Bill Gates pledged the same and yet his wealth hasn't reduced. Worse, the philanthropy has been targetted ideologically (like encouraging private schools) and somehow keeps ending up favouring companies he has ownership in.
I really don't get the animus against private schools. Surely a one size fits all public school can't possibly best serve the interests of every possible student. Furthermore in a pluralistic society, shouldn't we tolerate people's different preferences in education, especially those who opt for more religious education?
There's no reason public education can't be religious, if that is desired by the population in a region. Both ethnic and religious public schools exist in many countries, to cater to minorities.
The problem is charity with the privatising of schooling as a condition. Not unlike charity with the purchase of a specific type of seed sold by a specific company as a condition.
> There's no reason public education can't be religious
There is the establishment clause of the constitution in the US, which prevents the nation from establishing state sponsored religion. Courts have been pretty clear that compulsory religious elements in public school violates the establishment clause.
> The problem is charity with the privatising of schooling as a condition. Not unlike charity with the purchase of a specific type of seed sold by a specific company as a condition.
Most countries aren't the US and most people don't live in the US. It's also not where most of Gates' charity goes.
Gates offers charity only under specific conditions, especially in Africa. He gives charity for schooling, if it's for private schools he could make money off of elsewhere (at the expense of public schools). He gives charity for agriculture, if it's for some specific seeds he makes money off of (at the expense of the local people choosing what they think is appropriate). He distorts poor economies towards his own ends, that is the problem.
Try opening up a Madrasa in your neighborhood and you may find a lot of pushback to private religious schools, even from people who say they are in favor of such a thing.
There are several Madrasas in Brooklyn near where I live. I'd never send my child to one, but the suppression of ethnic/cultural/religious education has a long and ugly history in the US. The first public religious schools in the US were cooked up to force Irish and Italian children out of Catholic education. Is that really who we want to be in the 21st century?
Most of us don't have a problem with _private schools_, just with state money or charity being aimed at them. Private schools are fundamentally capitalistic - they serve their (generally wealthy) patrons, not society.
What is a median private school tuition? I doubt it's very high, I know someone who taught in an extremely wealthy-focused and exclusive private school and the tuition was $35k/year. In contrast, New York state schools appear to spend $25-30k per year per pupil [0 summarizing 1][2] and gets... far, far worse results.
You could say that private schools would attempt to serve anyone they can (just like any business), but public schools rob them of the opportunity. In this system, only the rich can escape, while non-rich get stuck with a botched socialized system at taxpayers' expense. Donating to allow more people to escape the public schools is thus a great cause.
> Most of us don't have a problem with _private schools_, just with state money or charity being aimed at them.
State money already goes to a dizzying array of non-profit and religious institutions. Anywhere from local homeless and addiction services to the University of Notre Dame. Why should primary and secondary schools be excluded?
> Private schools are fundamentally capitalistic
This is a meaningless statement. The VST majority of private schools in the US are non-profits.
> they serve their (generally wealthy) patrons, not society.
Religious schools in the US started out as a cheap way to educate the poor in reading. Catholic schools in particular still serve poorer communities and are low cost. Residential assignment in public schools comes from a legacy of segregation and anti-catholic laws. The wealth will always have their pick of education for their children and always have. Denying funding for poor students that want to opt out of their shitty assigned schools just perpetuates injustice.
Yeah, I was clarifying a sentiment, not starting a debate about a complex topic. This was actually a policy debate topic back when I was in school, it's very tired ground -.-
I understand that you disagree, and you probably have thought-out reasons for that. You'll just have to understand that I do as well, and we can both skip the hours of wasted time where we try to convince each other (or an imaginary audience).
That’s fair. By disposition I prefer to always try to make a clear case for an idea. It sharpens my own thinking and sometimes observers are inspired to look into something more deeply.
What does that mean his wealth hasn't reduced? Any money that he's given away (and he's given away a lot) has reduced his wealth. He'd be worth more if hadn't given it away.
Promises to do something good in the indeterminate but distant future generate tons of positive press coverage for free.
Better to ignore empty PR nonsense and wait for billions in philanthropy to actually materialize before showering sociopaths with praise and adoration.
Was the pledge to give away most of us while still alive? I know Warren Buffett's original plan was to give away nothing until death and then give away all of it and his wife or something convinced him to at least give away some while still alive.
Note that while I think most of the other replies are not necessarily pertinent in that giving away trickles is clearly not "most," the Gates Foundation has given a total of $65.6 billion to date, which is more than half of the Gates family's current net worth, but it isn't funded solely by him. That also means he can't decide unilaterally what to spend the money on, though. I was under the impression it was mostly global health until recently. The education initiatives are relatively new.
