I would ask yourself a few honest questions if I were you.
1) Do you want to change the world, really? Or do you just want to feel good? Lots of people have spent lots of money on eliminating poverty. And it's still here. That's not saying it's a lost cause, only that the benefit for all those other people was that it made them feel like they were trying. One day we will succeed. Until then, the numbers look like a long-shot.Same goes for a lot of other feel-good type investments: curing hunger, curing cancer, eliminating oppression, etc.There's a huge multi-billion-dollar industry built up around making rich people feel better by writing checks. It's a noble cause, if that's your thing.
2) Are you smart enough to know what to do? The beauty of capitalism is that progres chases benefit: you don't make money for _not_ helping people, if only a little bit. Now you can take the profit factor out, but then you've got a charity, not a business. Businesses have to provide value.
3) Isn't the best thing you can do is provide man-hours? In your example, you ask if use by 1% of people in the richest country a good moral choice. Let's say the toy saves an hour each week. That's 4 million people, saving one hour a week,in the richest country in the world. Assuming $40 per hour, You've roughly created $8 Billion in time for those people. Maybe 95% of that time will be spent playing Donkey Kong, watching American Idol, or picking their nose. Still, you've got $400 Million in return for what? A few hundred grand or a mil or two? And those 5% will spend their time doing things they are passionate about that _they_ feel will make a difference.
So if you're still feeling guilty, target some investment money in saving time for scientists -- all scientists. If you could save them a few hours each week, imagine how much value you could add?
So yes, time-saving toys for rich, productive people are the best use of my time that I can see. Perhaps other see it differently.
>So if you're still feeling guilty, target some investment money in saving time for scientists -- all scientists. If you could save them a few hours each week, imagine how much value you could add?
One very useful webapp would be a personal bibliography database, i.e. BibDesk for the web. Let me create an account, and upload papers. Give me tags, comments and full text search, as well as bibtex output. Maybe even the ability to share papers with other authors (possible copyright issues here).
Organizing papers is painful right now. My home and office are rsynced together, but that's useless when I'm in other locations, and I don't have full text search (just a list of folders by name of author). Most of my coworkers don't even do that.
1) Do you want to change the world, really? Or do you just want to feel good? Lots of people have spent lots of money on eliminating poverty. And it's still here. That's not saying it's a lost cause, only that the benefit for all those other people was that it made them feel like they were trying. One day we will succeed. Until then, the numbers look like a long-shot.Same goes for a lot of other feel-good type investments: curing hunger, curing cancer, eliminating oppression, etc.There's a huge multi-billion-dollar industry built up around making rich people feel better by writing checks. It's a noble cause, if that's your thing.
2) Are you smart enough to know what to do? The beauty of capitalism is that progres chases benefit: you don't make money for _not_ helping people, if only a little bit. Now you can take the profit factor out, but then you've got a charity, not a business. Businesses have to provide value.
3) Isn't the best thing you can do is provide man-hours? In your example, you ask if use by 1% of people in the richest country a good moral choice. Let's say the toy saves an hour each week. That's 4 million people, saving one hour a week,in the richest country in the world. Assuming $40 per hour, You've roughly created $8 Billion in time for those people. Maybe 95% of that time will be spent playing Donkey Kong, watching American Idol, or picking their nose. Still, you've got $400 Million in return for what? A few hundred grand or a mil or two? And those 5% will spend their time doing things they are passionate about that _they_ feel will make a difference.
So if you're still feeling guilty, target some investment money in saving time for scientists -- all scientists. If you could save them a few hours each week, imagine how much value you could add?
So yes, time-saving toys for rich, productive people are the best use of my time that I can see. Perhaps other see it differently.