 out of 100 companies they "fund" are destroyed and their work made worthless, while once in a while they hit jackpot and make a lot of money (while also usually ruining the company in the process, harming the employees and the customers).
I think it's really important to fight advertising on every step. Most of the awful companies in the world live on advertising (in relatively free countries, of course - if you're a totalitarian dictatorship, you can do whatever the hell you want :D ). Shut it off, and things quickly get much better - just look at tobacco companies (though after a lull, they are coming back - unsurprisingly, as the opposition slowly died down and they can again go full tilt on awful practices). Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change in the 20s, and looked for ways to fight it - but figured out it's more profitable to just control public opinion through the media and advertising. They're absolutely unapologetic about all this.
It's extremely rare to see and advertising that's actually informing you about some new product that might be good for you - it's almost all about force-feeding you horse shit. Those same tech bros are _all_ about advertising and bamboozling other idiots with too much money. It's not just the tech industry, though - just look at junk food, fast fashion, cosmetics - it's all built up on endless advertising making you feel like you _must_ have what they're selling, or you're going to be left behind. Just for one small example, the way Listerine made everyone think they have "halitosis" (which they invented), treated it like a medical condition (while using "doctors" in their advertising), and how the product they're selling is literally doing the opposite (the alcohol drying out your mouth, promoting bacterial growth and thus making you take more Listerine to flush out and aromatize your mouth), and harms your health - but so many people are already hooked and can't live without it.
Nice shirt Adam love it
My charity of choice was always just "money to the local food bank." I just personally feel that making sure the most vulnerable people in my community had something to eat would make any other problems more bearable. It's hard to fix anything else in your life if you're hungry, if you're lamenting an empty dinner table on the holidays.
Everything she said in her first breath told me I was in for a treat
By the end of the video, I can happily say this was a massive understatement
What a phenomenal guest and excellent show! Great work y’all!
One thing I dislike about this fun and campy vibe to a discussion is that it glosses over the problems with chuckles even though I get it, this isn't some academic presentation...
But right around 28:00 in discussing this failing of utilitarian philosophy meets the real world is so parallel to every major criticism of socialism and communism. I would love to say I am a communist but how can I when every label of communism is attached to Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. it is always like sure that belief system sounds good on paper but here is what the real world produces....and then I would have to be able to dive deep and spend 45 min extricating myself from those authoritarian tyrants who use the label of communism to unite the working masses while never believing in anything further than how they can use the message to further personal gain...
Anyway this feels the same, which makes the argument feel like a watered down echo chamber without any good analysis or suggestions.
57:45 "We need government for bread, and philanthropy for roses" 🤯 I'd never thought of it this way! Thank you Amy and Adam for the great discussion!
Wealth protects and deludes people from the consequences of their actions more effectively than any drug.
I've had this discussion lately as some people were bitching about people donating food and clothing and not money. Some people are not rich and still do want to donate what they can. To say only money donations isn't covering those folks.
"Effective Altruism" may be B.S. BUT, as a nonprofit developer, i certainly use evidence, data, and analysis in designing my social intervention. Every nonprofit should! If you're saying that nonprofits shouldn't use evidence, data, and analysis in designing their social intervention, they're not going to accomplish anything. If you're arguing against evidence, data, and analysis, that's B.S. too.
They're saying that you shouldn't be *exclusively* using a kind of "social good calculus" to decide which social interventions to go for to begin with, not how to implement them for maximum effectiveness.
@@sugoruyo So they saying the donor's ego should stroked, regardless of effectiveness of the intervention.
On the notion of always giving money and not things: I think if a company overproduces shoes it’s to give them to people than to destroy them or send them to a landfill.
I've had this argument with a conservative friend of mine. He thinks that charity should replace government as the primary safety net for people in need. Why shouldn't the rich person in the big house on the hill take care of the less fortunate people around them (aka peasants)? I tried to explain that system has been tried - it was called feudalism. Of course, rich people and churches love that idea. It gives them power over the people they "help". They hate the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to help people because voters control that system.