He could easily still be on track to give away some amount equal to whatever his net worth is on death by his death, though, and still meet a pledge to do it while alive. I don't know that anyone of extremely high net worth has ever tried to give away 50% all at once. I'm not sure that's even feasible in terms of finding organizations that could take and use that much money in a single year, other than donating directly to the US Treasury general fund.
That's cuz saying you want to give it away is not a simple thing, when most people around you only have the skills to accumulate it or spend it on themselves.
Not to mention all the pond scum it draws in that has to be constantly filtered out.
The people who have the skills to accumulate wealth at this scale don’t have the skills to give it away. They are extraction minded, and philanthropy is a direct contradiction to this mental model. Keep some to stay comfortable of course, but you have to be comfortable with your status, influence, and wealth substantially declining as a second order effect of the distribution logistics, and that’s just not who these people are.
MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example.
MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example
To be fair, neither can Bill Gates.
So it points to something fundamental about the way in which wealth works that these people can't give money away fast enough. Doesn't mean it's a problem though. Having money flowing up to Gates, Bezos, Scott and then having them give it away is probably the best we can do in the current legal and regulatory environment. Because the reality is that any efforts to change how things currently work would meet with too much resistance from others in power.
Another fundamental that it points to is that we've somehow set up a system where instead of the general public determining (and funding) the public good through democracy, a handful of rich people simply decide what counts as a public good and steer their money toward those causes.
The US Government funds much more than any handful of rich people, and many times more than all of the charitable giving in the US every year. State and local government spending just piles on to the government spending side of the equation.
Building a business that provides useful products and services isn't "extraction minded." Most of the people I've know over the years who start businesses do so because they want to be the one making decisions and having the ultimate responsibility. A lot of them are very community minded.
I mean, Bezos started Amazon for a relatively modest amount of funding in a garage and built the "everything store" with a relentless focus on customer service. It's not like he's some 19th century oil baron. I don't want to fall into the trap of reading a mans mind from a distance, but you claim of "extractive mindset" is utterly unsupported and ideological.
Of course it’s ideological. How else does one arrive at ideas and concepts after a review of empirical evidence? The facts are the same, the conclusions we arrive at (including our ideologies) will be the intersection of the facts, our mental models, and our life experiences.
I think, they create a trust and somebody manages it and grows it and
gives away the profits to charity. Unless its the best run hedge fund, it will go to zero eventually in a thousand years.
Gates pledged to give most of it away when he dies.
In the meantime he's given away billions, but obviously he's invested the billions he still has, so unless his (doubtlessly world-class) money managers were completely incompetent he's going to at least break even.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation "now spends more on global health every year than the World Health Organization — not to mention more than most countries on the planet."[1]
But that philanthropy has its critics. One criticism is that it's very opaque and it's impossible to measure how effective it is. It's also both hugely influential and unaccountable.
Also, from the above-linked article:
"One 2008 article by two Oxford researchers, published in The Lancet, argued that the Gates Foundation was "misfinancing global health" — paying most of its grants out to rich countries and prioritizing infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) over major chronic killers such as obesity, cancer, and diabetes."
"Another 2009 paper in The Lancet, by a group of University College London health and development researchers, found that despite the Gates Foundation's emphasis on improving the lives of the poor, its grants didn't actually reflect the burden of disease that the poorest face."
"An example: the Gates Foundation has received lots of positive press for its role in financing the eradication of polio. And yet, even that campaign had its critics, says McGoey. In her research, she found key stakeholders in some of the countries that were the focus of the campaign expressing the view that "this was really a priority of wealthy nations and not necessarily developing ones, many of which were more preoccupied with battling illnesses that created a far greater health burden in their nations [such as diarrhoeal diseases in India]. They were compelled to emphasize polio [eradication] against their will."
"Another concern that comes up in the academic literature is that the Gates Foundation is too focused on drugs, vaccines, and other technological solutions for global health problems. But many researchers, by contrast, would prefer a focus on the less exciting but crucial work of strengthening the health systems of poorer countries."
"For similar reasons, the Gates Foundation's work on malaria drew criticism from some corners. In a 2013 article in Global Society, Youde pointed out that the head of WHO’s malaria research, Arata Kochi, sent a memo complaining that the foundation "was stifling debate on the best ways to treat and combat malaria, prioritising only those methods that relied on new technology or developing new drugs.""
"The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."
If I give $10 to charity, my wealth is reduced by $10. The naive assumption is that if Bill Gates gives $10B to charity, his wealth is also reduced by $10B.
