Saving the world: Some billionaires try. Now see your lazy-effective way!

You don't have to be reminded. Forward looking folks know this time of year is when we re-assess our annual donations and find ways to help tilt the scales toward a more favorable tomorrow. But is there an aspect of ultimate self-interest?

Consider. What criteria will future generations use, when they decide which people from our era to up/down/in-load or simulate or whatever tech-apotheosis you yearn for them to provide? Won't they factor in not only how interesting you would be to have around, but also how hard you tried to be - in the words of Jonas Salk - a good ancestor?

Of course what I'm describing is eerily similar to the deal offered to our grandparents and their grandparents... redemption through good thoughts and good works. Only now we're talking about a process that will be both palpable and propelled by physical law.

(Ironic, huh? Still, whether you are placating a judgmental deity, or earning cred with our future, godlike descendants, it does boil down to the same thing. Help make things better. And maybe there'll be a prize to go along with the satisfaction.)

I've long promoted what I think is the most effective means for a modern, busy person to invest in improving the world... a method that makes efficient use of your time and money, and in ways that those future folk may notice. That method is called Proxy Power. It consists of buying subscriptions to groups and orgs and NGOs who pool their members' dues and influence to support full time activists, who then take action to make a better world on your behalf!

Organizations like the Sierra Club, Oxfam, the Red Cross or the ACLU are the great equalizers of our new civilization. They are how millions of smalltimers or average folk can together hire lawyers on a par with oligarchs, or fill a ship with food and schoolbooks, or stop whalers, or preserve an aquifer, or free a whistleblower, or replenish the blood supply, or lobby for a simpler tax code, or help poor girls in Pakistan go to school or...

Do read my old appeal on this matter. Not only in a spirit of philanthropy - perhaps inspired by the season - or to help your children or save your nation and world, but also out of enlightened self-interest and desire to help convince those who hold the keys of heaven -- or a future heavenly simulation -- to smile and admit that you were one of the okay ones.  (Also, at year end you can assess your tax situation and still squeeze a few deductions into 2012.)

== Quirky choices ==

Mix and match organizations who cover the bases you want covered! Say for example: one for hunger (Oxfam? or the Heifer Project?) and two for freedom (ACLU and/or Electronic Frontier Foundation and/or Project Witness)  Followed by one agitator environmental organization (Greenpeace) and one eco-negotiator (the Sierra Club). One that goes directly to helping real people, one or two at a time (e.g. Doctors Without Borders or Habitat for Humanity). Throw in your local library or PBS station, Planned Parenthood and the Libertarian Party or The Planetary Society and The Skeptic Society.... you get the drift. (BTW: I don't send money to all of these, every year.)

Okay, okay. I figure a couple of your choices may differ, or even cancel some of mine! So? We're all winners through lively and informed debate.  And the passionate geeks and attorneys we hire with our proxy dues will be passionately, geekily informed debaters on our behalf!

Oh, and let me admit that some of my own choices may seem quirky. Every year since 1979, for example, I've sent a small check to a little Treasury Dept. office in Parkersburg West Virginia, to be applied against the U.S. national debt. That's beyond my regular taxes. Sometimes (in lean years) the donation is very small, sometimes larger. Call it a statement in my own mind of how grateful I am, not to live in the 99% of human cultures that would have burned or garroted or skewered or drowned a guy like me before I was sixteen. A society that instead pays and honors me to be like this. So no, I won't commit the churlish, vile sin of ingratitude. No, not that sin.  Others, but not that one.

== And more reasons to believe... ==

Of course, all of this bears upon the notion that cynicism is getting tiresome. Below, I will show evidence that folks are fighting back, ranging from several famous billionaires to a quoted passage from Charles Stross to recent endeavors by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling and myself, persuading science fiction authors to return to the great old can-do spirit.  But first...

A cute "Tree Lobsters" cartoon lays down that same fundamental problem mentioned above... faced by all of those who have bought expensive cryonics contracts, in hope of being revived in some future age.  Why would future folk want you?  By now you know how to answer that. Make a pact with tomorrow.

Or, for a much deeper immersion into the concepts behind all this, watch Jaan Tallin (founder of Skype and venture capitalist) give an amazing Singularity talk about your hope of being a featured simulation.

