What would you do with 100 billion dollars to have the most positive impact on the largest number of people?
My partner and I were discussing this over dinner, our ideas went from buying up land to finance organic farming and distributing it at the lowest price to crashing the financial system to "reset" everybody's bank account with no possible recovery. Any other ideas?
buy politians to make them make laws to fuck over bilionaries, what is ironic lol
I feel like this is the only answer that would make a difference long-term.
The other suggestions like giving people food and housing would only be putting a bandaid on a broken system; it needs to actually change to prevent the same situations from reoccurring.
You might be underestimating how little 100 billion is, compared to the wealth of other billionaires.
With the pennies they actually pay lawmakers, though? 100 billion could go a loooooooooong fucking way to outspend the billionaires.
The reason they're billionaires is because they're fuckin misers and penny-pinchers. They hate spending money and that is evidenced by how cheaply our politicians are bought for.
Simply outspend them quickly, and you'll have the politicians licking your boots.
This. It's called "legislative capture" and corporates do it all the time.
I would set up a massive lucrative company and lobby the hell out of governments.
I am surprised nobody said 'education'. Every dollar spent there generates two dollars of worth. Educated people have fewer children and pollute less. Educated people don't vote as many morons into power. I sincerely believe many problems of the world could have been prevented with educating everyone involved.
Education, specifically primary and secondary education for girls, is highly effective at reducing poverty. It deserves be highly prioritized for investment.
True. Also sex ed and 'life education' like spending advice or household tips for people who struggle to live alone. I'd probably have a board of various teachers advising me on where to spend how much and track the results with studies to be able to correct course.
Very true...
Depends what areas of education you mean. I think the most important areas people need to know more about in order to better the world as a whole are literacy, numeracy and world issues (war, current politics, climate change, etc).
Spending $100B to make university free would just accelerate a new problem that the world is facing: overeducation. Now it's harder to get a job without a college degree as a minimum, especially above minimum wage, even though the skills gained in the degree are not what is actually in demand or being used in whatever job someone ends up with.
Granted that's mainly a problem in the USA at the moment, and with $100B you could also fund a lot of R&D so people studying STEM end up in STEM jobs bettering the world.
It needs to be heavily targeted towards mandatory education, particularly K-12 or equivalents, and have a strong focus on critical thinking, scientific skepticism, technical literacy, entrepreneurialism, and the methods and models of social programming that are commonly used (how to identify, resist and avoid them).
This will help create generational change which is great for the future, but sadly does nothing to solve the pressing issues we face right now.
Agreed. Education does not = academia. I’d argue that right now the incentives for academia for the sake of academia is far higher than for education and learning. There’s something systematic there. I can’t tell where $100B would be the most effective but getting 20 years olds MBAs ain’t it.
I'd buy Facebook and rebrand it as V.
Pretty sure that would kill it.
Gonna need a couple hundred billion more for that :(
Hire hitmen to remove the other 100 richest people in the 🌎.
This is a great answer. But you have to realize, "hitmen" cannot operate autonomously. You would need to fund them, create a private investigative network, etc etc so that you could hunt down other billionaires. basically, you have to get your hands dirty if you want this to work.
It’s a good start but then their wealth just transfers to their next of whatever. Hire hitmen after and during investing in creating political changes that ensure wealth is more fairly distributed through society.
Create a fund and use the dividends to fund free healthcare. Rather than spend it all in one go, I want it to continue generating a stable fund to keep things going.
Ewwwwww! You want us to get Pensions you filthy commie!?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GovernmentPensionFundofNorway
The simple answer is to give it all away in some way. The notion that you can personally do good with that money is the delusion of every billionaire.
Buy and open source as much farming, education, housing, medical and general automation technology and is practical, then deploy non profit supply chains to allow even the furthest reaches of the planet the ability to acquire and implement this technology.
Subsidize the edges of this supply chain to ensure the most disadvantaged get equal access
With everything that remains, acquire the means of productions (farmland, housing, mines, wells, roads, rivers) that are in private lands and set them up with an autonomous non-profit democratic anti-privatisable organisational structure built to exploit those resources for the benefit of the local population.
Basically, it's doing the exact opposite of the "enclosures" and then making sure it doesn't happen again.
Hire people who would actually know where to begin with that.
Idk probably buy the Amazon rain forest and then hire blackwater or whatever their name is to patrol it and make sure no logging or clearing or anything else is taking place. The indigenous people can use the land for their needs but no one else.
With 100 billion dollars, I would spend all of it on housing to end homelessness. Let's just provide homes for as many people as possible. All of it would get spent on this if I had my way.
200,000,000,000 / 200,000 = 1 million homes.
There are about 140 million homes in the USA.
You have 2.5 people per home in the USA.
You would essentially be able to buy everyone living in Chicago or Houston their own home per population.
