I have several orders of magnitude less resources than she does but I do the thing which I think scales the best.
I just give directly to poor people.
I find it a very interesting approach to what she is doing.
The problem with most philanthropic organizations is that they come to rely on a constant stream of money. I've heard the Gates Foundation have to be very intentional with how they deploy capital. Because whole ecosystems come to rely on that money in an unsustainable way. So when they have met their goals or decided its not working and pull funding, those that relied on the funding basically collapse overnight. Which could lead to even worse outcomes.
With her approach, I do wonder if this will occur with many of the organizations she is giving large amount of money to.
EDIT: Reminds me of the saying "Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".
What a gal. The world would be a much different place if we saw more of this kind of wealth transfer.
Good for her. Though I wonder, how many would still give, if donations were anonymous, so others would never know who is it that's giving?
The moment you hear about the specific persons/organizations making the donations, you cannot help but realize there are also other considerations at play (like publicity), besides the desire to help others.
As stated in the book “Lessons of History,” this is what billionaires should be doing with the wealth that they’ve snatched from the poor, marginalized and unlucky.
When we started on this tech journey, the hope was for a better more equal world,
Instead we have the worst inequality since the Great Depression, mass surveillance on a global scale and the destruction of the middle class.
Inequality is a part of our society. Some are born with better genetics and opportunities in a lucky part of the world.
If you are lucky to become a billionaire your purpose is to serve humanity and redistribute that wealth to your workers and to society at large.
If not, the only eventual outcome is repression by the billionaire class or forced redistribution through violent revolution.
These are the lessons that history has taught us.
This is good. I won’t say a bad thing about it. I just always wonder if there’s a better way.
Would it not be better to use the money to ~~bribe~~ donate to politicians instead? Two billions dollars can change the results of elections and sway a lot of policy at the local, state, and federal level. It’s a matter of wealth amplification, that two billion could have altered the course of several billions in government budgets. Like a big lever moving an absolutely enormous boulder.
Why donate to non-profits fighting for something when you can just win the fight by changing the law? Rather than donate to a non-profit that helps the homeless, wouldn’t it be more effective to directly change the policies that lead to homelessness in the first place?
Evil Republican megadonors do it, and it’s working great for them. Where are the non-evil leftist megadonors? If it’s an oligarchy, it’s not impossible to have a good an kind-hearted oligarch.
This is an object lesson in the Law of Karma that we human beings live within. It is the realworld and realtime application of the concept "You reap what you sow."
The joy that Ms. Scott experiences in her life is not comprehendable by the vast majority of human beings for the simple reason that very few of us have billions of dollars to give away. The few who do have such resources rarely give nearly as much to such worthy causes, because most of them are too busily trying to acquire more money with what they already have.
On the other hand, her ex-husband can build his mega-yachts and whatever-the-f else he does with his billions, but he will never be happy because his business is built upon brutally oppressing his workers to make its profit. No, he will have no peace because he is a servant to greed and money alone. Sure, he can always have more pleasure, but pleasure is not a substitute for peace and happiness.
That's why Ms. Scott is living a joyous life of giving, and Bezos looks like Bill the Cat on TRT. We all reap what we sow. The happiness we help others feel comes back into us within our inner world's peace and joy. As well, the same is true of those who create misery for others.
That's why the people who now run America are never -- and I mean never -- happy and peaceful. They are committed to squeezing each human being for all they can, irrespective of how much misery results. It looks to me like they take pleasure in that oppression, and that is the worst result for a human being, to incur those repurcussions.
No, those evil bastards must not be gunned down in the streets, because we must be a society of laws and process, but we can and must "take the power back", out of lovingkindness for the oppressed, not to mention for the healing of the Earth.
We are each choosing sides, each and every day, and there are only three roads a person can travel:
(1) Apathy and willful ignorance for the results our actions have on others, and the actions our society and cultures have on others.
(2) Cruel oppression without regard to the misery caused by our actions or those of our society and cultures.
(3) Conscious compassion for all human beings we encounter, such that we both try to act in ways that only result in happiness for others and evolve our society and cultures towards greater compassion for all human beings.
Everyone starts out with some combination of the three, depending on our personal predilections and societal/cultural training combined with the situations we encounter in life. Regardless, we all have the choice to self-evolve ourselves into caring members of an ever more universally compassionate society. We can care about our mistakes that result in others' unhappiness and then resolve ourselves to stop repeating them.
This is the Path of Love, whose purpose is to not only create happiness in others, but to reap the benefits of that happiness in our own inner world. It can be said that the most selfish -- yes, you read that right -- thing one can do is to help others without thought of recompense, for the simple fact that it will come back you in time, every single time. I like to say that giving without regard to receiving creates a bank of magic in the universe that the universe will pay back at the most optimal time and place in the future.
Selfless lovingkindness is the purest, greatest magic in the universe. That most religious folks don't espouse this is because they only partake in religion to be on the "only saved" side, or to be in the most dominant group, or simply because that is their culture's inertia. The universe always knows our heart, and our intentions are always present and can later be seen on our faces and in the tone of our voices as our decisions accrue over our lives.
You can see the self-satisfied vanity of the oppressors of the world, but you will never see peace and happiness. If a person has cheated every person they could, they will experience less and less joy over time, unless they see the error of their ways, repent, and then endeavor to live life under love's guidance.
Ms. Scott is giving so much to so many because her mother's heart is tuned to lovingkindness, and she knows how much of an utterly callous bastard her ex-husband is. So, she is both working to counteract her ex's horrific business practices and funding so many wonderful projects because it brings her the greatest joy a person can imagine.
This journey begins with asking the universe to help evolve you into a being of happiness-creating compassion, to the exclusion of all selfishness. Your life will then bloom like a rose in the springtime, but it won't usually happen all at once; it is a long road to defeat our inner selfish tendencies. The best help we can get comes from our Unfathomable Creator, but we must ask for that help; though it is in our best interests, our free will remains sacrosanct.
That people choose to remain ignorant of this system of karma does not make it any less real than Eugene Parker's discovery of the solar wind was any less valid in the face of his opponents' overwhelming majority at the time. It's just that most people are too satisfied with this world's pleasures to care.
Your peace and happiness is in your hands.
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The directors of this laundry list of non-profits will be very happy that their high salaries are secure.
If only there were a government that could build affordable housing directly. Perhaps from a billionaire tax ...
Don't get married, boys
What a trainwreck of a comment section.
It's great to see such philanthropy. I would love to see more documentation on process of choosing like e.g. Givewell does. Presumably non-trivial amount went into researching how to optimally allocate the money and some lessons from that could be useful to others.