Speaking of folks worthy of uploading/reviving/whatever? Did any of you see Jon Stewart interview Warren Buffett and his biographer?  The Oracle of Omaha, indeed.  Got rich by being smart. Smart and trustwortthy. Even smart enough to know what it all is really about, and why solipsism is for dopes. Go Warren! (More on good billionaires below.)

Will it work? Mind Meld asks authors, including Brenda Cooper and Charles Stross -- and yours truly -- about optimistic scenarios for our future world. Why they are rare amid waves of dystopias. And how hope really matters.

Of course, at the opposite extreme are the scrooges. See this older posting of mine that lays down the conflict before us. The Relevance of an Old Nemesis - as Even Older Ones Return.

Ponder doing your gift shopping at Costco - where workers earn 45% above industry standard and get profit sharing - versus Walmart, whose employees desperately take in an average of $500,000 in food stamps and other public support, per store.

... and then we come to...

== The Era of the Nerds? ==

Uber nerd Nate Silver on talk shows is such a geek!  But that is so "in" now... that I figure Silver is fielding embarrassing calls from sperm banks.  Here's something only a sci fi author would extrapolate. Watch  the kindergartens for 200 miles surrounding his present digs, 6 years from now. Oh, this will have repercussions for centuries to come.

Speaking of uber-nerds. Sergey Brin asks the election winner to quit his own party.  Not a bad idea.  Related to my Stipulation proposal. Worth pondering.

Aw heck, let's make this whole section about my billionaire acquaintances, Sterling examples of give-back moguls who earned their wealth with brilliant goods and services, but haven't forgotten the context of it all.

Take Elon Musk. Elon's at it again.  Pushing at us to be all that we can be. I sat in his living room one evening and heard about his plans to get a human colony on Mars... must be a decade ago. Now you get to read all about it. How big a statue at the base of Olympus Mons do you think he'll deserve, if this comes true?

Standing next to Elon on Mars? Amazon's Jeff Bezos: the ultimate disrupter - a fascinating look at an American original. One of the transforming figures of our time... and a really nice guy.

All right, in Existence I make it plain, the billionaires will matter, especially if the good ones join us in staving off the depredations of bad oligarchs.  Still, go back to my appeal at the top of this missive. We will matter far more, over the long run.

... and if you need more convincing...

== Back to investing in Optimism ==

There's this, from the fellow who coined the phrase the rapture of the nerds... Charles Stross offers reasons to be cheerful.

"...we're close to exterminating polio and dracunculiasis (aka guinea worm disease) in the wild. (Two extinctions I won't be shedding any tears over.)

'In other news of improvements, both China and India underwent annual economic growth averaging around 10% per year throughout the decade. The sheer scale of it is mind-numbing; it's as if the entire population of the USA and the EU combined had gone from third-world poverty to first-world standards of living. (There are still a lot of dirt-poor peasants left behind in villages, and a lot of economic — never mind political — problems with both India and China's developed urban sectors, but overall, life is vastly better today than it was a decade ago for around a billion people.)

'The number of people living in poverty and with unsafe water supplies world-wide today is about the same as it was in 1970. Only difference is, there were 3 billion of us back then and today we're nearer to 7 billion. Upshot: the proportion of us humans on this planet who are living in third world poverty (unable to afford enough food, water, clothing and shelter) has actually been halved."

Hm... as we've seen this time, there are guarded reasons for tense, tentative hope.

We're navigating harsh shoals but fair harbors are in sight. That's exactly the time when all hands are needed at the sails and tiller and sounding lines, bringing to action every tool of heart and mind!

Cynicism is for saps and indignation junkies and traitors to hope. It is an excuse for laziness, leaving to others the grown-up task of study and research and negotiation and hard work and innovating and saving the world.

We can get there. I just showed you how easy, simple and cheap it is to do at least the minimum, choosing half a dozen groups to save the world for you! And thus you can go on record as one of the good guys.  One of those who helped to make a dazzling future for our godlike heirs.

Aside: How the U.S. Saved the World by Buying Vast Amounts of Stuff...

Sorry, here's a topical aside. There's so much in the news.

Of course it all relates to the modernist agenda and its enemies.

