Giving Back
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our society lacks noblesse oblige. We need to think different about how we give back.
There are wealthy, brilliant people who are incompetent in other domains. For self-made people, it happens when they specialize in one area and don’t re-apply the frameworks they learned that made them successful. Self-made people are most incompetent when blindly listening to the “experts”.
Philanthropy
Sexy charities are overfunded. The charities that feel good and are completely uncontroversial receive the most funding. If it has a gala where supporters pontificate about saving kids or the underprivileged, it’s a red flag. Philanthropy needs more people looking for diamonds in the rough. That’s where the value lies.
Unsexy charities need funding, e.g., teaching and raising awareness in lower socioeconomic communities about personal finance and how credit card debt works, fixing broken wells in rural villages, tracking and stopping sex trafficking. Unsexy existential ones like stopping nuclear proliferation, diverting meteors before they strike Earth, and until recently AI safety research was also one of these.
It’s not the sexy work of writing a check to a feel-good institutional charity and getting your name on the prestigious invite. My brother wrote a great post on how to think of philanthropy. Money by itself is a tool, and we often use it poorly when trying to affect change. There are enough followers and cowards in the world who can donate to boring, feel-good charities.
Outside of charity, think about the group MADD (mothers against drunk driving), and all the time and money that was spent. If instead of lecturing children that time and energy went into starting a ride-sharing company, drunk driving deaths could have plummeted decades sooner.
What matters most is optimizing systems to have the right incentives and processes to let innovation, creativity, art, love, and life flourish.
Finding Your Contribution
Changing a system can have orders of magnitude more positive benefits on society than any charity.
Our brains are awful at relating to systems. We fundamentally don’t understand them as they’re emotionally unintuitive. Systems didn’t exist when we were in tribes. It’s the reason when we look at a spreadsheet of the number of deaths in a war, we feel nothing. It’s a number on a screen. But each number represents an individual, a human who was loved by friends and family. They had a story; one that will never be told. And their life is no more. Multiply that by millions. Our ape brains don’t understand. They never will.
Before changing a flawed system, you need to deeply understand the system and why it works the way it does. I’ve spent over four years working on fixing the system of real estate. The largest asset class runs on a software system that impacts everyone in the world— from paying rent to finding a plumber to fix your sink. Our solution is still ongoing. There are countless other systems that need to be fixed.
Culture, the environment, finance, logistics, education, security, communication, government, energy, and health are all system problems. Systems run the world. If you want to have a meaningful impact, fix a system problem. Everything else is peanuts.
Ineffective Altruism
Effective altruism feels true. It’s great in that it’s getting people aware of problems. It’s bad in that it doesn’t address any of the core issues. Feeding existing systems doesn’t fix the world. It can actually make the world a worse place.
This is my beef with effective altruism. At best, it’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It feels good to help people suffering as a first-order consequence of giving. But what if the same people are under a system that leads to misery? You can give money to people in a country where the vast majority of donations are stolen by corrupt institutions. At worst, effective altruism finances and props up existing systems that lead to despair.
Alternatively, a scalable way to make a difference would be to actively change the system they live under, or allow people to escape the systems of misery. Escape (i.e., immigration) to countries with systems that allow for growth is often the path of least resistance. Then it’s also on the philanthropist to make sure the place they escape to stays resilient and doesn’t become like the place they escaped.
We all want the same end results– happy, healthy people who contribute to society through meaningful work. It shouldn’t matter where they were born in the world. Human life is human life.
In America and elsewhere, political parties are married to “solutions” that benefit the special interest groups that support them. The programs political parties favor tend to have little to do with how effective they are. We need to change the incentive structures to improve education, healthcare, homeless policy, public safety, cost of living, and financial transparency. Some of these should be done via non-profits, while others should be done with for-profits.
Impact
Fixing problems at scale is what matters, but at the same time, we must learn personal stories. Understand them, spread them. The truth is that systems are the most important thing, but it’s also true that individual stories are the only things that make us care. To make people care, we need to feel.
Fixing a system in the private sector can be massively profitable. Prestige and influence can be used as tools to alter systems. Systems when changed will have cascading effects for decades if not generations. America’s founding was the ultimate system. The idea of a government serving the people via elected representatives with checks, balances, and protections on individual rights. Countries around the world adopted the American model.
When I write about frameworks, the emotional brain, metacognition, signaling, abstraction, or systems problems, most tune out. It’s not relatable. It’s sad because those are the core of what makes us human. Understanding and applying the concepts can make us better humans. They’re the primitive frameworks to navigate the world to better understand ourselves and what is true. Use these tools to fix a system.