I love when Adam does a topic that he admits to having fallen prey to to different extents. Really drives home that no matter how much someone might be a (to quote the video) "smartest good boy" we just can't possibly parse, process, and analyze all the data in our lives.
Peter Singer gets name checked here, but I feel like they give short shrift to his arguments. The Big Article he wrote (which is a pretty easy read) is called "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and is definitely worth a read.
Always good to see people recognizing (if not in so many words) that the logical conclusion of capitalism is anti-human, and, indeed, anti-life!
Not only is it better to donate money to a food bank, they actually typically have deals with grocery stores and the like. This deal often garners then a 3/1 ratio. Every dollar that's given, has a buying power of $3.
Political movement-building work is also just incredibly difficult to quantify. There's no direct number you can point to (in the way that effective altruists would like), between the money you give to a movement org, strike, etc, and the improvement in life quality (or even lives saved!) as a result of their activism. And that org is making a contribution that's part of a broader ecosystem, making it hard to quantify exactly. That's why it's also important to have people who understand the needs of movements making decisions with philanthropic money, not just people who have amassed wealth by working in lucrative fields.
Adam makes a comment like 50 minutes in about about people hating the way tax revenue is spent now (ignoring the whole "Taxes aren't actually where government revenue comes from in the US, at least" part) and democracy being messy. I just wanted to point out that, that's a function of our particular model of democracy. If we all, for instance, had a direct 1 to 1 vote on what money should be spent on, then those things wouldn't be funded; the things that are popular to be funded would be the things that got funded. It's because of the representative aspect of our democracy that unpopular spending even can exist. That's not to say democracy wouldn't still be messy, just to say that what Adam is talking about isn't a general feature of all democratic models, just the one we have now.
"You don't have to break out the pie charts, Adam." - 😆😆😆
"?okay first lemme just pause and go back" - every one of adams guests after he asks 15 questions at once (luv u adam)
I think this can be summed up by the panhandler debate. Sometimes I give them money, but for years I didnt. I worried that they would spend it on drugs, which would hurt them.
I could never stomach giving them food, it seemed presumptive to assume they were hungry or that I knew what they could eat anyway. So I just didnt give.
Then i decided that all money was essentially the same, and if a dude made $25 panhandling and i gave him $5 and he spent $5 on a hit and $20 on food, then maybe my $5 went to the food. Whose to say. And he does still get food, because he is alive, which means he is eating.
Then I remembered that many drug addicts would die from the DTs without a hit, and I gav up trying to figure out qhat was smart or right and now i just give money to people sometimes if they are askkng for it.
I don't really get the automatic tie from efficiency to control. I get that it's subscribing to some measure of efficiency. And in that there might be some control but not for me the giving. Also why should I value how relationships should affect my giving. Isn't working in one charity an ultimate control with lower value provided for the benefit of emotional validation rather than how much good it actually does. For me giving to charities that are effective sort of ignores my view of what I want as in not controlling. There are certainly flaws with absolutism and what's measured and measurable so it's more of an issue with execution not perverse incentive. I help people with whom I actually have a relationship and thats normal for me. I wouldn't even call that charity. Charity for me is giving to those who I don't have a relationship. Not to make one artificially but to add some good. I can reverse the argument of value of life and quality of life. How much hubris would it take for me to value quality of life closer to me but still no actual relationship against whole live and higher impact I can make elsewhere. I'm not married to either but it seems that my giving to causes that are close or what I think is important is more paternalistic than giving away that control so that people who know more about it than my bias.
"Efficiency" is definitely one of those things that...really doesn't refer to a concrete and definite thing most of the time. The "efficiency" of the "effective altruism" crowd is a _choice_ of metric, not an unveiling of some underlying reality, so the tendency to reach extreme conclusions justified by that choice was always going to be shady.
