A billion pounds?

[ciphergoth]

babysimon: "You could do a lot of good with £1bn"

How would you spend a billion pounds in order to do good? You can't spend it on yourself or your friends.

Comments

[hukuma.livejournal.com]

It's funny, 1 billion seems so impossibly huge on a personal scale, yet so insignificant on a global scale. I mean, the Gates foundation has a larger budget than that, and while they do a lot of good, they're barely scratching the surface of the problems they're targeting.

[fizzyboot.livejournal.com]

Indeed. A billion quid is 16p for everyone on the planet, which is clearly not enough to fix all the world's problems.

The most important thing -- assuming you actually want to make a difference to the world and not just make yourself feel good -- is to spend it in the most effective ways. So the first thing I'd do is assemble a group of experts -- economists, technologists, etc -- to evaluate different proposals and their effectiveness.

What sort of things might be most effective? One example is digital content: it only needs to be created once, then can be infinitely replicated for free. So creating open source software and open content works might be useful.