Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity
thedailybeast.com> But the use of ex-military personnel for humanitarian and conservation work is also controversial, according to Rosaleen Duffy, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield.
No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.
Switzerland is a model for this. Given their neutral and famously anti-confrontational manner, their armies do a lot of civil construction and aid work. The US should do more of that kind of thing.
At some point ex-military might just mean good at operations and logistics.
I recently took some college classes later in life (being dropped in with a bunch of 18 year olds at 30 is an interesting experience), and was blown away by the few ex military guys (roughly my age) in the classes. Of course it might be self selecting since it’s the ones who chose to go to school after their military career ended, but they were consistently some of the most mature, level headed people I had ever met. Definitely changed my outlook on folks coming from the military.
Special forces do this type of thing often too. It's part of winning hearts and minds.
Team Rubicon is another NGO that provides disaster relief.
So he’s just doing this for the ‘gram. Even the NGO director stated they respond to exciting disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. I wonder if they’ll be equally deployed to the disasters that don’t fit a 24 hour news cycle: drought, sea level rise, and pandemics. The kind of disasters that sneak in slowly and then overwhelm all at once.
Truly commendable that he would do this, but deeply terrible that a private citizen, no matter how wealthy, can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.
> can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.
Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head.
The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about.
But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around).
I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.
Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization to be more competent?
> democratic accountability
That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction.
There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.
This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.
The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.
Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here.
European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.
Yes, the poor performance of the US government in COVID-19 is astounding and unique among governments. In no small part due to exactly this attitude.
The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago.
And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big.
Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent.
Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility.
And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.
If Congresspeople and similar desk jockeys can't chronically profit from ensuring our preparedness for disasters, well, don't expect them to do so.
I'm sure he'd agree with you; it's not an either/or situation.
Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Not to mention a sizable sub-segment that has no interest in providing aid even to their fellow citizens, who happen to check a different demographic box.
The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.
> Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world.
Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama.
Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year:
2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer.
Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress.
The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example.
4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process.
"The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u...
The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.
>1/2 of all global food aid
You're just cherry picking numbers.
The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid.
But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), the UK ($284.85), and obviously behind top-spenders such as Norway ($812.58), Sweden ($701.10), Luxembourg ($609.48), etc.
It also puts them behind the EU: The total spending of the EU was $73.80 billion from member states and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
Food is obviously one of the most important ways of providing foreign aid combating an immediate problem, and it's great the US are using their geography to help out, but it's not exactly fair to pretend others aren't contributing.
> and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita.
And what about US institutions, such as the one this article is about? Seems like you are doing your own cherry picking.
> And what about US institutions
They're already included in the US number. In fact they are the US number.
Due to the greater autonomy of EU member states their individual contributions and those done by EU institutions (meaning those institutions not belonging to a specific member state) were kept separate in the above link.
It's possible the word "institution" doesn't mean what you think it means.
I don’t know the ins and outs of this. Just answer this question for me. Do any of the numbers you cite include donations by organizations such as the ones described in the article?
If not, then it’s not a very helpful metric since huge amounts of aid aren’t being measured.
As a thought experiment, imagine some wealthy private citizen who could afford to spend, say, $10 million USD and had a few hundred employees to draw a team from, and adequate transportation to a disaster location.
Now identify a country that could respond with a similar level of aid in less time. Not more aid in more time, but just “beat to the punch” with a useful initial response. Citations preferred.
This wing was donated by "anonymous". All eyes look at Ted Danson
Tax billionaires and let democratically elected governments perform this public service.
The government already has infinite cash, yet Brin is faster in sending disaster relief. Would more cash somehow make the government's response quicker?
In my opinion, it is great we have ultra-rich people who decide to spend their resources in ways that help others in ways the government currently isn't able to.
I think Slate Star Codex makes a pretty good argument why this is a bad idea:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
Besides monarchs in the past, for the first time in the history of Planet Earth we have many people and corporations that have more money than governments and so with that comes the responsibility of "acting accordingly". I believe that in a good light this will continue to assist humanity in ways never thought of before as human ingenuity is always more nimble than large bureaucratic organizations.
Andrew Carnegie definitely had "more money than governments". Same with other titans of that time.
He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/socialist/fascist revolution. I truly and sincerely hope today's ultra billionaires are as smart and realistic as Carnegie in this respect.
Carnegie emphasized education in his giving. Limited success. His library movement was largely successful, but his trade school turned into yet another hyper expensive prestinge-driven private university. Although I guess it was the brith-place of a lot of the computer technologies that made the current crop of ultra billionaires rich.