Saving the World Through Walmart?...

Every year, Warren Buffett (probably the world’s greatest investor personally writes a letter to the shareholders of the company he controls, Berkshire Hathaway. The following excerpt is from a section that concerns the US trade deficit, in which Buffett explains why he is diversifying into currencies other than the US dollar.

"If the U.S. was running a $.6 trillion current-account surplus, commentators worldwide would violently condemn our policy, viewing it as an extreme form of “mercantilism” – a long discredited economic strategy under which countries fostered exports, discouraged imports, and piled up treasure. I would condemn such a policy as well. But, in effect if not in intent, the rest of the world is practicing mercantilism in respect to the U.S., an act made possible by our vast store of assets and our pristine credit history. Indeed, the world would never let any other country use a credit card denominated in its own currency to the insatiable extent we are employing ours. Presently, most foreign investors are sanguine: they may view us as spending junkies, but they know we are rich junkies as well.

"Our spendthrift behavior won’t, however, be tolerated indefinitely. And though it’s impossible to forecast just when and how the trade problem will be resolved, it’s improbable that the resolution will foster an increase in the value of our currency relative to that of our trading partners. "


While I respect and admire Buffett in many ways, I think that things may be a little more complicated that he portrays them to be.

I have a perspective I'd like to add. It does require "stepping back a bit" and taking in an even wider context, so hold on.

Many periods in history have seen one empire or another achieve enough power to establish and enforce the rules of trade - nearly always to their own advantage. It happened under Pax Romana. Britain did it with the Triangular Trade in 1770s. Ghandi's biggest complaint against the Raj was the way Indian industries were crushed in favor of exports from British mills. As Buffett says, it is called mercantilism.

Only now comes a funny thing that happened in our lifetimes. It is probably the biggest fact about world civilization in the last sixty years, yet I do not know of anyone explicitly or openly discussing it.

After WWII, the United States had an overwhelmingly superior position in the world, with an economy that had benefitted prodigiously from war, rather than suffering from it. By any measure we had become the latest "pax" or imperium, able to set rules and establish patterns that others could only follow.

But something surprising and historically unprecedented happened. For the first time, this kind of power was held by a nation and people whose value system was colored by both satiation and lessons of the Enlightenment. (The two are, of course, related.) Moreover, we were guided at this time - with respect to international matters - by arguably the greatest man of the Twentieth Century, George Marshall, who ensured that the U.S. would use all this power in ways diametrically opposite to any other historical imperium.

Motivated by a strangely pragmatic version of utopianism - called Modernism - we set about the ambitious goal of reshaping the world.

Most people today know Marshall only for his "plan" to rebuild European cities and farms in the immediate aftermath of war. But that was only one small part of a far greater scheme. More significant, in the long run was the establishment of trade policies that reversed mercantilism.

Instead of the Central Kingdom (Chung Kuo) forcing satrapies to buy manufactured goods from the center, the U.S. allowed client states to set up barriers against US manufactures while facing negligible duties to their goods imported to America.

Chief results?

#1 - a huge U.S. balance of payments deficit. This has been discussed relentlessly ever since the sixties - offering grist and nourishment for pessimists, predicting disaster. Indeed, it is becoming hard even for optimists to imagine happy outcomes for America, with the trade deficit now reaching more than half a trillion dollars a year!

Keen observers such as Warren Buffett predict a major reconfiguring of currencies in the near future, with another dolorous outcome -- the U.S. becoming an extreme debtor nation. And they are probably right. This is mismanagement on a collosal scale.

Okay. That's pretty clear. So far. But there is another side. A completely nother side.


#2 - The 60 year anti-mercantilist trade pattern established by America also resulted in the greatest transfer of real wealth in world history. The effects, first in Europe and Japan, then Taiwan and Korea, then the smaller "Asian Tigers" and parts of Latin America, have been staggering.

Out of the world's six billion people, more than two billion have been lifted into some kind of middle class existence - with modest but clean homes, access to water, power, education and hope - as a direct or indirect result of Americans buying trillions of dollars worth of goods we never needed.

Another billion or so appear to be on the same track, only a little behind.

