Thanks, Ryan—numbers are helpful. I think, though, that the value of the collective outreach is considerably larger than the value of the GWWC pledges, via various indirect effects.
An advocate of public outreach can argue that the recruitment of the likes of Moskovitz required an enormous amount of political and social capital of other high-profile scientists or business leaders. But this would just concede the point being argued in the first place—that recruiting such leaders is both a critical and achievable project (since of course it has already been achieved).
Is it really to concede the point? The question is how valuable “collective outreach” to broader groups is relative to “personal outreach” to rich individuals, and how much of these two kinds of outreach we should do. If collective outreach indirectly makes personal outreach more effective, it would seem that that is an argument for putting more resources into collective outreach than we otherwise should have, ceteris paribus.
The original question wasn’t just about the rich vs non-rich, but whether to focus on elites. The high-profile scientists and business leaders surely count as elite, even if they’re not hyper-wealthy.
Thanks, Ryan—numbers are helpful. I think, though, that the value of the collective outreach is considerably larger than the value of the GWWC pledges, via various indirect effects.
Is it really to concede the point? The question is how valuable “collective outreach” to broader groups is relative to “personal outreach” to rich individuals, and how much of these two kinds of outreach we should do. If collective outreach indirectly makes personal outreach more effective, it would seem that that is an argument for putting more resources into collective outreach than we otherwise should have, ceteris paribus.
The original question wasn’t just about the rich vs non-rich, but whether to focus on elites. The high-profile scientists and business leaders surely count as elite, even if they’re not hyper-wealthy.