@@M_M_ODonnell I get that, the very next sentence I show issues with efficiency measure, still it's not my control nor do I use one oracle of that I also use government metrics of operating costs Vs benefits etc. Throwing that away seems like falling for nirvana fallacy. Also I spread things around not only the one recommendation usually proportionally. Still the automatic from efficiency measure to control is a bit much. Same could be said about choosing lower operating costs when it may be detrimental to some causes just because charity is being run poorly or has intrinsic higher overhead. Only entirely blinded giving would result in total loss of control but that might be even worse than some choice of the matter.
Over reliance on optimisation and not acknowledging that the measure is imperfect sure can lead to shady places but using that as one of the deciding factors shouldn't be demonized. And basing giving on level of relation or direct work seems at least odd. I don't volunteer on a regular basis because my money goes further than my time but there are situations when I do. In times of sudden greater need like with start of Russian aggression on Ukraine me and couple friends organised some transports. Etc. But my hour of work that I would spend at a local charity provides less benefit than that hourly wage at my job (like the example of bankers) and it's a valid point not just something to scoff at. I wouldn't donate all my time anyway not all the money I make but your for cash conversion is clear
@@Przemo-c Claiming authority to define acceptable metrics doesn't just lead to social and political control, it's an authoritarian act itself.
@@M_M_ODonnell bit it's not claiming authority it's providing a metric that you can follow entirely or factor in or just ignore
Absolutely awesome you have so many sponsors. Love the show. See you next time.
I love Adam so much
The thing that sits heavy on me is "Take the money and we all vote on it" is we get money going to things like what is going on in the middle east right now.
Adam Conover is the embodiment of “I am so smart”.
I appreciate the depth and humanity of this conversation.
Ironically, this very quickly became a discussion about how to effectively use philanthropic dollars
When i was developing my activist sensibilities in the late 00s/early 2010s a lot of talk was going on around charitable orgs with high overhead and how that's bad. I was a firm believer in that at the time. Now having spent the early part of my career working in donor funded orgs I've changed my tune. Donor funds are sacred and should be spent with care and that means making sure staff are compensated well enough to live comfortably and are treated well while at work. Cause-work can be so exploitative and donors can be truly awful to staff.
When I was a kid, I used to listen to this musician named Rich Mullins a lot. I think the worst thing you can say about him is that he was a Christian. By the time he died in 1997, he was "worth" $6 million, but he had it all in a blind trust and only received an allowance (I'm not sure how much that was, but I'm sure it was less than the full amount 🤦)
Rumors of effective altruism's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Worked with a charity golf thing that donated the proceeds to teen/young adult charity. They loved the donations due to no strings attached- use it the best way they can. They used, but did not like religious foundations donations, due to the myriad of demands on what the money cannot go to. A lot of the money could have been used to help young mothers and such, but noooo, cant have greater economic freedom for them.
If you make a lot of money, you must ask yourself if the industry you're in is causing some of the problems you are donating to "fix." It might do the most good for your job to die or be seriously reformed, and it might do a hell of a lot of good for you to be paid less and others paid more.
Protect trans kids ♥️♥️♥️
3 things: #1 Patagonia broke my heart. #2 I've always questioned why corporations are giving away money when perhaps they took too much in the first place. #3 I used to work for a company who asked their workforce to donate their own unpaid time and then the company claimed it as it's own donation to the community. I don't have a lot of sympathy for humanity anymore.
i love the reflective trophy thing i can see the experts agreeing with adam in real time
Give to Partners in Health, they make a marked and proved difference in the healthcare of Sierra Leonne that's been borked over solidly by colonialism
I think the real detriment of this m/billionaire philanthropy model is that regular middle/lower class people think that they are off the hook for helping others. "That CEO/actor/etc just gave a million bucks, so what is my $100 going to do?"
Also, it allows people to discount, and even fight against, the welfare programs that are funded by our taxes. We can debate efficacy, but these programs help a lot of people and at least half of Americans talk shit and resist funding these programs.
