Libertarianism is the first type. The average libertarian has a set of proposals he wants – lower taxes, less regulation, legal drugs, etc. – and keeps pushing until they get passed.

The pro-choice movement is the second type. Abortion is already legal, as much as Mississippi doesn’t like it. There’s no new agenda to implement. But there is a villain – the pro-life movement, which can be made appropriately evil and scary-sounding. Likewise, the pro-life movement’s villain is the horrible baby-killing pro-choice movement. Two such groups can be each others’ villains, and so can keep fighting forever and ever.

If there’s neither, a movement whithers away. For example, almost everyone opposes Nazism. Yet, there are no big anti-Nazi rallies in the streets every week. No one calls you to push anti-Hitler petitions, or denounces proposals to add swastikas to the flag. At some point, people just got bored and did something else.

This means, interestingly, neo-Nazis are doing Nazism a huge disservice. There’s no chance of them ever winning elections. And their existence galvanizes opposition to Nazi ideas, by giving everyone a villain to hate. (The one time you do see anti-Nazi protests is around Nazi rallies.) Conversely, if you want to kill a movement, tell everyone they hate to shut up.

Time to find out.

1. Google their name, obviously. But also Google their email address. A name like “Joe Brown” gets a million results, but an email is unique to you.

2. Put their email into Facebook’s search bar. That gives you their Facebook profile.

3. Pipl will search based on name, email, username, phone and location. WhitePages searches by name, phone and location. (Ignore the ads, and don’t pay anyone money.)

4. If they use a pseudonym, search for that. People often reuse the same one. Eg. someone might make a forum post as just “catamaran363″. But their Twitter account is under “catamaran363 (Bill Smith)”.

5. Any website someone owns lists their contact information in WHOIS, unless they cloak behind a proxy.

6. If you have a photo, put it through TinEye’s reverse image search. Even if the photo isn’t of them, they might have posted it on other pages they own.

7. Google for exact phrases. Eg. suppose you’ve found someone’s blog, but it’s anonymous. Try taking five or ten words from a post, and Googling them in quotes, eg. “someone owns lists their contact information” (for this post). Odds are, you’ll only get hits if the post was copied elsewhere.

8. If a website is down, or stuff on it was deleted, search previous versions with the Wayback Machine.

America’s been independent for 232 years. 2013 clearly corresponds to somewhere in the mid fourth century – call it 330. This gives us roughly four Roman years per American year.

FDR was obviously Augustus – he transformed the country into an empire, keeping old institutions in name, while greatly expanding central authority and his personal power. (Notably, both are widely seen as good guys.) In the Roman timeline, Augustus took power 360 years ago, corresponding to 90 American years. FDR took power 80 years ago (1933) – pretty close.

The American Civil War was 150 years ago. The closest corresponding event was the Second Punic War (Hannibal = Robert Lee, Grant = Scipio Africanus?), which happened 550 Roman years ago. This equals 140 American years, confirming the timeline. Further obvious mappings are LBJ -> Marcus Aurelius and Reagan -> Diocletian.

In broader terms, both Rome and America did not fall suddenly – there was a slow decline over centuries in government efficacy. Likewise, phrases like “bankrupted by war” misunderstand economics. War is very expensive, but it’s a one-time cost. What matters long-term is a) the fraction of GDP one can extract to fund armies, b) size of GDP, c) growth rate of GDP, and d) how these compare to opponents. In 1960, America and to a lesser extent Russia utterly dominated all four categories – with the US emphasizing b) and Russia emphasizing a) – as did the Romans in 100. Hence, they could fund huge armies and not worry about it.

Rome wasn’t (and America won’t be) conquered like Nazi Germany. There was no one big battle where barbarians lined up and overran the Empire. As barbarians grew in power, they became Romanized, and often were Roman allies. But the central government was increasingly unable to control them, causing a gradual breakdown of Roman authority. One modern analogy is the Arab Spring – popular unrest threw off American-allied governments, and installed more independent leaders.

