Tuesday, May 2, 2023

A Better Philanthropy


“Ticket from Miami to Port-au-Prince: $124. Ticket from Port-au-Prince to Miami: $1,000-3,000”

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In our testing, when given a full battery of USMLE [medical licensing exam] problems, GPT-4 answers them correctly more than 90 percent of the time.
And it can give very good explanations.--forthcoming book

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Côte d’Ivoire citizens pay the highest income taxes in the world according to this year’s survey findings by World Population Review.

While both its sales and corporate tax regimes may be considerably lower than those of other countries globally, at 60%, Côte d’Ivoire’s income tax rates are markedly higher compared to developed countries.

Only Finland (56.95%), Japan (55.97%), Denmark (55.90%), and Austria (55%), closely follow Côte d’Ivoire to round up the top five countries with the highest income tax, in a study that surveyed over 150 countries.




A Better Philanthropy

At its best, lots of philanthropy is very useful, but may not be sustainable over time—a sugar high that rarely enables that “teach a man how to fish” thing. Effective altruism may be an oxymoron. And it’s hard to miss that much of philanthropy is to fix government failures in education, welfare or medicine. I think that was Bono’s point.

But at its shadiest, philanthropy drives the misallocation of capital, overvaluing professors, the U.N. and climate poets and undervaluing those who can productively increase societal wealth to fund solutions to the future’s harder problems.

If only there were a way to use capital to provide opportunity, train workers, pay middle-class wages, help people build wealth … wait, it just came to me. How about starting new companies and investing in entrepreneurs and world-changing technology? Sure, that’s “a hazardous journey,” but so what? Actually, part of OpenAI is now a for-profit. Yes, it turns out the perfect cure for the flaw in capitalism is, voilà, more capitalism. You may not get that warm fuzzy feeling or media adulation—in fact, you’ll likely be labeled greedy—but you might fund future economic powerhouses. Scolds will throw shade. Ignore them.--Kessler

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