Spending $10 billion for humanity

There's always the Warren Buffet approach, spend your $40 billion on whatever Bill Gates is spending his $50 billion on. But the idea of giving billions to insitutions that claim control over the relationship of individuals to God scares me a bit. That hasn't always played out very well. However I do have an idea.

Give away $10 one billion times. Thoughtfully, prayerfully, respectfully, hopefully each time.

1.) Heavy investment in low-petroleum agriculture in the United States. Help farmers who want to get out of the agri-business-government complex and provide food for their regions. Push to legalize agricultural hemp.

2.) Set up food chain infrastructures like bakeries, co-op dairies/creameries, markets, humane butcher shops, etc. Sally Fallon has sold more cookbooks with her Nourishing Traditions book than Rachel Ray and the Barefoot Contessa. There is a hungry market!

3.) Ditto on the boarding schools & communities.

4.) Invest in manufacturers implementing serious "cradle-to-cradle" processes.

5.) Invest in those who are designing appropriate technologies, like small wind & solar, water purifying techniques.

6.) Give away the rest anonymously as I listen to the news reports of hard-luck stories. Take care of my own backyard, so to speak.

Let me say that I have served on the Board of Directors for the local Boys and Girls Club, sponsored projects for a Habit organization, been a Scout Leader and spent countless hours coaching many kids from across the tracks.

Have any of you studied the Malthusian limit? Africa has already reached it. The Black Death was one of the reasons Europe was not taken over by Islam. It was responsible for higher wages and more food was grown. It did away with European peasantry and broke the grip of the Pope over the masses. The ensuing Protestant Reformation caused an arms race. And Europe's role as the world's leading culture lasts until today.

The thirld world does not benefit from these handouts. It hurts them.

Rod, apologies if I'm missing the obvious, but you write:

"I know how I would be inclined to spend that $10 billion with no parameters put on it, but he asks us to think about benefiting all humanity."

That makes is sound like the ideas you then describe are not the same as the ideas you'd suggest if there were "no parameters" on the funds. Is that correct? If so, I (and I'm sure others) would be curious to know what your suggestions would be. Not baiting you, it's a genuine interest.

The same stingy fatherless children who don't want to spend money to clean the air -- dirty air hurts the poor more than the rich, by the way -- also don't want to spend the $10 billion to help humanity. It's still unclear whether the Bush administration will allow U.S. aid to Africa to be used to buy limited amounts of DDT to fight malaria, even though environmental organizations urge that it be done.

Warming is spreading the territory where malaria is available, and consequently, it's spreading malaria. Failing to fight pollution only increases the costs, monetarily and socially. The Magliozzi Brothers have it right: The cheapskate always pays more.

$10 billion won't get you very far.

That being said, it would best be dispersed through basic public health measures (mosquito netting in malaria-ridden areas, prevention of parasite born blindness, etc.) Agricultural measures - techniques for sustainable, varied, localized agriculture would also top my list. And transportation - bicycles where there is very little infrastructure, and biofuel powered efficient buses where there was some (and I include much of rural America here.) If I had anything left over I would emphasize literacy.

My vision for the world's poorest people is helping them to achieve and maintain small landholdings, where they could grow a rich and varied diet, building on any extant traditions and techniques, or introducing more sustainable ones as needed. No one who has access to arable land should ever starve. Our focus on giving people hand outs while simultaneously pulling them off the land in favor of monoculture "cash crops" only leaves people more vulnerable and less self-sufficient.

I'm well aware though that without security and peace, this is all pie in the sky. Can money buy awareness? Can it buy diplomacy? Can it buy a logical and sustainable foreign policy where we encourage the good and refuse to buy or sell anything to the bad??

Perhaps in addition to the grassroots measures I first described, a portion of this fund should go towards publicizing its goals, purposes, and the reasoning behind it all, as well as how people can help, if they so choose.

Change must be systemic.

May I suggest a "Marshall Plan" to teach great white fathers (and everyone else) basic economics?

Ironic, as the biggest recipients of the Marshall Plan, like the U.K., were also the biggest economic laggards.

At any rate, I truly doubt the benighted populations of the world lack for economics PhD's. In fact, that's probably part of the problem. Leave people alone and they'll figure out the economics on their own just fine.

Five words: Solar power water purification plants

Dirty water is the major health problem. (I put no qualifiers on that. It is the major health problem, planetwise.)

Design them that they're built inside standard shipping containers The really short ones, I think they're twenty feet long. When it gets to the destination, you pull out the solar panels and stick them on top, and pull out a hose and drop it down the local well. Something that can be installed in an hour, and from then on is totally automated.

Also it can supply a very small amount of power, but that's not the point. But enough to charge those laptops that people inexplicably want to give out or charge the dead battery of the village car or power a built-in sat phone for emergencies.

Alternately, erase malaria. You have to wipe out entire populations of mosquitoes, one area at a time, and keep them quarantined of people with malaria, but it's been done in many place. If we'd just decide to do it, all at once, it would probably cost less than ten billion dollars.

1. Find a relatively unpopulated, bucolic, fertile county of ~500 sq. miles somewhere in flyover country, with decent access to highways, a regional airport and a railhead.

2. Buy out the local farmers and essentially corner ownership of all the worthwhile land. Retain private security firms to bring in armed mercenary types to intimidate local law enforcement (probably just Andy Taylor and Barney Fife clones) and scare off any holdouts who don't accept my most generous offers.

3. Scour the country for like-minded co-religionists and crunchy con types and invite them to my new domain. Offer them "allod tenancy" of farm parcels: title rests with me, but they and their families, and their descendants, cannot be evicted for any reason save violation of covenants agreed to in my 21st c. feudal estate.

4. Have my new allod tenants vote my way to install my stooges as sheriff, council supervisors, etc. Then really put the screws to holdouts among the small townsmen, local industries I don't already own/control.

5. More to come

two paths
light side
Basic research to find the cheapest most effective ways to provide sufficient micro-nutrient and protein supplements to children from prenatal to puberty. Then pay for its distribution. Probably cost more than 10B thats ok I'll use part of the money to attract as much money is necessary or try and create a for profit company to do the same thing. I'm surprised there isn't a first world vitamin company that hasn't done this already. Removing the 15-20 IQ pt deficit that can be addressed via pediatric nutrition will transform hungry mouths to useful hands and brains. I consider this the casting bread on troubled water approach.

I like the malaria eradication idea as well. Childhood fever also affects neural development.

dark side
Design a way, probably via bio-warfare that children cannot be carried to term without expensive intervention target number being $10000-25000 each.

I'd invest the money in developing and constructing Low-Earth-Orbit solar power satellites. With sufficient energy, Humans can do all sorts of things.

Not to mention that SPS would require developing a practical means to get to and from space. Just get out of the Earth's gravity well, and you are halfway to all sorts of resources.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

Give it to Burt Rutan to colonise Mars with. Maybe we'll do better somewhere else ...

Jobism part 2: recruit managers/ entrepreneurs with business plans
that need at least 10 workers, with the managers willing to work at some salaray formula which includes a #of workers component.
Example: avg worker wage is 80% avg of country.
Manager makes avg worker wage * (150%+sqrt(#workers)/10 ) = (150%+30%)
when there are 9 workers, 150%+40% with 16 workers, 150%+100% when there are 100 workers.

Look for the formulas which create organizations with the most workers.

Such 'profit=0' orgs will be self-sustaining, once they get started.
The $10b will allow starting LOTS of them.
Much can include both basic capital and loan capital (to be repaid).