Extrapolating forward, what’s America’s equivalent to Byzantium? The obvious answer is Canada, and possibly Australia. Both are as similar to us as Roman provinces were to one another, while also being generally wealthier and better-run. It seems reasonable that, over the next two decades, American social, economic, and human capital will gradually flow out as the government continues its decline, leaving the US proper an empty shell like Russia in 1995.

GiveWell’s charity recommendations – currently Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative – are generally regarded as the most reliable in their field.

This isn’t wrong, of course, but one should note that, eg. Against Malaria Foundation has only raised about $1.5 million per year. Why is the #1 rated charity so small?  It’s because there’s no shortage of donations. Warren Buffett alone donates a thousand times that amount, and so most useful charities won’t benefit from an additional marginal dollar and won’t make the rankings. There’s a shortage of charities with enough visible human and social capital to be worth donating to.

I imagine many readers here donate to these charities. This makes it all the more surprising that it should be pretty easy to start a charity more effective than any of them.

All you would need to do is found an organisation that fundraises for whoever GiveWell recommends, and raises more than a dollar with each dollar it receives. Is this hard? Probably not. As a general rule, a dollar spent on fundraising seems to raise at least several dollars.

This confuses average return with marginal return. When Saudi Arabia pumps oil out of the ground, it costs them $3 per barrel. They then sell the oil for about $90 per barrel. That’s a 3,000% profit margin! Surely, then, it’s easy as dirt to get rich in oil?

But Saudi Arabia has all the easy oil fields. Those have already been found and claimed. To get rich yourself, you have to find a new oil field – one that’s much harder to find, and much harder to drill. Your cost is probably more like $50 per barrel.

This is the law of diminishing returns, and it’s ubiquitous in economics. The more of X you do, the more difficult the next unit of X becomes. Think of X as a rubber band. You can stretch it a little easily. The next bit is harder. The next bit is harder still. Pretty soon, you’re using your whole strength to keep it taut. The average bit of stretching didn’t need all your strength – if it did, you could never have stretched it in the first place. The average bit was pretty easy. It’s only that last bit that’s hard.

The same goes for fundraising, or pretty much any economic activity. The first bit of fundraising is really effective. The next bit is less effective. And so on. Where do you stop? In a perfect world, you stop where one dollar of fundraising raises one dollar of funds. There’s no point to doing any more. Hence, some outside entity doing more fundraising will not help a charity. For every dollar it spends, it’ll get back less than a dollar, leaving everyone worse off. Even though the average dollar of fundraising is helpful, the marginal dollar is not.

Of course, the world isn’t perfect. What if charities are, say, 50% inefficient? Then, you’d stop fundraising where one dollar raises two dollars of funds. One dollar will be wasted on inefficiency, and the other will be spent effectively.

But again, there’s no point to doing more. If one started a new fundraising charity, it would also be inefficient. For every dollar it spent, it would raise two. But then, it would have to spend one on inefficiency, and we’d be worse off. (In real life, as a new organization, it would always have to spend more on inefficiency, since it would need to pay for its own board and website and accountants and lawyers and whatnot. We’d be even worse off.)

There are many reasons for diminishing returns. Maybe the existing donors are tapped out, and it’s hard to find new ones. Maybe the fundraising manager already has eight employees, and can’t handle more. Maybe they can’t buy more clicks on the relevant Google keywords. Why does this keep happening?

It happens (in large part) because virtually every process has inputs other than money. Suppose you had a million bucks to start a fundraising charity. But who’s going to manage it? Who’s going to recruit the team? Who’s going to oversee it, and prevent people from stealing the money and running off to Latvia? What about accounting? Legal? Advertising? Marketing strategy? These things don’t grow on trees. After a certain point, money stops helping.

It’s a pretty simple and fast multiplier that obviously beats putting your money in the stock market.

The reason there’s no easy way to triple your money in the stock market is exponential growth. If you could triple your money every year, you’d soon have way more money than you could use on one stock play, and your returns would taper off. (And the next person who came along would find you already tapped out that play.) The same holds for charities. Even assuming people most are stupid, and don’t spend more on fundraising when fundraising has 3:1 returns, at least one nonprofit out of several million surely would. That one nonprofit would then grow until it had eaten all the easy fundraising opportunities. (I’m against efficient market arguments generally, but even the most diehard EMH opponents would agree you can’t make billions by just copying what everyone else already does.)

