Comment by shantanubala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shantanubala | Hacker News Reader

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> I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for <$10mm and a promise of immunity from prosecution or extradition by major world powers (i.e. places I'd actually be, afterward). Scaling that up for other countries is possible, too.

Oh really? What's your plan? How do you intend on ensuring that culture is preserved while you implement this plan? Or do you believe that Western culture is superior because it has been more successful in the last 100 years (forgetting that segregation ended less than 50 years ago, if you must include the eradication of entire populations as "successes," we can call it 500 years)? Even Bill Gates will admit that his solutions are imperfect at times.

The tricky part is a sustainable solution. Sure, you can throw money at problems, but how is the solution going to last? Like you said, there is already a lot of money involved (e.g. Bill Gates) in philanthropy, yet the problems haven't been solved yet. This indicates that the solution is trickier than you think. And if there is someone smart enough to engineer a solution, I would like to think Bill Gates is very qualified for such a position.

EDIT: Mainly, if you don't account for the culture of a place, a solution will likely not be popular enough to work (HIV prevention and treatment suffers from this problem).

Ryan - I'm on the Epidemiological Modeling team funded personally by BillG. I concur that the skillset required to solve problems on our planet (eradicating infectious diseases in our case) is completely different than those required for inter-galactic exploration. Perhaps the only overlap would be Mathematics, but that's the foundation for pretty much everything.

Shantanu - You're right. Simply throwing money cannot solve global issues and no single person including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett combined have the monetary resources at their disposal to tackle even 5% of global issues. However, they're the right kind of people to take on sociological challenges and eradicating diseases because there's a lot more to the problem than that. For instance, bureaucracy, corruption, beliefs, natural causes, etc. I was really surprised (shouldn't have been) to learn that a significant portion of their funds are allocated for dealing with corrupt governments for our mission to globally eradicate diseases like Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc. With my limited experience in that realm, I can state that the problem is definitely way more complex than it appears at the surface (and I think you get that as well).

I don't think I could do a particularly good job running the country, and wouldn't try (beyond a few weeks/months in transition). There are plenty of other African leaders in other countries, particularly elected in the past ~10 years, who are far better. I don't think there's any reason why EG wouldn't be able to come up with some domestic political leadership which was better than what they have now. The problem is the nexus of oil wealth and foreign support has allowed Obiang to remain for decades.

The less violent solution would be a trade embargo of the country (at least, not allowing them to sell oil).

Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in their government.

Probably this is one area where an oil embargo would be more helpful in combination with removal of the government. An external power could enforce an embargo against oil unless a substantial percentage was spent on domestic infrastructure and programs, vs. funneled into a dictator's personal accounts.

"Oil for food" in Iraq in the 1990s was a horrible fiasco, but there have been cases where natural resource wealth hasn't been strictly a curse.

For ongoing security and government assistance, probably the only entity able to credibly do anything in EG is the AU, which has become a lot more credible in the past 5-10 years.

> Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.

I think this would both fix the corruption problem as well as restore faith in government.

that only works if the corruption hadn't reached the courts. and how does the average citizen check that? corruption has to be fixed from a third party.

> that only works if the corruption hadn't reached the courts. and how does the average citizen check that? corruption has to be fixed from a third party.

You are 95% right. The problem is, the third party always decides it might be a good idea to take something for themselves, and we're right back where we started.

But I don't buy the idea that it's not possible, it's just never been tried before.

> Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.

All that would do is wind up killing a bunch of 3rd party candidates and anti-establishment types. You can't simply place a law and then expect it to be 100% accurate let alone the people determining guilt be 100% ethical. A corrupt judge could kill a whole lot of people with this type of law.

My assertion is that there are different levels of corruption. If EG ended up being just as corrupt as Nigeria after the eliminating of the current regime, it would still be a victory for the people. They might even do better than that.

And maybe structurally changing how oil revenues are handled; not allowing any new leader to directly control them for personal benefit.

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