Unless the world is in for a nasty spill, the richest people likely will become even richer over the generations. Other than buying out or bribing African dictators, what else might the truly rich do with their money?
1. Build artificial islands, create jobs there, take in immigrants, and experiment.
2. Change their names to "Nemo," and hire mercenaries to intervene when Darfur-like situations get out of control.
3. Finance excellent movies just for the heck of it.
4. Send out self-replicating, solar powered von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy and look for life, or perhaps seed life (did anyone get a tax deduction for doing Earth?).
5. Create galactic spectacles which are obviously the work of intelligent beings, to advertise our presence to other civilizations, or future civilizations, throughout the galaxy.
What else?
Replicate the great barbecue restaurants of the South in more densely populated places, also just for the heck of it.
Pay music collectors to go out and make the best possible recordings of all the old traditional musicians still out there, then make the results freely available over the Internet.
3b. Finance really bad movies for the heck of it.
1.b. Adopt-a-village in the global south with results widely advertised. “This village/district/state adopted by Bill Gates: malaria down 75%; infant mortality = Peoria, IL; unemployment = Massachusetts; return on human capital 15%/yr; corruption index down from 42 to 17 in four years.”
Create a collective bargaining corporation, and present a contract to the United Nations and each of their respective governments for political autonomy, then build a nation out in International waters where they pay themselves taxes and can serve as the headquarters for multinational corps.
Since they’re the stockholders, they make the rules of this new world.
Patronize the arts and ultimately make their collections accessible to the public.
Write me a check.
Purchase a small Eastern European country for the diplomatic immunity, and also so I can put a “von” between my first and last names. Build a suit of armor with incredible powers. Use these resources in my endless quest to defeat my arch-enemies and conquer the world.
More prosaically, fund critical infrastructure projects that would open up bottlenecks but haven’t been built for political reasons: power plants in India, 2nd Avenue subway in NY, etc.
Purchase the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and move them to a huge untapped market that will appreciate having a professional baseball team: Mexico City.
how about using that money here on earth, like distributing it some? galactic spectacles indeed…
Finance a project to make car go on salt water. We have a lot of it, and it would solve the rising of the oceans problems, along with most of global warming.
Build pleasure gardens and charge a nominal entry fee.
Subsidize a world-class touring opera company for the U.S.
Isn’t the point of this blog that no one does anything just for the heck of it? Why the sudden desire for that?
That said:
-Replicate the great barbecue restaurants of the South in more densely populated places, also just for the heck of it.
These exist in old Northern Industrial cities, just not in the gentrified areas. They came along with many other aspects of Southern culture in the great migration of blacks in the 20th century and they are disappearing as blacks migrate back. Journey into some of the less fashionable areas of a city and you will find them.
- Buy organs from the poor or clone themselves for organs to extend their life up to 150 years or more.
Hasn’t the obvious awfulness of this idea been established already under the euphemistic title of moral hazard.
- Finance really _ movies for the heck of it.
Apart from the just for the heck of it part, this already happens, from Mel Gibson to Michael Moore’s backers to “What the Heck do we know” there are plenty of movies of varying quality being funded, but just for the heck of it is never going to happen.
- Pay down the U.S. national debt.
They already do, the rest of us just run up more debt.
- Build artificial islands, create jobs there, take in immigrants, and experiment.
Isn’t this already happening in Dubai (http://www.theworld.ae/)? The only difference is they’ve decided they don’t like to live too close to the immigrants so they ship them on and off the island as needed.
- Build pleasure gardens and charge a nominal entry fee.
Yellowstone National Park brought to you courtesy of the Rockefellers?
Except for the galactic spectacles part (give Mr. Musk a little time…) I don’t see much that isn’t already happening somewhere, including running portions of Europe or Africa as private fiefdoms.
Then again it’s really hard to figure out what I’d do with tycoon like levels of wealth, perhaps grab a large Trojan asteriod, bore it out (using the bored out mass to move it into Earth orbit) and turning it into a private space station. Maybe build a city near an undersea volcano (you need the volcano for a power source). Go Norway one better and get a well preserved DNA sample of all lifeforms on Earth (bacteria and viruses may be problematic because of their pace of change but I care more about the macroscopic cute and fuzzy stuff anyway). Get some AI and robotics types to build me a professional football, basketball, soccer team.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are wealthy people pursuing the last option. But given the difficulty of thinking of something to do with great wealth that isn’t already being done perhaps that’s a sign that the difference between the truly wealthy and the rest of us is they have better imaginations since they thought of it first?
Given the flood of wealth into professional sports entertainment, from Mark Cuban to Bob Johnson to Dietrich Mateschitz, maybe they know something we don’t since they don’t seem as interested in making movies as we’d like them to be.
Fund research projects in a tax-free research park established in a geographic area far away from any political instability, i.e. New Zealand. Specifically focus on nanotechnology and biotechnology to reduce material costs, energy related issues such as transportation, storage and minimizing byproducts, plus get a fusion reactor up and running, and robotics/automation to reduce labor costs.
Also give $30 million to Dr. Moller to finally get his Skycar off the grown.
Tell NYC that you will fund a 30yr BOT project to finally create a decent rail link from Manhattan to all 3 airports.
Privatize and run Amtrak on the stipulation that you can upgrade the rail infrastructure on the Eastern Seaboard and other higher population dense areas of the country to run high-speed trains at +150mph. There is no reason why France and Japan should have faster trains than us. Also shut down passenger train service to low-population areas, i.e. North Dakota.
Fund ubiquetous wireless broadband.
Work on providing low cost, crime free housing solutions while minimizing the disincentive for market driven development.
This is probably (by definition) the wrong place to ask this question, but: if you had a $100M to free copyrighted content, what would it be?
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-October/045481.html
This doesn’t seem to have been discussed much (on my blogroll at least) but the first comments I’ve seen about it focus on lobbying for reform instead of answering the question.
buy France and replace it with a big monkey zoo?
Create a foundation centered not around a discipline or a disease, but which has the purpose of funding research into controversial topics.
Definitely #1 (though you could just buy and island – though maybe a floating artificial island would be useful) with #2 as one of the goals. Model it on Silicon Valley and Aldous Huxley’s “Island” – highly (liberally) educated population, high-tech paradise. I won’t hazard too many guesses at what the society would look like, because the whole point is that such a population would decide for themselves how their society would evolve, but I submit it’d be more humane and impressive than anything else we’ve seen.
Hire an all-mercenary army and start a private war.
Build a burm around all of kansas, fill it with wat and stock it with trout.
Start largest investment project in mexico to give potential immigrants a
reason to stay.
Build a large mirror to cover most of canada to reflect the sun’s rays to
counteract global warming.
Pay Trump $1 billion or so to just shut the $%!&£ up and go away already!
Blow it all in one roulette spin, but get some free drinks in the process.
Start a company that buys medical patents and gives it away free in emerging
economies.
Create a national chain of hydrogen gas stations and just wait.
Fund every crazy process that promises to:
reduce dependence on fossil fuels
combat global warming.
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