Chicago, IL (Population: 2,670,406)
Houston, TX (Population: 2,378,146)
Buy a major social media platform and run it into the ground. Oh wait...
In the book Capital in 21st Century, the author comes to a conclusion that one way to reduce inequality is by increasing the skills among the people. I would make higher education more accessible to poor people via scholarships, establishing colleges, etc..
Ooo a meritocracy, very impressive, and surely if the poor were just better trained and smarter, we'd live in a utopia.
First I'd find out how to make the money grow ethically
Then I'd invest in fusion power and green power, invest in lab-grown meat, invest in atmosphere cleaning, perhaps start some well-funded schools in areas of low education, sponsor some hospitals, etc.
I think I would also try to get asteroid mining to take off.
I'd lean on the charities that have done the research on how best to deploy money and how much money those methods can support.
I'd also set myself and my friends/family up for life with a handful of millions each. But the rest gets donated.
Fund projects to drastically upscale desalination efforts.
Chat suddenly gets handed Noblesse oblige cellphones
Organic farming?
Pesticideless farming that's respectful of the environment, easy way to make people healthier without damaging the plant further and while thinking about the future sustainably. Sounds like a decent deal to me!
Organic farming isn’t pesticide free, they use a range of pesticides, and usually at a higher volume than normal farming methods, because they don’t work nearly as well.
Additionally, organic farming tends to produce lower yields (19-25% lower on average) than traditional farming, meaning you need to actually use more space and resources (water, fertilizer, plus application of both) for the same benefit.
Organic farming can be good for some things, like fixing already-damaged environments, but it’s not a silver bullet by any means.
Probably just throw it at people until I run out. It'd at least help people up front.
Trees. I'd plant as many trees as possible across the world.
And an old dogs sanctuary. Just because.
Spend on research and development to end menstruation.
Send everyone 12 dollars.
Unpopular opinion; A big mass suicide. Just give money to the family of anyone that offers to die. World wide.
Popular opinion; make an american "charity" 😂
First off, invest and diversify it in companies and startups also focused on positive change, like those creating technology for lowering the cost of food and necessities and improving lives of people with disabilities. Stuff that improves our everyday lives and creates real value in the world. Solving all the world's problems is not really something that one person can reasonably do on their own effectively, so it needs to be allocated to other groups of people where it can make a proper difference. Build housing and invest in education globally with the proceeds, helping those in need to get back on their feet. Investing it intelligently means you'll never run out of cash, and even have more year-over-year to improve the lives of more and more people. If there are a lot fewer people struggling in the world, those people can then dedicate time to solving world problems and improving lives and continue the cycle.
As you acquire more money you can provide more services to more people, make more positive investments and help and improve the lives of more people.
Shit, I think I just described capitalism. Whoops, nevermind. Sorry I know that sort of thing is frowned upon here. I think the best thing to do would be to give every person on earth $12 one-time. Well, minus the costs and logistics involved in doing that, so every person on earth can get $8 after expenses. That should do it.
Shit, I think I just described capitalism
I wish what you just described had happened under capitalism so far.
"Capitalism" is a very broad definition and the devil's in the details.
No disagreement there. In an ideal world that's what capitalism would/should look like.
Start going around to banks and pay off mortgages - but only for people with like less than $1000 to $2000 in the bank. that would change lots of lives, quick.
Build a fusion power plant and put money into fuel production for it.
Spend it on the poorest countries around the world.
So... Invest like China? Lol.
Buy as much land a possible and build houses for homeless people to rent at an extremely low cost. They would need to either have a job or be actively looking for one (with proof since trying to get one shows they might actually be trying to better their life, in my eyes at least), pay for their own food, and maybe a $10 monthly rent.
The lease would be on a yearly basis and if they find a better place they can afford before the lease is up, they would be allowed to leave without any sort of early lease termination fees. There would probably be a month long period where the person(s) could move back in just in case the new place doesn't work out and they have to move out. During the grace period, nobody can move in.
I would, with the hypothetical money, pay for their utility bills and try to keep up on repairs/maintenance so long as they don't abuse it by doing something like constantly keeping the water on 24/7, using as much electricity as they can physically can, or purposefully breaking and wrecking the place.
Also, I would let them know that they would be responsible if they get their internet access cut off because they were too busy pirating. Even though I personally support piracy, I wouldn't want to be in trouble for piracy that I wasn't directly involved in.
Wow you would reinvent "means testing" except make sure that it is to your whims speciifcally instead of a government service. So tell me, how would building houses 500 miles from the nearest metropolitian area while requiring "a job" be sustainable? Are you providing them jobs? What if the jobs they found didn't meet your definition of "bettering their life?" Would you then bus them off to Chicago or New York city? Why not just create company town where you provide them with the job you find useful to your bottom line and then post on lemmy.ml about how benevolent you are?