An independent organisation raising money for GiveWell’s top charities should do even better than a typical fundraiser, thanks to:

 - the strength of evidence, which is especially compelling to big donors

As noted earlier, GiveWell’s top charity has an approximate budget of $1.5 million. US charitable spending, by big donors alone, is tens of billions annually. Billions. With a ‘b’. Apparently, evidence isn’t as compelling to donors as it seems.

  – the independent recommendation, which looks particularly credible and removes the perception of any ulterior motive

Virtually every charity is recommended by someone. If it couldn’t even get that much, it would have no donors, and would soon go out of business. There are many, many recommenders, public and private.

 - a willingness to maximise (for example by targeting the wealthy, and focussing on regular or legacy donors)

Virtually every fundraiser already targets the wealthy. Charity balls are attended by the rich, not the poor, or even the middle-class. This isn’t some sort of strange coincidence – it’s a deliberate strategy by nonprofit managers.

 - an intrinsic motivation to do good

Even assuming, for sake of argument, that everyone associated with GiveWell had this “intrinsic desire”, how would anyone know about it? People’s motivations cannot be seen with binoculars. There’s a reason why virtually everyone has gotten scammed, at one point or another – scammers appear trustworthy.

And will motivation to “do good” make people work harder than self-interest? Every investment banker and bond trader I’ve seen works a lot harder than volunteers doing community service. No one ever snorted coke to keep awake at 4 AM so they could finish digging African wells.

 - the freedom to choose which of the three organisations they promote, depending on who they are talking to.

Virtually every charity already has mechanisms to screen prospective donors based on interests. It does no more good to talk to the 0.3% of the population interested in education/health/poverty, and then talk to them about education/health/poverty, than it does to just pull the 0.1% of the population interested in education and talk about that.

Putting your money into fundraising, rather than just giving it directly, does impose additional costs on the donors you inspire, and may ‘crowd out’ gifts to other charities. However, the logic of giving to GiveWell’s top rated charities is that they make (much) better use of money than most other individuals or organisations. So if you have a fundraising ratio significantly above 1:1, these downsides shouldn’t much matter.

Diverting lots of money from non-GiveWell charities to GiveWell charities would indeed be useful, if money were a limiting factor. But it is not. Even if 0.1% of US donations were to GiveWell charities, these three charities would rapidly have more money than they knew what to do with, and would get taken over by thieves. GiveWell selects for charities where a marginal $10 is useful, not ones where a marginal $10 million is.

You might ask: if fundraising is the best thing to do, why wouldn’t AMF, SCI or GiveDirectly just spend the money you give them on fundraising? My guess is that it’s simply a bad look. If they spend too much on fundraising, it will irrationally scare off their existing and potential donors.

If there are social costs to spending a lot on fundraising – which seems reasonably plausible – this would automatically make an organization which does nothing but fundraising a complete non-starter. If spending, say, 50% of income on fundraising scares off donors, despite a GiveWell top ranking, what would spending 100% of income on fundraising do?

Even if a charity should ideally spend most of its receipts on further fundraising in order to grow more quickly, the option simply isn’t available. The social norm against ‘optimising fundraising‘ is generally helpful, because intense competition between charities for donations would cause ‘rent dissipation’, and less total money would flow to charity recipients. But if your charity actually is much better than other charities, and so it’s good when you ‘take’ their money, this social norm does harm by preventing you from doing so.

This is a sociology version of a group selection argument. Way back in the day, biologists would say that such-and-such adaptation was for “the good of the species”. The problem is that this isn’t a Nash equilibrium. If everyone acts for the “good of the species”, at cost to themselves, each individual can benefit by acting differently. Sooner or later someone will do so, become better off, have more descendants, and their genes will dominate the population. So much for that.

Similarly, social norms do not arise to benefit society. Social norms arise because it benefits each individual actor to obey them. In the case of the ‘fundraising norm’, charities obey it in order to get donations, and donors impose it to prevent their money from being snuck away to buy new Ferraris. These forces will not go away just because a social norm no longer benefits the group. In particular, one can’t just say that one won’t spend the money on Ferraris; everyone already says that. One has to convincingly prove it, which is very difficult. Even if the charity is seemingly well-run, how do donors know you aren’t buying nails from your nail company at a 20x markup, and using that money to buy Ferraris? See, eg., the special “movie accounting” which “proved” Star Wars never made a profit.

