Forty billionaires donate to charity instead of buying panda chairs

This weekend, while furniture shopping in SoHo for my friend, we saw a chair made out of stuffed panda toys. The price tag? $75,000. The rich really are different - and by different, I mean crazy.



But maybe not all of them. Last week, Warren Buffet announced that 40 wealthy individuals and families have signed on to the Giving Pledge, a project he started with Bill and Melinda Gates. This means those rich folks will be giving away more than 50 percent of their wealth (in some cases, much more.)

As this Daily Finance article describes, "Each person who chooses to pledge the bulk of their wealth to charitable causes will make this statement publicly, along with a letter explaining their decision. The Giving Pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organizations. At an annual event, those who take the pledge will come together to share ideas and learn from each other."

The list includes Mayor Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, and Barry Diller (who is of special interest to me since I just started working for his company, IAC.)

Of course, some pundits must look at everything, even these charitable acts, through a polarized political spectrum. Evan Newmark (WSJ.com) suspects that Buffet is providing cover for President Obama to raise taxes (aka let the Bush tax cuts expire) by reminding us how rich the rich still are. This seems like a stretch. Steven Perlstein points out in The Washington Post that theoretically, these donations actually reinforce "trickle down" theories and make the case that private donations can be more effective than government spending. He thinks that those people donating should focus instead on just paying their full taxes, since the mega-rich often have an easier time dodging their fair share, and the money spent is also then (ideally) accountable to citizens.

But I did a lot of research into Buffet's and the Gates' charitable histories and motivations for my book, and I'm choosing to look at this a lot less cynically. Nothing is forcing these uber-rich people to donate; they could be wasting money on panda chairs. These billionaires all have their own individual reasons and made this commitment as a personal choice. Good for them, and hopefully this continues to set a great example for others.

"The battle for gay rights has been won" ... somewhat

"The battle for gay rights has been won" ... well, in Britain anyway, as described by Julian Glover in The Guardian, which I read reprinted in The Week. He concludes that since Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, hosted a big Downing Street reception for "lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender Britain", no single party can now claim to be the natural home of the gay vote. Gays do continue to face some discrimination, but "the fact that someone is gay or lesbian need no longer be their primary defining characteristic."

Public opinion is shifting in America, too. Despite frequent headlines over the past few years about controversy over gay marriage, Americans are becoming more receptive to almost every other issue regarding gay rights. For example, in May, one poll found that 78 percent of Americans would like to see the ban on openly gay soldiers lifted (compare this to a much more closely divided split in the 1990s on the issue.)

In related news, Argentina recently became the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, after fierce debate. Actually, it's only the 10th country to do so worldwide (along with Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and some parts of Mexico and the US), although another 20 countries perform civil unions, and they are recognized in a growing number of other places, too.

Shareable interview and IndieReader

Hey everyone,

Thought you'd be interested in this recent interview on Shareable.net: The Speed of Good Trends. Rachel Botsman (co-author with Roo Rogers of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption) was kind enough to interview me about The Secret Peace, and came up with some excellent thought-provoking questions. ("It's 2020, how do you think technology will have transformed democracy?" is a good example.)

The book is also now available for sale on IndieReader. if you're reading this, I'm sure you own a copy of my book already, but browse IndieReader for a great variety of books. Each book is vetted and reviewed on the site to ensure quality, and I got a very nice staff review from Kathryn Livingston. Check it out here.

Wow, Hiroshima is doing great! ... Or is it?

I received the following email forward from a friend. Follow along with me and you can practically smell my skepticism:

SUBJECT: Fwd: THIS IS AN INTERESTING REALITY CHECK

(All caps - already a good sign.)

THIS IS AN INTERESTING REALITY CHECK ...

(Comic Sans, giant font … even better.)

What happened to the radiation that's supposed to last thousands of years?? ... What's The Death Rate? ...

(Are these questions meant to be rhetorical? Sarcastic? A few additional sentences would have helped indicate this was written by someone who can string thoughts together coherently.)

HIROSHIMA 1945

(Now imagine those 3 photos all much larger but completely mismatched sizes.)

We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after explosion of atomic bombs.

(Almost a grammatically correct sentence.)

However, we know little about the progress made by the people of that land during the past 64 years.

(Yeah, what have the Japanese been up to, anyway? Last I heard from them, some farmers had asked me to come help their tiny feudal village with a bandit problem. It's certainly not like they're the world's 3rd-largest economy or anything.)

HIROSHIMA - 64 YEARS LATER

(Imagine 9 similar photos there, all of the same glittery cotton-candy Tron Vegas wonderland city of the future. Incredibly beautiful photography.)