We are told that the world is a devastatingly sad and oppressive place, filled with poverty and hopelessness. And, indeed, the raw numbers of people who suffer malnourishment and/or oppression, can only tear at the heart. Ideally, this awareness will spread and make us feel determined to do better.

But the irony is that only people who are relatively satiated can indulge in empathy and feel the pain of others, for whom satiation is but a dream.

In fact, the percentage of human beings who live in some degree of comfort and safety, with secure hope that their increasingly educated children will do better, has been rising spectacularly for two generations. And the principal driver of this change has been the U.S. consumer, purchasing the output of tens of thousands of foreign factories, wherein the same pattern gets repeated from one country to the next. Workers systematically move from exploited peons to hard-pressed semi-skilled assemblers, to unionized skilled labor... while roads and infrastructure get built all around them and their kids go to school, graduating into the bourgeoisie.

Let me reiterate this point. Far outweighing all "aid" the world ever saw, the greatest force for good in the world has consisted of Americans purchasing megatons of crap we never had to buy in the first place, under trade rules designed to favor those thousand of foreign factories.

Alas, we'll never get a scintilla of credit for this vast beneficence. Because it did not blossom out of motivations like guilt or generosity. To a large part, it flowed out of a childishly spendthrift love of shopping.

Indeed, when viewed from this unusual angle, America looks even more impressive than ever. After single-handedly lifting up Europe and Japan, in the wake of WWII, then hauling Korea and Taiwan into the middle class with the helpful voraciousness of our appetites and wallets, we proceeded thereupon to offer this same bounteous good deed to dozens of other nations and peoples until, today, we are accomplishing what no one would have imagined possible.

We are SIMULTANEOUSLY lifting both China and India toward prosperity. Nations amassing more than two billion people. At the same time.

Now this view may infuriate liberals, who believe that doing good should feel like doing good, ideally motivated by sacrifice, guilt... and maybe some paternalism.)

It also won't please conservatives, who would just hate to picture George Marshall saving the world. (They certainly give Ronald Reagan all the credit for calling the final plays in Marshall's long and patient game.)

It seems to be in nobody's interest, left or right, to acknowledge either that the world is being saved, or that it has been accomplished by good-natured American extravagance. Is this why such a blatant fact is so ignored?

Oh, but it is NOT being ignored... in Beijing.

The Chinese leadership is painfully aware how much they have at stake in continuing the American buying spree. If their present transition were to stall short of the halfway point, with most of the rural population poised at an especially dangerous phase - aware of possibilities that have not yet been realized - then social disruption could wrack the nation on a seismic scale. Beijing needs confident Americans to buy plenty more unneeded goods with strong dollars, for the foreseeable future.

Can this be achieved, while our current accounts deficit shatters all records? Yes, if a sufficient counterflow is maintained. The Chinese and others could buy more American goods, for example. (Unlikely.) Or they could pay for intellectual property (even less likely).

Or they'll buy more American capital. The latter will be done even with complete awareness that US investments must depreciate eventually. They don't have any choice. They must buy our bonds and banks and skyscrapers and golf courses, as the Japanese did, at an expected long term loss.

Shall we derive some small satisfaction from that?

I don't see it as an issue of us-them quite as much as some do. Had we played this as a competitive game on that basis, Marshall would have set up a traditional mercantilist trade pattern and we would right now be not only the richest nation but the Great Creditor, owning debt in every other country... and the world would be a raging storm of rebellion against a genuine American Imperium, with billions more suffering in angry poverty than do now.

As I see it, we ARE getting something. We are getting cheap Asian goods and a better world. High quality Japanese cars and a vast majority of Earth's children going to school. A cornucopia at Walmart, and four billion people rushing toward the middle class.

(With concomitant ecological crises that will challenge the NEXT generation. Don't think for a minute that I've forgotten THAT part of things... or the way we are betraying our role as R&D department for efficient and sustainable growth.)

The ironies pile up higher and higher. If America fades somewhat because of all this, will we be taunted because a great empire let itself slip from the pinnacle through spendthrift ways?

Or will we be given credit we deserve? We spent and spent and spent, and in the long run, what we bought was hope for the world.

For follow-up, see: How Americans Spent Themselves into Ruin, but Saved the World


...next, a return to modernism...