So, if you are unlike most donors and are willing to have your money spent on effective fundraising, you can easily increase your impact several times over. Just help GiveWell’s top charities take their fundraising efforts ‘off the books’ by founding or giving to a separate organisation that does it for them.

This logic immediately falls apart, once one takes it a step further. If fundraising offers a 3x multiplier, why not fundraise to fundraise, and get 9x? 27x? 81x? Where does the tower of meta end? The answer, of course, is that doing things everyone is already doing (like generic “fundraising”) never has a 3x return.

This isn’t actually an impractical plan. Starting up a lean and effective fundraising organisation is difficult, but much easier than building a global team to distribute insecticide-treated bed nets.

Speaking as a serial entrepreneur, marketing is usually the hardest part of starting a new business, not the easiest. Marketing, fundamentally, is getting people’s attention, and people’s attention is very scarce because a) everyone wants it, b) the Internet and mass media allows anyone to compete for it, and c) it’s a fundamentally limited resource. Modern logistics makes globally distributing anything pretty easy, for someone dedicated and competent. But you can’t make marketing easy the way you can make logistics easy. If you could, (eg.) by inventing a new kind of advertising, there would suddenly be ten times as much demand for people’s attention as supply, and marketing would be as hard as ever. See also Top Ten Geek Business Myths.

Any bright and energetic person in a rich country who went and received the necessary training would have a decent shot at getting such an organisation off the ground.

There are roughly two million charities in the United States. All of their leaders are in a rich country, and most of them are at least relatively bright and energetic. Out of those two million, GiveWell recommends three. If all you know about a person is that they’re bright and energetic… well, three out of two million ain’t great odds. Even assuming GiveWell is missing dozens of effective charities, despite having spent more than five years searching… what fraction does that give you? 0.1%? 0.01%? This must be pretty hard if so many fail, relative to the abilities of those who try.

In summary: there is already plenty of money. There are plenty of people managing money (banks). There are plenty of people managing the managers’ money (mutual funds). There are plenty of people managing the managers’ managers’ money (funds of hedge funds). There are plenty of people managing the managers’ managers’ managers’ money (hedge funds themselves).

Fundraising is, fundamentally, a way of allocating money. We don’t need more towers of allocation and meta-allocation and meta-meta-allocation and meta-meta-allocation. We need places for the money to go at the end of it all. And those need social and human capital. Social and human capital, not infinite meta.

That 1% interest rate, however, means the best you could do with your billion dollars is something that makes about ten million per year. All those big buildings would only deliver $10 million in rent payments. All the goods from those factories would only sell for $10 million. And so on. (Per year, on average, after expenses, after taxes, risk-adjusted, etc.)

The idea of a shortage of money is silly. There are giant piles of money sloshing around, all over the world. Desperate for somewhere to go, something to do. But why is it so hard to use a billion dollars? Most people probably think, “Hey, you know, I could really use a billion dollars to do awesome thing X. Why don’t they just give it to me?”

Here’s why. Suppose you’re a billionaire. You want to (for example) use your billion to start small businesses. You post ads for hopeful entrepreneurs. A few come, you talk to them, and you give them a few million in loans to get started. And then they take the money, and disappear to Latvia. Oops.

Next time, you won’t be so dumb. You hire Bob to select people to lend to – you want to filter out the thieves. Bob finds a few people, and gives them a few million in loans. Except Bob told all his friends to apply, and then only selected his friends. And Bob and his friends disappear to Latvia. Oops.

Next time, you won’t be so dumb. You set up a foundation, with a board of directors and everything, and give them a few million to make loans with. Except Joe, one of the five directors you hired, is a really charismatic guy, and he convinces two of the others to quit, replaces them with yes-men, and they vote out the remaining two. And, you know, a nonprofit needs accounting, and it needs lawyers and paper and some other things. And it just so happens that Joe’s friends run accounting and legal and office supply firms. And Joe buys all his stuff from them (at ten times market prices) … and it turns out, at year’s end, the foundation doesn’t have any money to make loans. So you double the budget. And, what do you know, Joe needs twice as much paper the next year. And then you give up. Oops.