More importantly, "the rich bastard who owns my company who keeps wages as low as possible and then uses a smidgen of the extra profits to fund charities, I can hardly be expected to contribute even more" :D
I agree with your general sentiment but, given that the "middle class" (no such thing in reality, just "working class who are slightly better off") is facing rapid disintegration as we transition from a production economy to an asset economy (i.e. we're quickly moving to a Neo-feudal system), I think we need to temper our expectation of the average individual donating money to charity when most of us can barely afford to live anyway.
Charity/philanthropy is not particularly helpful; systemic change is what is needed. If you do feel the need to donate money to a charity find something that is small and targeted enough to have direct effects. A charity is not going to cure cancer but it can provide that LGBT kid who just ran away from an abusive parent with a place to leave and maybe even legal help.
If you want to fix economic inequality, you need to push society towards a radically different, much more equitable model of managing and distributing resources and that's not achieved by funding a charity, much less by a billionaire giving away money they shouldn't have had in the first place.
As for the welfare programs, again those shouldn't be needed in the first place but the illness of hating on redistributive mechanisms (welfare, universal access to healthcare and education etc.) is a particularly WASP kind of attitude that likes to connect one's place in the socioeconomic order to their "work ethic", advocating for the idea that "more work = more good". That's great a way of getting people to keep their heads down and consenting to their own exploitation.
@@sugoruyo Yeah, there's certainly some aspect of the rich bastards getting us to basically enslave ourselves. They just couldn't be bothered to even do that themselves :D
@@LuaanTi that’s the trick. They didn’t have to. They exploited a pre-existing ideology that came from Protestantism between the development of Enlightenment ideas and the Industrial Revolution and it meshed very well with the transition from agrarian and mercantile economies.
@@sugoruyo Of course they couldn't be bothered to even _think_ of it themselves :P
For a big picture political change thing to support, get involved in initiatives to implement ranked choice voting and proportional voting.
I think monetary methods of resource distribution fall into this same trap (example: capitalism), where quantity becomes more valuable than quality, and now we have product obsolescence built into business models, businesses throwing out perfectly usable products instead of giving them away, consumerism is part of our culture, etc.
I know of a way to know if I'm being truly altruistic. If I'm angry at the person but even so decide to help and if I continue being angry and feel nothing good at all from that. Then you know I'm being altruistic because I get literally nothing from helping someone else. If I feel good that means I'm getting something in exchange therefore it's no longer altruism. So by being angry at people I can distance myself from validation and know exactly what I'm going for.
Amy's awesome, you should have her on the show again in the future. :)
I'm only about 15 min's in so forgive me if this does get addressed, I just wanted to comment on the idea of giving a item vs giving money and the reasoning, conscious or unconscious, that giving items makes us feel better about it then giving money and a lot of the rationale behind not just donating money directly is rooted in a parental controlling, not trusting the people to spend it kinda attitude. This may be true but I also think that a lot of people like to donate specific items, like for example, Christmas Dinner, instead of just money because a lot of us grew up with Unicef and other non profit organizations that have had scandals about how the money was spent but if I buy a turkey dinner for a family on christmas day at least I know they got a turkey dinner and not 1/3 a dinner, also we have started doing this ourselves by posting it online rather then going through organizations.
I fully agree people should receive a giving wage. I've done a living wage for the past 10 years living paycheck to paycheck. Didn't save much for retirement so I didn't have enough money to further my education if I wanted to improve my job prospects. Years ago my uncle told me these days jobs don't pay as much as they used to. When he was in his 20s, jobs paid enough so that people could afford rent or a mortgage, cost of living, putting away a little for emergency fund and/or for college for kids, AND still have enough left to put into a separate savings account for twice a year vacation. Nowadays, people are struggling to just pay the bills. Not many have an emergency fund today. People cannot give let alone invest in their own retirement.
38:25
I think that little statement there hits the nail on the head. It's about power. Charity and philanthropy from the ultra-wealthy is a form of soft political power.
