Louis Cares

Saving the world, one dollar at a time

I’ve been told more than once that I’m a very rational person. To a fault, even. Overall, it’s a mindset that served me well - until I hit a wall at the end of my twenties.

I never found financial gain or amassing power and control terribly motivating, and the craving for the respect of those I looked up to had dulled as my confidence in my own abilities grew. I could see plenty of paths to progress in my career - and life in general - but I couldn’t find a good reason to commit to any of them. Without a rational reason to commit, or even take the first step down any of these paths, I ended up paralysed and unhappy.

After a couple of years festering in my comfy Big Tech job, I finally put on my big boy pants and quit. I wasn’t sure exactly how, but there had to be a way that I could go and do something with my life that would make the world a Better Place. Surely that would be a good enough reason to commit to something and break out of my stagnation?

Obviously the first step here was to define what “make the world a Better Place” means. It took some years and a few false starts, but I think I’ve finally settled on a few things that I’m happy with.

The Goal

To know with certainty that, regardless of when it ends, my existence was a net positive for the world.

Easy. Just have to define “net positive for the world”.

Or, do I? Can I? Turns out, I don’t think I can. If I come up with some definition of “net positive”, then really what I am aiming for is “my life made the world closer to my personal ideals”.

Sure, I can pick some ideals that are widely accepted as “good”, and adjust them over time as society’s collective knowledge grows, but for my rational-to-a-fault mind, this was still too flawed an approach.

What if being successful in slowing climate change removed the urgency that ended up causing a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? What if curing disease led to a food shortage that killed many more than would have died from the diseases that were cured?

I wanted to know with absolute certainty, starting today, that I was aiming for something that was objectively a Good Thing.

So if I can’t define “Good Thing” without baking my own personal values into it, who can? Easy. Everyone else!

If the people whose lives I impact believe that impact was a positive for them, then I’ve succeeded.

So, back to the goal.

To know with certainty that, regardless of how long I'm around, the people whose lives I impacted believe their lives were better because of me.

This also has the nice property that it scales. If I want to feel awesome about myself, I just need to impact more people in a way that they believe made their lives better.

Sounds good? Think so. Still need to figure out how to measure that, but we’ll come back to that.

How to Save the World

Whatever my personal twist on the goal, I wasn’t going to pretend to myself that I was the first well-meaning, well-off person to set out to try and save the world. So, I tried some things. Spoiler alert, I didn’t like them.

Startups

My first stop was to go play in startup-land. I naively thought I’d find myself surrounded by bright and enthusiastic entrepreneurs, each driven by a mission they cared deeply about. Each making the world - by their own definition - a little bit Better. How wrong I was.

The only person I encountered who didn’t focus on how rich they were going to get was Susan Wu. She spoke about an investment she’d made in a company tackling climate change through reforestation. It was genuinely inspiring, but was a move that required being both independently wealthy and personal friends with Jack Dorsey. Neither of which were going to happen without some steps in between.

Impact

I had read about Impact Investing, Social Entrepreneurship and all the variations thereof. This sounded like what I had originally thought startup-land would be, so off I went to the closest Social Impact conference.

I found a lot of kind well-intentioned people, but I couldn’t help but feel that by attempting to strike a balance between profit and “social benefit” (“how do we even measure that btw?” - was the hot topic of the conference) - they seemed to be managing to miss both targets.

Third Sector

I’ve always been sceptical of charities - they just don’t fit with my understanding of how human are programmed (you’ll see what I mean below). So when I found out that those people on the street who try to get you to sign up to a monthly donation are paid on commission (and not a small one), and that footage of the latest disaster gets used for an ad campaign, but the donated funds are used elsewhere, I was done. It’s not that I don’t believe these charities do Good Things, it’s that I believe they do them inefficiently, and without enough transparency.

I decided that if I was going to go this route, then I’d have to join the Red Cross or something, and go build computer networks somewhere uncomfortable. That would be the only way to know that I was actually having a positive impact, and not just paying for someone to sit in an office in Basingstoke filling out Excel spreadsheets in slow motion.

I don’t think I’d do very well building computer networks somewhere uncomfortable. I like nice things too much. Plus, I rationalised this option away on the grounds that since I didn’t want to engage with the organisation itself (and all the internal politics that would no doubt entail), my impact would always be limited to what I could do as an IC - a limitation I didn't want to accept.

EA / GiveDirectly

I’ve read many positive things about the impact of just giving money to people who don’t have enough. My takeaway is you have to give the smallest “big” amount of money, no strings attached, all in one go. This lets people bootstrap themselves and turn that initial lump sum into a revenue stream. This apparently really does work. They’ve done real studies and the results are repeatable. It’s a thing.

