Philanthropy and Democratic Society – The Atlantic

A new book argues that the giving patterns of today’s wealthy may present challenges to the democratic process.

The gifts come at a time when government is shrinking, and when, in some cases, philanthropic dollars replace or supplant government functions. That can mean that it’s philanthropists who decide what scientific issues are researched, what types of schools exist in communities, and what initiatives get on ballots. “It’s great to have these new donors appearing on the scene at a time when government is being cut,” Callahan told me, in a phone interview. “On the other hand, there’s no question that with money comes power and influence.” … “We face a future in which private donors—who are accountable to no one—may often wield more influence than elected public officials, who (in theory, anyway) are accountable to all of us,”

Callahan isn’t sure where he stands on this debate. As he points out, it’s hard to argue against individuals providing nets to prevent the spread of malaria, or giving away all their money before they die. But he makes a convincing argument that philanthropists are more aggressive than ever, and that this is cause for concern.

part of the benefit of having so much money to give away is doing what you want with it without listening to anybody else. But in a society where the haves are increasingly separated from the have-nots, some wise philanthropists may begin to understand that there’s a problem when having money means not just improving your own life, but deciding what happens in other people’s lives too.

Source: Philanthropy and Democratic Society – The Atlantic

More: The Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age by David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy

Forget coding, we need to teach our kids how to dream | World Economic Forum

If we accept that the role of education is to furnish our children with the best understanding, skills and values for a prosperous and happy life, then how do we arm them for a future that we can’t imagine? Do we even need knowledge in a world of Alexa and Siri? Is the skill of agility now more valuable than the gaining of knowledge?.

For kids growing up today, let alone tomorrow, we’re living in a world where we outsource knowledge and skills to the Internet.

If we foster creativity, fuel curiosity and help people relate via relationships and empathy, then we empower kids to be totally self-reliant. They will be agile: adaptable to change in a world that we can’t yet foresee.

Source: Forget coding, we need to teach our kids how to dream | World Economic Forum by Tom Goodwin

Tears | Melting Asphalt

I want to talk about crying, or to be more precise, weeping or emotional tears. Humans … are the only ones who unite tears and noisy crying together in a single behavior.

the question to ask about crying isn’t, “What causes it (as a symptom)?” but rather, “What is a human creature trying to achieve by doing it (as a behavior)?”

The goal of our investigation is to explain three things: First, what weeping accomplishes. Second, how we evolved to do it. And third, why only humans weep.

In particular, they’re a social behavior, something we evolved to do because of their effects on the people around us. In the language of biology, then: Tears are a signal.

communication is fundamentally cooperative. When there’s no overlap of interest, there’s no basis for communication

we, as receivers, often feel manipulated by someone else’s tears is the giveaway that crying is a signal — i.e., because it aims to change our behavior. … a submission signal … a distress signal

I’d like to throw my hat into the ring, by providing my own hypothesis for how and why tears evolved.

it’s a way of giving up dominance in the hope of earning allies.

inherently they’re just a piece of social technology, a device for coordinating the tradeoff between dominance and social support. And this invention turns out to be useful in a variety of scenarios.

Source: Tears | Melting Asphalt by Kevin Simler

More: Why Only Humans Weep by Ad Vingerhoets

The Problem With Freedom – George Monbiot

Propaganda works by sanctifying a single value, such as faith, or patriotism. Anyone who questions it puts themselves outside the circle of respectable opinion. The sacred value is used to obscure the intentions of those who champion it. Today the value is freedom. Freedom is a word that powerful people use to shut down thought.

Freedom is used as the excuse for ripping down public protections on behalf of the very rich.

When we confront a system of propaganda, our first task is to decode it. This begins by interrogating its sacred value. Whenever we hear the word freedom, we should ask ourselves, “freedom for whom, at whose expense?”.

Source: The Problem With Freedom – George Monbiot

The End of the Past | Notes On Liberty

Source: The End of the Past | Notes On Liberty by Mark Koyama

On Branko Milanovic’s recommendation, I read Aldo Schiavone’s The End of the Past.

Was the Roman economy only as developed as that of Europe circa 1300 or was it as advanced as that of western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution in say 1700? This question is not mere idle speculation. It matters for our understanding of the causes of long-run economic growth whether an industrial revolution could have happened in Song China or ancient Rome. This type of counterfactual history is crucial for pinning down the casual mechanisms responsible for sustained growth

Whether measured in terms of the size of its largest cities — Rome in 100 AD was larger than any European city in 1700 — or in the volume of grain, wine, and olive oil imported into Italy, the scale of the Roman economy was vast by any premodern standard. Quantitatively, then, the Roman economy looks as large and prosperous as that the early modern European economy.

Qualitatively, however, there are important differences that Schiavone draws out and which have been obscured in recent quantitative debates about GDP estimates.

Observe that Roman history leaves no traces of great mercantile companies like the Bardi, the Peruzzi or the Medici. There are no records of commercial manuals of the sort that are abundant from Renaissance Italy; no evidence of “class-struggle” as we have from late medieval Europe; and no political economy or “economics”, that is, no attempts to systematize one’s thoughts and insights concerning the commercial world.

Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery. … The expansion of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean after 200 BC both rested on, and drove, the expansion of slavery. Here Schiavone note that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes. … The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning. … Thus this attitude also manifest itself in the disdain the ancients had for practical mechanics. Similar condescension was shown to small businessmen and to most trade

[Schiavone] argues that given the prominence of slavery and the prestige of the landowning elite, economic expansion and growth of the kind that took place between c. 200 BCE to 150 CE was not self-reinforcing. It generated a growth efflorescence that lasted several centuries, but it ultimately undermined itself because it was based on an intensification of the slave economy that, in turn, reinforced the cultural supremacy of the landowning aristocracy and this cultural supremacy in turn eroded the incentives responsible for driving growth.

Source: The End of the Past | Notes On Liberty by Mark Koyama

 

None of the great engineers and architects, none of the incomparable builders of bridges, roads, and aqueducts, none of the experts in the employment of the apparatus of war, and none of their customers, either in the public administration or in the large landowning families, understood that the most advantageous arena for the use and improvement of machines — devices that were either already in use or easily created by association, or that could be designed to meet existing needs — would have been farms and workshops

Source: The End of the Past by Aldo Schiavone