What will Jeff Bezos do with his fortune? The Amazon chief has amassed around $130 billion, and there’s really no practical way to spend more than a fraction of it. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said in a recent interview. By “space travel” he means space tourism and space colonies—“millions” of earthlings living and working in space.
Other people, naturally, feel they have better ideas for all that wealth. One of them is Harold Pollack, a “professor of social service administration and public health science” at the University of Chicago, who suggested in a New York Times op-ed that Bezos spend it on the sorts of things a professor of social service administration and public health science would spend it on. “If Mr. Bezos wants to strengthen America’s future scientific prowess, he would finance intensive math tutoring for about two million high school students every year—forever. . . . If he wants to nourish the high-tech sector that enabled his fortune, he would endow eight MIT-size universities around the world and still have billions left over.”
That’s what we need—more universities to hire more professors of social service administration and public health science!
But Pollack isn’t done. “If he prefers to improve global health, he would barely break a sweat providing $1.50 eyeglasses to a nearsighted Indian schoolgirl, a farsighted Nigerian truck driver and a billion others. Or he could buy a $2 mosquito net for everyone in Africa who needs one. On top of that . . . ”
We tend to agree that space travel isn’t a great way to blow billions of dollars, and if that money belonged to The Scrapbook we’d allocate it very differently. But people always have a better way to spend other people’s money. Alas, Bezos’s fortune doesn’t belong to The Scrapbook. Another thing that doesn’t belong to us? Professor Pollack’s surely not insignificant income from the extremely well-endowed University of Chicago. We won’t presume to tell him how he could better spend that money.
Still, if Pollack needs some help in doling out his extra cash—assuming he’s not inclined to spend it all on glasses for Indian schoolgirls and mosquito nets for Africans—we’d ask him to please call The Weekly Standard’s main line and ask for The Scrapbook.