Next time, you won’t be so dumb. You hire a team of psychologists to write an honesty test. You hire finance PhDs to make a finance test. If someone wants a loan, you test them on marketing and sales, on accounting and management, on design and engineering – on every topic that might be relevant to small businesses. You won’t get tricked this time! Except the only people who pass the tests are competitive conformists, whose main goal is to be first in every contest. And they sit on the money, and spend all their time sucking up to reporters, trying to win the Best New Business Of The Year award. Oops. This is why the problem is hard. (See Negative and Positive Selection.)

There is, always and everywhere, no shortage of money. There is a shortage of human capital: people who know how to do stuff. There is a shortage of social capital: people who know each other, trust each other, work well together, and won’t run off to Latvia with stolen funds. And there is a shortage of places to put money that provably have enough human capital and social capital to not immediately steal it, or waste it, or use it to fund some project any physics undergrad could see was impossible. These are the vital, scarce ingredients for getting anything done.

If you have a big project you want to execute on – don’t think about “ways to get money”. Think about ways to get human and social capital, and prove you have them. Thinking of money as scarce is the wrong reference frame.

Suppose you, Alice, start a business. You have four co-founders, Bob, Carol, Dawn and Edgar. It’s a little bumpy at first, but in your third year, you start turning a profit. The business grows, and makes you all rich. Time to cash in on a cushy retirement, right?

But wait. Carol, Dawn, and Edgar have 60% of the stock. And, like almost everyone, they have some self-interest. What if they vote to take your and Bob’s shares? They have a majority. And they’ll each be much richer. Why not?

In real life, laws prevent this sort of theft. If they didn’t, business partners would rob each other left, right and center. The economy would turn to plunder instead of trade, nothing could get done, and we’d all starve. Most of corporate law deals with protecting minority shareholders.

But that’s exactly what nonprofits are like. Instead of owners, you have a board. And it’s perfectly legal for three board members to vote out the other two, because they don’t like them, or they’re having a bad hair day, or just because. And this happens all the time.

The consequences are what you’d expect. Everyone has to worry, every single day, forever, about either kicking someone else out or not getting kicked out themselves. (I speak from experience.) We blame politicians for only worrying about re-election. But what if elections weren’t every four years? What if, every time an approval rating went below 49%, voters put someone else in on the whim of the moment? Madness, that’s what.

In economics, everyone knows how important secure property rights are. People make more stuff if they get to keep it. The same applies on the organizational level.

Why is obvious. Software has grown rapidly for many decades now. The skilled labor pool can’t adjust nearly as quickly, because our training system for skilled workers is FUBAR. Hence, the market wage for programming has grown rapidly. Wages are sticky, as employers don’t want to pay much more than what they see as historical norms. And so, when wages can’t rise fast enough to meet demand, we get shortages.

In startup investing, most returns are from a tiny fraction of companies. You might invest in a hundred companies, have 99 fail, but have one return 1,000x.

One might, therefore, conclude valuations don’t matter. Suppose you’re an average VC fund. You start with $1B, and you invest $10M in 100 companies. 99 fail, and one returns 100x after five years, so your net return is 0%. (Median VCs actually lose money, but we’ll be generous.)

Now, it doesn’t matter what valuation you gave that one big hit. If the valuation was double, you would only have invested $20M, and your return is now -0.1% – a negligible difference.

But the key is, there’s no way to tell in advance what that big hit is. If you could tell, you could only invest in big hits, make 150% returns, and be rich beyond your dreams. To invest at a higher valuation for that one company, you’d have to do it for every company. And your returns are now -12% – terrible! Alternatively, if you invest at half the valuation, your returns are 15%, which is superb.

Like any other investment, startup investing isn’t about identifying successful companies, but identifying differences between what median investors think and how successful a company really is. Any nincompoop can see Apple is successful, but there’s little return there – its stock is correspondingly expensive.