If I had fucktons of money, I’d like to think that I would give most of it to people who don’t have enough.

So, just go get fucktons of money right? That’s what EA says?

What if I get offered a job as CEO of Philip Morris, and I get an Elon-style mega payout if I can double sales of vapes to teens? Not sure what I’m supposed to do then. Seems like it should be a hard pass, but EA gets pretty weird about this stuff. I started reading a bit and had to run away.

Capitalism Rules, mmk?

I’m a big fan of the Culture books by Iain M Banks. I hope that one day we’ll reach some similar kind of utopia where resources and energy are effectively infinite, causing money and control to become meaningless.

Probably a little ways off though. And as much as I’d like to believe that even in the absence of infinite resources, humans are capable of organising themselves to distribute resources equally - even when it comes at a personal cost - all my experiences in life have only shown the opposite.

I believe that when push comes to shove, everyone will prioritise themselves and those they care about. Those of us lucky enough to have resources to spare can kid ourselves that we don’t, and wouldn’t, but I have yet to see that play out in practise.

Triangle of Sadness would't have won the Palme d'Or and received an 8 minute standing ovation if people couldn't relate to it. It's a movie about - amongst other things - our base survival instincts. The instincts that evolved over thousands of years and helped us survive the thousands of years that came after. Like appendixes and pinky toes, we don’t really need them any more but they’re still there, and they’re not going away any time soon.

So if we accept that this base, selfish, survival instinct is not going away, and that it is a powerful motivator, rather than fight it, we should probably just harness it? That’s what capitalism does.

I’m not going to pretend I’m in any way qualified to do a real comparison of capitalism with the alternatives, so I'll just stick to some facts.

(by "capitalist society" I mean: people buy and sell goods and services for money, so by this definition, yes, China counts as a capitalist society)

Is capitalism great? I wouldn’t say so, but it does seem to be the only thing that sticks. Given it’s only real prerequisite is human selfishness - which is universal, if not always manifest - that seems to make sense to me.

Cool cool cool. So, what about saving the world though? Isn’t capitalism just about getting rich?

Rules of Capitalism

I missed a bit when I said capitalism just relies on human selfishness. It also relies on everyone playing by the same rules. Some of those rules are enforced by the legal system, some are enforced through societal norms and pressures, and some are just kinda vague assumptions that we collectively make. T-Bills anyone? The US government will probably honour those, right?

Countries each have their own set of rules, and some create a stronger social safety net than others. The one thing that is consistent though, is that it is never illegal to prioritise yourself at the expense of someone else. How could it be? That would be making capitalism illegal!

Well, only if you believe you're participating in a zero-sum game.

Creating Value vs Capturing Value

I’m sure I’m rehashing well known concepts here, but I’m bad at learning from books and prefer to start from first principles, so, yea. Sorry.

I think it makes more sense to think of participation in a capitalist society as two main activities: creating value, and capturing value.

Capitalism gets it’s fair share of detractors, but I think that what irks people is not capitalism as a whole, but the act of capturing value. Specifically, capturing more value than you created.

I don’t think that anyone could say that inventing new things that people find useful is Bad. And I don’t think that many people would object to the inventors asking for some consideration for their work. They need food and shelter after all!

But what if I trick you into paying me more than it’s worth to you? Or I create a situation where you have to buy something from me that you didn't really want?

Selfish Capitalism

This is the one that gets people riled up.

My personal favourite example is the $500 “high quality” HDMI cable. Tricking people into believing that they’ll get noticeably better picture quality than they would on a cable that costs 50x less - not cool.

Or, remember in 2008 when supply shocks pushed the price of petrol over £1 for the first time ever? Remember when the supply issues were resolved and the price went back to normal? Me neither. BP made record profits though. Everyone was used to paying £1.20 by then, so why lower the price when they could just pocket the difference? What are you going to do, not drive to work? You’re trapped.

The online world is full of examples of Enshittification, which I won’t do Cory Doctorow the disservice of rehashing here.

Basically, capturing value you didn’t create is Bad. Exploiting information asymmetry or positions of control, or worse - creating these situations to then exploit them, for personal gain, is going to make you one very unpopular puffin.

Productive Capitalism

We’re nearly back to the original goal, promise. Which was?

To know with certainty that, regardless of how long I'm around, the people whose lives I impacted believe their lives were better because of me.

But we needed a way to measure “they believe their lives were better because of me.”

And the answer is... money?

You wouldn’t spend money on something that didn’t make your life better, right? Right, unless I’m tricking you. So, we need more rules.

If we assume for a second that we have some rules in place to make sure I don’t trick or trap you, and you’re both well informed and parting willingly with your money, then that’s got to be a pretty good proxy for “you believe [the thing you are buying] is going to make your life better” ?

