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  • Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

  • So over at CrashCourse, Adrian Hill has just started

  • hosting a great new series on statistics, and

  • in a recent episode called "Mathematical Thinking"

  • she helped me understand the difference

  • between big numbers.

  • In general, humans are notoriously bad at big numbers.

  • Like, I don't really understand the difference

  • between a billion and a trillion, because they're both, like, a lot.

  • So how am I to process the fact that, for instance, there are over one hundred trillion microorganisms currently living in or on my body?

  • Poorly, that's how I'm gonna process it, on every level.

  • But, right, this is one of the things that makes government budgets, for instance, so notoriously difficult to parse.

  • Like the U.S. spends, by the broadest definition, around fifty billion dollars a year in foreign aid, which is a LOT of money, but it's also just

  • over 1% of the federal budget.

  • Here's another big number: 4.6 billion dollars. That's how much the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation donated in 2016.

  • That's a lot of money, but it also isn't.

  • If you gave every American an equal slice of that 4.6 billion dollars, we'd each get about 13 bucks.

  • So there's a lot that 4.6 billion dollars a year can't buy. For instance, it can't pay for enough teachers to serve all the kids who are getting inadequate instruction worldwide.

  • It can't pay for everyone to have access to primary healthcare,

  • and according to current market rates, 4.6 billion dollars will only buy you 32.3 Phillipe Countinhos.

  • I'm getting sidetracked by Liverpool, but, right, every year Melinda and Bill Gates release an annual letter, which Hank and I have been following for several years now.

  • And this year, the letter takes the form of answering ten tough questions they get.

  • They range from "Won't saving kids' lives lead to overpopulation?", which is actually an easy one to answerno, it won't—

  • to more complicated questions like "Why don't you spend more money in the United States?" and "How has Donald Trump affected your work?"

  • and "Is it fair that you have so much influence?"

  • It's always worth reading the annual letter; there is a link in the doobly-doo below.

  • But I emerged from it with another difficult question: If 4.6 billion dollars a year isn't enough to solve the world's biggest problems,

  • then are we just, like... completely screwed? (I think that's the technical term.)

  • I actually got to ask Bill Gates about this on a phone call a couple weeks ago, and the first thing he pointed out to me is that not every dollar spent has equal impact.

  • Quick definition: The Green Revolution was a huge increase in agricultural yields due to better irrigation techniques,

  • better fertilizers, and better seeds. By the late 1960's, it had helped increase the number of available

  • calories per person by 25% and helped decrease the number of people dying from malnutrition worldwide.

  • Okay, back to the quote.

  • And on this, I completely agree. Breakthrough technologies can be absolutely transformational, and investing in better systems can

  • be disproportionately effective because those systems can continue to produce good results over time, even after you stopped funding them.

  • This is why the Gates Foundation is investing in better toilets and new vaccines, but also in primary healthcare systems.

  • It's also why, when spent well, the U.S.'s foreign aid budget actually can go a really long way.

  • Like, beginning during the George W. Bush presidency, the U.S. invested a few billion dollars a year to improve

  • access to and availability of AIDS treatment in the developing world. That program had lots of flaws, for one thing it focused

  • way too much on abstinence-only strategies, but nonetheless, a 2009 study found that it saved 1.2 million lives.

  • You probably don't have a billion dollars, but I believe that how each of use chooses to use our resources shapes the world we end up sharing.

  • And that goes for how we spend our money, but also the resources of our attention and our time.

  • Here's another big number that at the same time is very small: Twenty-six thousand ninety-seven.

  • That's how many days the average human born today will live to see.

  • Let's make them count.

  • Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

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十億美金買不到什麼? (What Can't a Billion Dollars Buy?)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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