Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity

Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha... by md224 on Thursday March 20, 2014 @07:46PM (#7439722)

Honest question: do you have a criticism of "charity" besides your own negative psychological reaction to derogatory uses of the term? I believe charity can be an empowering force if it helps people break out of the cycle of poverty. If anything, your criticism indicates that we need to work to reframe charity as compassion rather than some kind of condescending pity. But that seems like a problem to fix, not a reason to view charity as likely to fail.

> I don't think we help people that much when we first have to write them off as losers before we do anything for them.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this. Who's writing them off as "losers"? I'm pretty sure charitable organizations don't consider the people they help to be losers. If you're complaining that people look down on the poor, that's certainly an unfair stigma, but why does this mean charity isn't helpful?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha... by Mz on Thursday March 20, 2014 @07:55PM (#7439757)

Edit in response to your edit: I did not say "charity is not helpful". I said that other models typically provide superior solutions if you can work it out right.

Original reply:

Yes, I have a lot of criticisms of it. I was talking to my son the other day about something and he gave me the supporting example that a charity in Africa found that if it gave away mosquito netting to poor moms to protect their babies from diseases carried by mosquitoes, they typically sold it. But if they sold the netting for 50 cents, which was half a day's wages for these women, then proper use of the netting shot up from something like 10% to something like 80%.

Giving away things for free tends to undermine self esteem and self determination, tends to come with a lot of controlling conditions, and tends to be very poor quality. I left the soup kitchens as soon as I could in part because the food is terrible and it exposed me to concentrations of people who were often ill and actively smoking cigarettes next to me. Staying away from sick people and cigarette smoke and eating good quality food is part of how I stay out of the ER.

I could go on but I don't really see much reason to. I have a lot of very practical reasons. It is not merely some kind of negative psychological reaction. It is a very well reasoned position, based in part on having done a lot of volunteer work when I was younger and a lot of reading about such topics.

I don't think we should eliminate all charities but I do think that the more we can find other ways to solve problems, the better those solutions are likely to be. Charity tends to produce pretty bad solutions which keep people limping along and generally does not have a good track record of lifting people out of poverty.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha... by md224 on Thursday March 20, 2014 @08:08PM (#7439808)

Thanks for the response, your points make a lot of sense. I will say, however, that after searching for info on the mosquito net situation you described, I came across this article which seems to contradict your point:

http://www.trust.org/item/?map=fighting-malaria-selling-v-gi...

Regardless, I agree there's room for improvement in terms of increasing the effectiveness of charitable operations.

[ Parent | on HN ]