The old elite originated in the Progressive era of the early 20th century, and came to power during FDR’s administration. It consists, generally, of graduates of elite law and business schools, placing a high value on credentials. Its members are affluent, but not really rich. It includes virtually all Democratic elected officials, some Republican ones, most CEOs of Fortune 500s, old-style journalists, and some scattered groups like lobbyists, policy wonks, and elite academics.

The new elite was created by the hippie movement and the Reagan reforms, starting about thirty years ago. Unlike the old elite, many members are wealthy, and appear in the Forbes 400. New elites are primarily tech entrepreneurs, but also include entrepreneurs in other fields, some investors, hackers, “new media” people, and nonprofit project managers. They are, on average, far more intelligent and technically skilled than old elites. Their members also attend elite colleges, but they tend more towards MIT, CMU, and Caltech than the traditional Ivy League (though there is of course much variance), and rarely have JDs or MBAs.

Both elites control large corporations, but different ones. The old elite has no entrepreneurs – their corporations have been around forever. They view “CEO” as another job in the bureaucracy, like “product manager” or “copy editor”. The company hires them, they work for a salary for a few years, and then they leave. These corporations are mostly owned by institutional investors, and the CEOs and managers usually hold very little stock themselves. (Even though institutional investors own them, they have little power – the old elite wrote laws that gave most power in public companies to the CEO and board, not shareholders.)

The new elite is built around entrepreneurs, so most of its corporations are new. The CEO is usually also founder, or someone the founder hired. Being younger, these companies are much more closely held, with management and employees holding large or controlling shares. Hence, there are generally much less plagued by principal/agent problems.

Why draw these lines? Why not, say, define a “North Elite” and a “South Elite”, or “Tall Elite” and “Short Elite”? Because social classes are fundamentally social. Beneath the companies and titles and power games, elites are essentially defined by who talks to who. It’s very common for, say, East Coasters to be friends with West Coasters, or short people to be friends with tall. Hence, these are bad categories. Both the Old Elite and New Elite are highly interconnected amongst themselves, but have few connections to each other.

This is largely a generational divide – people mostly make friends in their rough age bracket. Very few New Elites are older than 45, and very few old elites are younger. Of course, both groups have older/younger wings: the old elite has lots of Harvard Law students angling for a spot, while the new elite has older folks like Bill Gates. But these cohorts have very little comparative power.

How can one, not being privy to private conversations, judge who talks to who? One easy way is examining the flow of people. Within the old elite, CEOs will often sit on each others’ boards. An old elite CEO often hops from company to company – the average F500 CEO only stays a few years. CEOs move from business to government to business to government. Bankers become regulators and vice versa, congressmen become lobbyists and vice versa.

The new elite is similarly mobile. Investors become entrepreneurs, and vice versa. People hop around from company to company, project to project, city to city. New elites hire each other, write together, work together. Look at the careers of Elon Musk, or Jack Dorsey, or Steve Jobs.

But there’s de minimis flow between the elites. The number of programmers or microchip engineers in Congress is zero, even though programmers are now >1% of the labor force. Similarly, there’s no way Google or Facebook would hire some politician or lawyer or management consultant as CEO, though that would be typical for old elite companies. And, of course, there’s the age gap.

One might think an old elite CEO making $2M is rich, but even if he pays no taxes, has no expenses, and remains CEO for two decades (all nearly impossible), his net worth is only $40M – a tiny fraction of many new elites. Why aren’t old elites rich? The old elite likes hierarchy, structure, and large bureaucracies, and that’s what they focus on when competing for status – moving up within the hierarchy. The new elite judges status more by wealth, popularity, coolness, and technical ability.

These groups mostly co-exist peacefully, at least for now. But, as always, there is fighting around the edges, SOPA being an excellent case in point. The music industry, old elites, wanted another bill protecting their interests. Since the government are themselves old elites, this had always worked in the past, and the bill was expected to sail through. Google, Wikipedia, and other new elites weren’t part of the old-elite government, and couldn’t fight back using the old elite tools of lobbying and campaign donations. So they used their own power to mount a publicity campaign, with enough force to kill the bill.