MrBeast's Faux Philanthropy

As someone who has worked in community projects in rural areas, I would like to point out a few things:

1. It is not the donor's fault if the wells are not being maintained properly. Ideally this should be something that the locals are paid and trained to do but honestly, if you can't even be bothered to take care of your primary source of water, you have big problems which cannot be solved by ANYONE's philanthropy.

2. That brings me to the point about local attitudes towards donors and what is done for them: I have seen locals really benefit from things donated to them and they then use the new facilities to build a much better future for themselves and their children. HOWEVER, I have also seen locals who absolutely waste whatever is given to them. They may even loot everything down to the last nut and bolt. I have some theories about why this happens (based on personal experience) but I have noticed very different outcomes in different villages for the EXACT SAME help received from donors.

Many of the philanthropy videos are either manipulated or outright frauds. If you state your aim is to earn a million dollars to spend a million dollars on philanthropy and then after earning the million dollars you spend half a million dollars on philanthropy, the half a million spend is not a great philanthropic gift, it does not justify misappropriating the other half. Philanthropy as a shield is a strategy as old as time. We can forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims if they failed due to naivety following an earnest attempt. Can we forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims wilfully?

The premise of your position is that philanthropy is always a net good, but that isn't true: philanthropy can be harmful. Homelessness is the easiest example to think about, where half-baked philanthropic efforts can have immediate harmful consequences, as we see time and time again.

There's also a heuristic for people whose smile doesn't reach the eyes.

The split isn’t on intent. It’s on effectiveness.

In one camp is ineffective philanthropy pretending to be effective. In the other camp is actually effective philanthropy.

What makes is problematic is when the ineffective philanthropist is using the philanthropy to line their own pockets.

Do you think also part of it is that to amass that amount of wealth is to extract that much money, I wonder how many "true altruists" would even play that game to begin with?

> Is it really Faux Philanthropy what he is doing is using his platform for promotion of different causes he likes.

Kinda? There's a thin line between donating food to a homeless shelter and setting up a camera crew to film a vetted contingent of contestants who have to fight in potentially dangerous conditions where Beast Ltd. cannot be held accountable for injuries. One is selfless - the other is petty exploitation. It feels very clear where "the line" is here.

I guess you could argue that Mr. Beast has an incentive to set up these things to maximize profit so he can "donate more to charity" (cough cough buy cars and houses). But at the end of the day the publicity alone is enough to argue that he's exploiting the people involved - the additional ad revenue and inherent high-performance incentive of his work makes it hard to call the whole thing charity. Maybe gambling or, at the most absolute generous, a "game" show.

If someone listens to him or watches about 30 seconds and doesn't come away with the thought that his charity thing is complete BS, I think that person is probably a very poor judge of character. It's a subjective assessment, and I can't quite put it into words, but he oozes with sliminess and it's quite transparent.

He needs to target an audience of children because they are gullible through inexperience and won't be able to read this from him.

Can you give a summary of what is it about?

Not sure how big of a minority we are, but for some of us, philanthropy does actually come from a place of deep gratitude for our community

  > allaying guilt

Why not both!

Half jokingly, MrBeast is a decent source of learning other languages given (1) how children friendly the contents are, and (2) how many dubs/subs the videos have. I particularly like the Takeuchi Junko Japanese dub.

There's also been a number of analyses that suggest he was lying about the number and location of the wells.

It's the same phenomenon as the What Three Words thing. The pitch was that it would solve commerce because in parts of the world they don't have "proper" street addresses.

Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools".

Just another outsider who thinks they know better.

I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well.

Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from.

It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth.

And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy.

> He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”.

At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!

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