Can you explain why the naive assumption is wrong? Because I actually can't, not without more thought and research than I've given it.
Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time.
Gates can give substantially more money if he leverages it to grow over time. I would wager that it is going to take decades if ever that the Gates fund will hit $0. Yeah it's not as flashy as "Died with $0 of his fortune left", but under the hood the net good done is orders of magnitude greater.
> Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time.
If you can do that in perpetuity, then it actually means you're giving away none of your wealth away. You're selling the time value of money back to the people that generated it for you.
You've essentially taken out a giant loan, but the interest is being borne by the people who generated that wealth for you in the first place. And your "charity" amounts to sometimes reimbursing those people for paying the interest.
In that case, more power to him, and no argument about net good - I guess for me, the issue is with the wording. 'Most of his wealth' to me implies someone's giving away most of the principle, not most of the proceeds. Which of course Bill Gates did, just to a charity he also controlled. Again, more power to him and I'm glad the precedent is set, regardless of how I feel about the Gates foundation's activities. But it still doesn't feel the same as giving it to a charity someone else controls.
Gates pledged to give his wealth away before he dies, not immediately. And that's good - the world will be getting much more money than it'd get if Gates just gave away all his money the moment he announced it.
> Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.
Gates' wealth fluctuates all the time. There was a time when he was rather low due to his donations - multiple 10s of billions down. He got back over $100B from cca $50B - that's $50B more for charity than if he just donated everything he had left.
It does, but that doesn't mean your net worth will decrease by that amount that year. There are other effects - e.g. the rest of his investment portfolio.
if you give away $10 then your net worth at that moment goes down...it may easily recover that price, but if you count it like that then you can surely count that the money you donated would have been worth more too
Yeah but nobody has that granular logs of Gates' net worth and donations. At best, it's calendar months, sometimes you can try to assume weeks, with a big maybe.
I think the Gates Foundation does good work, but the cynical "so what?" is that creating a structure like this to "give away most of his $124bn (£107bn) fortune during his lifetime" (RE the linked article about Bezos) is a ruse to maintain control over the money without paying taxes - while also producing some good PR.
If they truly wanted to just give it away, Chuck Feeney offer a straight forward model for doing so. You just do it. If "giving it away" merely means putting it into a foundation you control, many people would feel that little has, in fact, been given away.
I fully believe they're doing it to retain control of their money, and I don't mind, Bill Gates is a master handler of money - in fact I find the system that led to people like Bill Gates working on things that are good for the general humanity to be genius. It's not like he's going to embezzle the money out of his foundation to buy another villa. Bill Gates doesn't fucking care about a hundreth villa. He's really working on the projects, and he's deploying the money in a way that promises results - that's exactly what I want to happen. I am happy.
And the PR? Let the guy have his fame, he's really worked for it.
Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Key point here: before other people in order to be seen by them
We have a similar notion in Islam called Riyaa' (رياء), where not only will the person engaging in it not get any rewards in the Hereafter, but he would be actively punished for it.
Intention matters. It is possible that doing a major good deed in public is the right thing to do in order to get other people to do the same. It's all about setting your intentions right.
Is it a pledge? Or an Amber Heard pledge? I feel like we're seeing the Michael Scott version of declaring bankruptcy here. I'll believe it when I see it.
Once the money is in the foundation or DAF, you can't get it back out again to use for personal gain, and you really can't use it to pay yourself.
If you make a foundation, you can pay people to run it, and they can be friends of yours, even family members, but it's not like you can pay them ridiculous amounts of money compared to other foundations. That would be illegal.
That's not to say some people don't try that, I'm sure. But if they abuse it to much, they will likely get caught eventually. Certainly some probably pad just a little, and nobody raises a fuss, but it's not like some instant magic hide from estate tax thing. It's more like, hire your kid that's to stupid/lazy to work for a living. Sure it can be a totally cushy job. It's not any different than mom and pop's grocery store back in the day hiring their idiot kids to make sure the back wall of the store doesn't fall over. Sure it's a mostly pointless job, but it's not illegal to do that.
Since it's their money to control, they can of course use it to prop up some particular viewpoint, but it mostly washes out, since both aisles of the political camp can and do stuff like that.
So that article is mostly just uninformed crap, sorry.
"The Mercers and the Allenders are among a small but growing number of wealthy Americans who’ve discovered how to bypass rules designed more than a half-century ago to ensure philanthropists stay accountable for the billions of dollars in tax breaks they receive each year. The key is the donor-advised fund, or DAF, which is so flexible that charitable dollars can sit in one indefinitely, and so opaque that no one needs to know either way.
