{"items": [{"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/625594611262?comment_id=625610873672", "anchor": "fb-625610873672", "service": "fb", "text": "\"Sometimes in talking to people about earning to give they say the idea is obvious: it's so simple! The thing is, no one seems to have been advocating it until the last decade or so.\"<br><br>Coming up with an idea and actually acting on it are two different things. It seems like E2G (minus certain things like replaceability) could have occurred to a number of people in different places. But because of the lack of Web 2.0 (Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter), there was no easy way for these people to find and connect with others who had the same idea and feel validated in actually pursuing it. I think the main barrier with E2G was probably not that it's a hard idea to come up with but that it was such a departure from social norms and conventional lifestyles (and even from conventional counter-culture values e.g., anti-capitalism). So most people  would probably need to find others or need a community where E2G is a norm before jumping on the wagon, and this was probably very hard to do until recently. I imagine that being an E2G  back in say, the 90s, would have made you a social outcast whereas now it makes you a member of a fast-growing community. Eliezer Yudkowsky describes this difference here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/)", "timestamp": "1377452138"}, {"author": "Brad", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/116032343632043704302", "anchor": "gp-1377464284674", "service": "gp", "text": "Great post. It seems as if Zell Kravinsky might have been one of the early earning-to-give practitioners, from around the same time (late 1990s), and later got a lot of publicity for donating a kidney to a stranger: \"Having earned his real estate fortune, Kravinsky was free to leave behind a business atmosphere of 'greed and corruption' that he had tolerated for only one reason - to make money and give it away.\"\u00a0\nhttp://articles.philly.com/2003-08-24/news/25455342_1_family-life-works-real-estate", "timestamp": 1377464284}]}