---

So, what to do with that? If true, it is awesome, and I could write a Secret Peace blog post about the good news. But, all signs pointed to hoax. So, I looked it up on Snopes.com. Nothing. Good sign (I can't recall Snopes ever failing me before), but I couldn't believe it, so I kept Googling increasingly specific sentences from the email, and sure enough, there was a site debunking it.

It's a hoax: the present-day photos are actually from the city of Yokohama (Japan's 2nd-largest city.)

It's always difficult to discern the motives of hoaxsters. Is the goal here just to make us feel better as Americans in case we have any lingering guilt over being the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon? I mean, it was 65 years ago; myself and most other readers certainly didn't have anything to do with it personally (although it did happen on my birthday.) The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't the most controversial American historical events by far; people may be conflicted about Afghanistan now, or the Vietnam War, but WWII remains fairly non-divisive here.

At any rate, whatever the reasons, the fact remains that's it's a hoax, so there's no Secret Peace news here, right?

---

I thought so at first, but then I realized several positive ironies I want to point out.

First, why not use an example that's real? How about Tokyo? As Wikipedia puts it, "The bombing of Tokyo in 1944 and 1945, with 75,000 to 200,000 killed and half of the city destroyed, was almost as devastating as the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." And now Tokyo is inarguably one of the world's largest and most impressive cities. (We know the answer to why they didn't use Tokyo: it's because most Americans aren't familiar with its bombing, and nuclear bombs are more dramatic and compelling.)

Second, Yokohama is still real. Those are still real photos in the email forward. Look at this one:

Nice, right? Hey, even after getting nuked, the "people of that land" (ugh) managed to build this awesome city. Why is that less of an achievement because it happens to be 400 miles east of Hiroshima?

Third, and most ironic of all, I looked up Hiroshima. I would love to find out firsthand what it's like - please chime in if anyone has been there in person - but from what I can tell from Wikipedia and elsewhere, it's a perfectly nice city.

More modest than Yokohama, but wow, what a beautiful place. In other words, the original post could have been 100 percent correct, but they had to overshoot their mark and go for the flashier photos. If I were a Hiroshimian, I'd be offended that they skipped over the hard work I did rebuilding my real city and showcased the gaudy theme park of my neighbor to the east.

Stupid, stupid terrorists!

An article in The Atlantic this month by Daniel Byman and Christine Fair makes the case that terrorists are, well, stupid. In general, most of their plots are small in scope and even those fail. They're essentially a ragtag bunch of fumbling morons - lucky for us.


I think this might be overstating it a bit - click through and read the comments after the article for a good debate - but it reminded me that I do make a related argument in my book. It's useful to remind ourselves that terrorists, by definition, are not as powerful as we think they are, or as powerful as they claim to be. (The entire reason to use terrorist tactics is because you're not strong enough to use conventional tactics.) So, our fears of terrorism and the reactions we've been taking as a country are practically guaranteed to be overblown.

Of course, you can counter with this argument: better safe than sorry, right? Better to overdo it than to be unprepared.

Not a bad point of course, but nevertheless, keeping the War on Terror expansive does have the nasty side effect of playing right into the terrorists' hands in terms of messaging. Treating them as powerful warriors makes them feel as such, and makes more recruitment possible.

A better attitude? Treat them as petty criminal scum. Vandals, not soldiers. A type of (loosely) organized crime, not a righteous army. The sort of group you'd have to be a nitwit to join up with.

(The Secret Peace delves into this in a lot more detail (hint, hint.))

Image by Frank Stockton

More Improvements in Global Health

The Health chapter is perhaps the least controversial in my book. It's easy to see how much global health is improving, especially over the long term - the last 100 years, say. Here's another tidbit to add to the list.

A new report revises down the estimates of the number of infants that die every year. An article in the Economist focuses on how this new way of reporting contrasts with past methods, notably the UN's. Some organizations are upset because they feel that if the public thinks that this issue is improving, they'll stop donating, even though obviously there is still a lot of work to be done. That would be a shame if that happened ... you would think it would instead be a good opportunity to say, "Look, what we're doing is working! Keep it up! Donate more and let's beat this."

The irony is that regardless of which statistical method you prefer, the trend is pretty straightforward. Check out this chart I made.


What's even crazier is that this huge decrease is happening while the total world population is still increasing*, making it an even larger success in terms of percentage.


* And no, the world's population growth isn't a big problem. It's slowing down. I talk about that quite a bit in the book.

Thanks again for the book launch!

Thanks again to everyone who came out a week ago to show their support for my newly released book, The Secret Peace. We were at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Bookstore, with over 80 people in attendance! So great to see you all and get to share the joy of the book with you.

I put together a little video of the best photos and videos of the event. Take a look (you might be in it.)



Thanks! Jesse