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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I don't know if "billionaire" is enough to have a substantial impact. Let's say you have $999B of wealth at 5% returns. You can therefore direct $50B to zero-return initiatives (whether or not they qualify as "charities") without reducing your nominal wealth.

If you choose to target elementary/secondary education, that's a 6% increase over the current US funding. Similarly, it's a 10% increase in new housing, 2% in welfare, etc. If you have a mere $1B instead of $999B, then all of those numbers drop by three orders of magnitude.

I don't think you can solve racism without solving racial differences in outcomes. I don't think you can affect the outcomes on a national scale with merely billions of dollars of wealth.

There are ways to influence society with greater leverage than that. Instituting policies at your company, and spreading them via professional conferences and such (if they're successful), is one possibility. Another would be to influence politicians, who can certainly be rented for what one company or rich person can afford to spend. A third is to sponsor research.

I don't know how much progress can be made using zero-sum tools like selective hiring/promotions or unspecified political/scientific efforts.

I'm sympathetic to the "war on noticing" framing of the fight against racial discrimination (aside: I wish "anti-racism" wasn't the name of a specific movement, since it would otherwise fit perfectly there). For example, if you ban criminal record checks for employment while keeping the same criminality rates, you'll find that employers start discriminating based on race as a proxy measure.

I think that fighting against noticing racial differences (and acting on them), without having a change is the raw situation is doomed to failure.

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