This week, a single pioneering donor gave gifts worth $640 million to hundreds of advocates of equity, environmentalism, public health, and gender justice.
Does anyone know how much advocates of space exploration, nuclear power, or good city governance received this week?
When the directions of intellectual, ideological, artistic, and cultural philanthropy are lopsided by five orders of magnitude or so in one direction rather than another, it's hardly surprising that society follows in that direction.
A tremendous number of people seem to think that investing in businesses or working on technology balances out this kind of philanthropy somehow.
But better businesses and technology don't make a society's need for intellectuals, culture, art, or ideology go away.
Unless businesses or technologies somehow prevent people who oppose them from using or benefitting from them (which they don't), then they have no impact or balancing effect on the future of society at all.
They just further empower the philanthropically and politically active.
Posting irately on the internet or doing electoral politics are also totally ineffective counterbalances to philanthropy.
You can't critique or vote MacKenzie Scott into not donating or donating to something else.
You can only argue or impress her out of it.
MacKenzie Scott is of course just synecdoche here for society as a whole. You can't critique or vote society into a new direction for the future.
Who is going to argue and impress human civilization into its glorious spacefaring future?
The idea that MacKenzie is "destroying wealth" or "wasting money" is comical.
Her "wealth" is fictitious, socially constructed. This isn't the Middle Ages. She's not tearing down coliseums. If anything, by spending it, she is making it real by converting it into something else.
She is exchanging her money to shape the future intellectual, cultural, and ideological direction of society. It's just that simple.
In the long run, that's a lot more real than common Amazon stock or Vanguard ETFs or whatever.
Don't forget to check out last week's thread on philanthropy and its consequences:
The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
Some academics got mad at my bespoke categorization of Africa's geo-economic regions, but it perfectly explains why colonial borders were drawn up so randomly.
They intentionally fragmented every natural economic region btw. multiple empires to maintain the balance of power! 🧵
French Africa wasn't some rational unified whole, it was most of the Maghreb and half of "The Gulf" divided by the Sahara.
They gave France and Italy bits of the Red Sea so that Britain couldn't just dominate it outright.
Germany got a random slice of every region, just cuz.
If you wanted maximum economic growth and development, you'd have turned entire geo-economic regions into vast unified states or spheres that could transcend ethnic conflict and benefit from economies of scale.
Like a Super-Nigeria across all West Africa. A Nile Confederation.
"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful.
For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.
While flaccid debates about Ukraine, wokeness, or AI safety or whatever soak up attention on here, the American foreign minister is fighting a global proxy war with Russia/China, and the American information minister is scientifically determining the correct level of wokeness.
The AI minister has not been formally sworn in yet but to be fair he would be the inaugural officeholder.
The fact that nobody even remembers when the Suez Canal was closed from 1967 to 1975 should be a testament to how irrelevant it actually is in an era of cheap, big, and fast cargo ships.
It's not like these ships are unable to sail around Africa rather than through the Canal.
The Suez Canal only shortens routes by an order of magnitude for short trips between countries directly on either side of it e.g. Saudi Arabia and Greece.
For the more important routes from Asia to Europe/America, even from Qatar to the Netherlands, it's just a 20-40% reduction
When the USSR fell, Moscow's empire instantly lost -48.6% of its population -38.8% of GDP.
For comparison, this is how it would look if the U.S. broke apart with the same ratios today.
I think this more than anything explains why KGB officer Putin is so fixated on Ukraine: 🧵
Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union a "genuine tragedy" and "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" since at least 2005.
Quantifying this, the catastrophe is that Moscow lost control over half the Soviet population and a third of its economy.
If Washington lost the same proportion of population and GDP, what remained of the U.S. would on paper still be the 2nd-largest economy after China, but with only 170 million people.
This is smaller than Pakistan, Brazil, or even Nigeria.
We still live in a society of geocentric creationists.
For 98% of people "evolution/Big Bang" just occupies the slot where "God" once did.
We must integrate the meaning of a snowball planet of alien creatures, battered by asteroids or worse.
A 🧵on the last 4.5 billion years:
Some wacky people try to fit dinosaurs into 3000 BC.
"Scientifically rebutting" them is a meaningless achievement, because it fails to address the actual and very deep problem:
How can we possibly put the starting point of meaningful history *after* dragons walked the Earth?
"The science" fails to address this problem, instead downplaying such incredible facts into irrelevance.
People thus just replace the "God" Story with the new "Science" Story and continue believing meaningful history starts in 3000 BC—or 1619, 1776, or 1945.