I think we're over-due for someone to emphasize healthcare in their giving. (Gates did this, but not in the USA.) We're also over due for a labor backlash against this sort of obscene wealth concentration (and not even as a value-laden statement... just as a "lessons from history" thing, the pendulum will probably swing).
That trade school which is now CMU did not start out being a hyper expensive prestige driven university. For years prior to the computer era it was a humble university in Pittsburgh.
"In 1900, he donated $1 million for the creation of a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh, envisioning a school where working-class men and women of Pittsburgh could learn practical skills, trades and crafts that would enhance their careers, lives and communities."
It was not until the dawn of the computer era that things started to change.
https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html
See this link for more details.
Yeah, it served its intended purpose for a long time. It's extremely difficult for a wildly successful university from humble roots to stay true to its roots. Even public institutions mostly fail to stay accessible after becoming successful.
CMU has damn close to zero "working class men and women from Pittsburgh" in its student body these days, unless by "working class" you mean "parents were doctors, lawyers, and software engineers from shadyside/squill/fox chapel/etc." :(. On the other hand, it is one of the two big reasons Pittsburgh experienced a renaissance in the early 21st century (which continues to this day), and in that sense did achieve the goal of helping the Pittsburgh community thrive. Just not by elevating working class folk.
There was also a modest contribution toward basic scientific research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Institution_for_Scien...
Some astronomical observatories built atop certain mountains were built with his funding.
He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers
That’s interesting. Why would he “lay siege” to workers? Were they hiding somewhere behind fortifications, and he was trying to force them to work, or what? It’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where capitalists would even find it useful to “lay siege” to workers.
if only historical accounts existed of this mythical time.
Well, maybe instead of sarcastic remarks you will be the one to point me to some historical accounts?
Ah, now it makes more sense: he wasn’t laying siege to workers, but rather to his own factory the workers were illegally occupying, and refusing to let in him or other workers, and after they kicked out the Sheriff, who was initially called to lawfully remove them. Finally, the occupation was dispersed by state militia. Yeah, now it all falls into place, except it’s still unclear to me which part exactly makes Carnegie a “shit person” here.
Oof. I don't think anyone in the world is interested in re-litigating 100 year old labor politics with you.
Who has more money than governments? Sergey Brin is worth about $65 billion. The US federal budget is ~$3 trillion _per year_
Here is one example...
5. Niger: Wealth per Adult: $1,017 Niger is the largest nation in West Africa, but more than 80% of its land area is in the Sahara Desert, so it is prone to drought and famine. The GDP as of 2017 was $9.87 billion, but the wealth per adult remained low despite economic reforms.
Reference:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/managing-wealth/112916...
Mansa Musa is said to have been so wealthy he crashed the economy of Egypt by giving away gold. Extremely wealthy people is not a new phenomenon. Maybe monarchs don't count because they're so wealthy they own entire countries outright? It seems to me that makes them more wealthy, not less.
> Mansa Musa
That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor. (OT: I often wonder if his story is well-known in tech circles because of the end date of his reign.)
> That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor.
That's kind of my point though; owning an empire is an extreme form of wealth, well beyond what any of the American tech billionaires have.
To keep that in perspective, the GDP of Niger (population 22 million) is about the annual budget of San Francisco (population 900 thousand).
Is comparing very poor countries to individuals from very rich countries a relevant framing? Global wealth disparities aren't a new phenomenon (and global wealth inequality is decreasing!)
Usually these comparisons are not very fair because it’s done by currency exchange rate conversion. For example, a person with mere $800 per month income in India can have superior life style than minimum wage worker in USA.
The US is the wealthiest country on earth. Sergei Brin's checking account would be the 74th largest GDP in the world.
Why are you comparing somebody’s net worth to a GDP, which is a rate? That makes zero sense.
No, it does make sense: Brin could pay to run the 74th largest economy for a year.
That's not what GDP means, and also a person's net worth is not necessarily liquid.
Checking account or total value of investments?
It was a figure of speech. Obviously he doesn't have an 11 figure bank balance.
There are other governments, though.
Well sure. A ton of people have more money than Nauru, or not restricting to international, cities and villages.
They have revenues of ~$3 trillion and expenses of ~$4 trillion so...
The annual budget for just San Francisco is $12 billion (https://sfbos.org/supervisor-fewer-budget-information). That's 20% of Sergey Brin's net worth.
So no, I don't think that any billionaire is even remotely close to being able to sustainably spend what any country-level government can.
For another reference: the smallest GDP listed at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... is ~$40B, and government spending is usually some 10s of percent of GDP.
You should read a biography of J.P. Morgan sometime. In the 1890’s he bailed out the US government, and during the Panic of 1907 he basically bailed out the entire economy.