So we are optimising for money after all? Maybe. Let’s get the rules in place first.

Rules for Productive Capitalism

You can’t set the rules for society as a whole, and you shouldn’t ignore rules the majority agree on. But you can choose to define some additional rules, and live by them. Just don’t expect anyone else to do the same and you’ll be alright.

Here we go.

Only capture value that you created

Short and sweet. This really is the rule.

There are a few things implicitly bundled up in this one.

Sounds good, but a bit abstract to apply day-to-day.

Here’s a stab at some practical guidelines that I hope will help me not break the rule.

Only capture value from the people for whom you created value

aka: Just Say No to Advertising!

If this whole “value captured as a proxy for value created” thing is going to work, we really can only capture value from the people for whom it was created.

If we’re capturing value from some third party, we’re going to end up optimising to create value for them, at the expense of our users (again, see Enshittification) - and who knows if that’s a net positive. All signs point to No.

Only capture value in the form of money

Money is weird. Why does charging 5¢ for a plastic bag work when you’re already spending 1000x that on groceries? Because you’ve already got loads of bags at home. Having another one doesn’t make you better off, overall. It’s a waste of money. It’s money you already wasted when you forgot to bring a bag with you, but it’s a waste nonetheless.

I would love to know the actual details of the psychology at play here, but for now, let’s just go with “people really hate wasting money,” so if they’re spending money on your thing, it feels like a safe bet that they believe it’s valuable to them.

You know what people really don’t mind wasting? Their time. Weird. Especially given that time is literally the only resource you have true control over. And that it’s convertible to money. Anyway, point is, having people spend their time [and not their money] makes it too easy to trick people into overpaying. Don’t do it.

Don’t create artificial barriers to make it easy for you capture value

There is one word that sums this one up perfectly: iMessage.

Or, in the words of Craig Federighi, SVP of Engineering at Apple: “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,”

I'll allow myself to translate: "We know that some people would like to buy their kids Android phones, and we could easily create some value for these people [in the form of choice] by shipping iMessage on Android, but we're choosing not to, so that they have to keep buying iPhones from us."

As you can probably tell - despite writing this on a MacBook - I have no love for Apple. I cannot think of another company that so brazenly goes out of it’s way to capture more value than it creates. Anyway, enough of that. Just remember to share your toys, ok?

If you’re lucky enough to build something that has a natural moat, I think you should feel free to enjoy that for a time, though at some point you might want to consider building some bridges - that way you can create value for people who aren’t even you’re customers! You won’t be capturing it, and can’t measure it, but you know, you’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling. And if you’ve got far enough that people actually want to use your bridge then you’ve probably already bought a boat, so, you know.

Sell the product, not the dream

Luxury goods are the most obvious culprit here. There’s a reason adverts for Audi and BMW tell you absolutely nothing about the car itself, and just leave you thinking how awesome the lives of all the Audi and BMW owners must be. If they told you about the car they’d have to point out that to get equivalent functionality, you have to spend significantly more than if you bought a Nissan or Toyota.

So, focus on the product. Describe it. Explain how it can be used. Demonstrate its benefits over similar products.

Please though, don’t press those emotional buttons. Humans are notoriously terrible at recognising and managing emotions, so - whether it’s intentional or not - pressing those buttons is going to land you squarely in “tricking people” territory.

North Star

Ok cool so we've got some guardrails in place, but what are we aiming for again?

To create as much value as possible for other people.

And how do we measure that?

By how much value we capture.

Wait, what?

Well, as long as we stick to the rules and set a comfortable margin, we’ll never capture more than we create. So we can optimise for value captured - which we can measure - as a proxy for value created.

It’s also worth pointing out that you don't have to keep all the value you capture. You can absolutely redistribute it to others who can make better use of it than you - and then you’ve helped twice!

So anyway, um, did I just go through all this to justify feeling good about getting rich? Maybe?

Is that a bad thing though? If you really do stick to the rules then I think you’ll still end up being a net positive for the world, which was the goal.

Turning “Not a Bad Thing” into a “Good Thing”

This is the part of the assignment that gets you extra credit. As such, my solution is a little half baked. Suggestions welcome.

Instead of just maximising total value created, we could aim to maximise say the median value created per person. The idea being to factor in the number of people whose lives got better, as well as by how much.

In practise, this probably means something like aiming to increase revenue by growing your userbase, rather than by creating more value for your existing users. Or starting a whole new project that creates value for a whole different market.

These are the decisions where you get to express yourself and pull the world a little bit closer to your ideals. Just stick to the rules, and it won’t let you pull it in a direction it doesn’t already want to go.