[Pyxl101]

The charities that Gates tends to invest in don't just distribute goods to needy people. His charities try to tackle core societal problems like fighting malaria in Africa:

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal...

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Dis...

> Working closely with other global programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Discovery & Translational Sciences program aims to create and improve preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for infectious diseases as well as other conditions that affect mothers, infants, and children. We do this by identifying and filling gaps in scientific knowledge, creating or implementing new technology platforms that can accelerate research in support of our goals, and investing in potentially transformative ideas.

> All of our investments advance the goal of creating solutions that can be deployed, accepted, and sustained in the developing world. To speed the translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming late-stage clinical trials.

There's nothing about fighting malaria that denies people agency in their well-being as far as I'm concerned.

[barrkel]

The problems are not just agency, but also whimsy.

Charity is basically a combination of guilt assuaging, ego food and social proofing. I think we'd be better off with democratically controlled funding, or economically allocated funding, from a self-sufficient demos, for things like the battle against malaria.

Charities like Gates's typically turn into long-lived foundations which acquire politics and agency of their own, not entirely benign. They need to be connected to their benefactors by some structure of control, like democracy or economics. A big pile of cash and investments isn't that; it's independence from control.

Yes, democracy also has problems, it would be great to figure out something better. But democracy is still better than oligopoly, even if they're benign today.

[edanm]

I think you're wrong. Democracy is also subject to whims, but with the government, you basically have one player. With charity, at least you have "competition".

E.g. look at groups helping promote minority rights (civil rights movement, LGBTQ movement, etc). These were political no-goes, but small groups cared a lot about these issues, so they helped push them through, via charity and other means. If you were only OK with charity being done democratically, i.e. via majority rule, then these movements couldn't exist.

[barrkel]

The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American public to believe otherwise.

Yes, bureaucracy isn't efficient. But ultimately its decisions reflects the demos. If the people don't believe in positive government, it will be poor, like the US. But it isn't always that way (but it is usually still inefficient).

Lobby groups for minority interests are orthogonal to charity, or should be, otherwise money will buy more political influence than the demos warrants. That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not money spent.

[edanm]

"The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American public to believe otherwise."

1. I'm not sure it's a great move to decide that people who disagree with you are wrong, or "diseased". (Obviously you're using the word disease metaphorically. Still, I think it's a bad attitude).

2. I'm not American.

As for the rest of your comment, I didn't say anything about the efficiency of bureaucracy. I'm not sure anything you said refutes anything I said.

"That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not money spent."

I'm not sure that's a great measure. Minorities are by definition smaller groups of people than the majority. If the minority wants something the majority disagrees with (e.g. civil rights movement), then if we're weighting simply by the size of groups, then the civil rights movement probably wouldn't work. We should be also weighting by how much each group "cares", and money is, to some extent, a measure of that. Not that it's a perfect system, but is there a better one?

Btw, this is why democracy isn't just about majority rule - it's considered fundamental to democracy to also have minority protection and similar. Otherwise minorities would always lose.