If you could save the world, would you?
I’ve been asking this the past couple of days as I read “Going Infinite” by Michael Lewis, which profiles Sam Bankman-Fried and the spectacular collapse of FTX. (Lewis – somehow? – is able to print books in near real-time. He also wrote The Premonition two years ago about the pandemic, which I read while wearing a mask on an airplane. It was excellent but also kind of wild to be like, this is happening now, how am I reading a book about it?)
Anyway, Sam. He identifies, not as a criminal, but as an effective altruist. I vaguely knew of effective altruism in that Sam Bankman-Fried was planning to give away his money. What I didn’t know until reading this book was how much of a movement it embodied – and, of course, how much of that is based here in the Bay Area, where there’s no shortage of ideas and a lot of people with too much money to fund them.
Essentially, the concept, which has been around for nearly 50 years, is that it’s our duty to give back and better the world – and the human race – as best we can, using logic and reasoning (versus, say, emotion.) That can include through your career choice, whether that’s through direct help (being a doctor), influencing (becoming a politician, say, or a teacher), or a financier (literally going into banking to give away your fortune). Of course, we know what Sam chose, when he was first introduced to the concept as an undergrad at MIT.
When I read this – that his goal wasn’t simply to make money but to save the world with it – I thought, well, of course.
Of course if I could save the world, I would.
Of course that is a noble thing to do.
Of course this man-child is out of his mind for thinking that.
Sam’s childhood was unique in that he proclaims he didn’t even have one, at least in the ways we recognize it. He wasn’t interested in friendships or playground games or, most insulting of all, English class. He is cagey in the book about events from his childhood – when Lewis asks who he can interview from Sam’s youth, he can’t even answer the question.
Sam was a brilliant boy, who was told as much; he grew up to be a brilliant man, who was told as much. What Sam is not, though, is empathic. He repeatedly says that he doesn’t feel things. (Perhaps he should have paid more attention in English class.) Sam doesn’t want to save the world because it’s noble or the right thing to do – he wants to do it because it’s a statistic he can solve.
The question isn’t “if you could save the world, would you?” For Sam, it was “How do we save the world?” implying that only he can do it. Like, of course this guy had a big head and played fast and loose – he was going to save us all. With his money. No one wanted to ask the more boring questions about, say, business ethics or potential criminal activity, or even, say, WHERE IS THE MONEY? when their name could be the very reason for our existence.
There are some truly hilarious and mind-bending scenes in the book where the group of (mostly) 20-something billionaires are sitting around a penthouse in the Bahamas debating where to spend their money for maximum impact. Climate change? Saving democracy? Stopping a meteorite? (That one was one of the least likely to happen, they decided.) In theory I love the concept of people generating wealth just to go back to the greater good. Isn’t that why, say, I donate $25 to your marathon, or whatever? And yet, it still smacks of ego. Sure, you may have helped eradicate a disease, but it’s like the heady version of the Sackler’s demanding their name be on the escalator in some art wing. How much about people do you really care? Have you saved the world, or is it now The Human Race™ brought to you by Sam Bankman-Fried?
Whatever causes Sam had in mind are certainly not getting funded now. (I’ll still donate $25 to your marathon.) There was a time where doing good was, well, simply that. It didn’t have a name or a formula or a brand or a hashtag or an engagement metric. Would SBF still have crashed and burned his company had he not made such a broad and heady mission? Perhaps. But really it enabled him. At least for a moment, many of us weren’t looking because, sure, saving the world is pretty noble. It just looks a whole lot more bleak now that we’re on the other side of that mission.