Different groups want the say in how the money is spent. Individualism vs collectivisms decisions. Analytical decisions making vs emotional decision making. In depth, well rounded, multifaceted approach, compared to a single decision that “fixes” the issue.
There are two kinds of economic brains in the world: those who think money is a means to an end, and those who think that money must increase.
The first sentence is showing Adams ignorance. The world IS getting much better in many ways. Global health has improved immensely in the last few decades and continues to do so. Deaths from malaria, TB and many other deceases have dropped, access to medical treatments have increased worldwide. Extreme poverty have gone down by a lot, with the trend reversing due to Covid and hopefully will start to decline soon again. This is in large part because of charitable work, which is sometimes funded by billionaires and a lot of the time funded by average citizens who donate money and through taxes that go to foreign aid programs etc.
TBF AI doom seems increasingly likely, and that would zero out all of the positive trends.
@@jumpingturtle8830 I don’t agree with that, but even if true it’s not relevant to the faulty point Adam is making. The world is getting better in many important ways.
@@danielduvana That's fair.
I know Adam had probably planned this weeks in advance but given the recent revelations about Jirad the Compleationist and his family's charity, Open Hand foundation, it is relevant to many who watch gaming content on RUclips.
Hot damn you the man!! Keep up the fantastic content!
The fundamental flaw in these sort of charities is that the need they purport to address is a manufactured need, caused by allowing or lobbying for governments to fail in their fundamental duties.
If your working people can't afford their needs, you need to legislate to raise wages. If people not in paid work can't afford their needs, you need to raise welfare. If your health care services or schools or other essential services aren't providing for your people's needs, this again is the responsibility of the government that you elect and you pay taxes to. You don't fix it by stepping in with your own money - you fix it by holding your government to account.
Send the philanthropists back to donating to their local ballet and opera societies. Letting them feed their egos by encouraging the government in dereliction of its duties is not beneficial to anyone.
Peter Singer's philosophy is hella ableist, though-he has expressed so much contempt for disabled folks that many people in the disability community see his approach as eugenics.
My impression was his writing on the topic was about infants with profound mental disabilities and/or untreatable severe pain. And not about eg paraplegics or people who are deaf-blind. Is this not the case?
@@jumpingturtle8830that would still be eugenics I'm not sure what you mean
@@eshansingh1 It does not strike me as contempt for disabled folks to say that infant euthanasia might be used for some conditions that will be incompatible with joining communities as an adult. That is what I addressed.
But I don't think it would be eugenics either. We're talking about conditions that will make reproduction unlikely (eg by making them unlikely to survive to adulthood or unable to consent as an adult). So euthanasia would have little effect on the "gene pool", which is what eugenics tries to affect.
In fact, Singer's examples would be the opposite of eugenic if anything. He specifically argues for euthanasia followed by the couple attempting to have another child soon after. Extreme conditions like he describes are often due to recessive mutations inherited from both parents. The 2nd child would have a 50% chance of being a carrier for the mutation. A eugenics policy would like to eliminate such mutations, so his ideas would be counterproductive for eugenics.
They should give this money directly to people via Universal basic income
People alive today are the most important ones to help, because we can only help them today.
The irony of a discussion about people like SBF not making decisions on best way to give money, and then insinuating that you know better than Mackenzie Scott on how best to help the world.
it feels cliche to say but, aren't we all familiar with the starfish story?
One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?” The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”
After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said…” I made a difference for that one.”
Remember to help "the one" when you can.
I'm not even a big fan of her's, but there's something heartwarming about a progressive movement that is spearheaded by Bette Midler.
Bruh wtf. Why do I feel like I found out about factually so late. I love like all the topics!
So if I donate to your channel, I get my name on an episode? 🤔I feel like I just heard something about the giver being coddled into giving...
Love you. Seriously, I do.
Love your show! Would you ever consider having Andrew Yang on to talk about UBI? I bet you two would have a killer episode.