...
In a study of more than 2,600 DAF accounts, the Council of Michigan Foundations found that the majority of donors paid out less than 5% of assets in 2020. More than one-third gave nothing to charity at all. The biggest sponsors of the funds have rebuffed calls to release that kind of account-level data, even as the number of accounts has swelled to more than 1 million. As of 2020, DAFs held almost $160 billion, an 85% increase in four years. Although the industry says it’s paying out more than one-fifth of its assets a year in aggregate, the reality is probably less: Some of the biggest recipients of grants from the funds are other funds, as donors shift money from one sponsor to another."
Yes, the money can sit in a DAF almost forever, but the original donation or any proceeds from the DAF can not be used for anything BUT charitable purposes. The money WILL eventually end up put to work for a charitable purpose.
A DAF *IS* a non-profit itself. It's bound legally to only disperse the funds to other charitable purposes.
So your entire complaint is, the donor gets the tax write off the day they donate it to a DAF, but the funds in the DAF might take a while before getting put to work for a charitable purpose?
"If you make a foundation, you can pay people to run it, and they can be friends of yours, even family members, but it's not like you can pay them ridiculous amounts of money compared to other foundations. That would be illegal."
They can direct their foundations to give billions of dollars to corporations controlled by their friends, who use that money (after taking a cut, of course) to do whatever it is the foundation was set up to do.
This is one of the things the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was accused of doing: enriching their friends' corporations.
Of course, their friends can do the same in return, or compensate them in other ways, in money or influence.
Please understand the law, once it's in a Foundation or DAF, you can't then send the money to corporations, only to charitable purposes. For a Foundation, it's more limited than that, as you have to spend the money to fulfill the foundations purpose for existing.
Charities buy products and services all the time... for charitable purposes, of course. That money they spend goes to corporations.
That's what I meant when I said "They can direct their foundations to give billions of dollars to corporations controlled by their friends, who use that money (after taking a cut, of course) to do whatever it is the foundation was set up to do."
It's not "given" in the sense of a gift, but given as part of a trade. The corporations they purchase from still profit.
OK, You are correct, they can buy goods and services from corporations, but this will ONLY apply to Foundations, as DAF's are different. Plus, it's not like these foundations can get away with over-paying for goods and services. They have to file returns to the IRS, if the expenses start to look ridiculous, they can audit, just like they can audit anyone else.
DAF's are not controlled by the contributor, so this does not apply to DAF's AT ALL.
"it's not like these foundations can get away with over-paying for goods and services"
It doesn't have to be gross overpayment[1], it could just be funneling the money to companies that benefit friends, family, or people they want to influence or get favors in return.
"I still don't see why this is somehow bad"
It's bad because these billionaires get good PR for giving away money and hero worshiped for being selfless benefactors of the needy, while they might be lining their friends' pockets and maybe themselves, just doing so under the veneer of philanthropy.
Whether these "philanthropic" foundations actually do any good, or how much good they do for all the money spent and all the influence they have because of it is yet another issue that's explored elsewhere in this thread and the many articles that have been written about them.
[1] - though I wouldn't be surprised if some foundations get away with this... whether they get caught depends on a lot of things
How is funnelling money to their buddies any different than the entire rest of the world? This is how the entire world works, that you think it should somehow be different in charitable causes is the funny part.
In your personal dealings, if you have to buy X and your friend sells it and some random stranger sells it, would you rather buy it from your friend? If the answer is yes(which will be true for 99+% of the entire 8 billion people on the planet), then you are being at the very least a touch hypocritical.
I think with your attitude being fairly common, this good PR perspective doesn't seem to necessarily be true.
As for doing good, what does that have to do with anything? There are tons of non-profits out there, that are objectively failing at their mission. Should they all close as well, just because they had a bad year or two? Clearly whoever is funding and controlling the foundations thinks they are doing good. I guarantee even the most widely accepted non-profits get plenty of criticism at failing to do good. Good is not an objective measure anyway. If I think saving the last 2 stuffed Tux penguin's on the planet is important and I'm willing to pay for their continued survival, what does it matter that you think stuffed Tux Penguins is not doing anything good in the world. It's not your resources used to keep the last 2 stuffed Tux Penguins in good condition.
FYI: Foundations are generally required to spend at least 5% of the total fair market value of its noncharitable-use assets from the preceding year on charitable causes. This means that they will almost certainly close eventually.
Probably going into a “donor advised fund” which allows bezos to claim a multibillion dollar tax break for a lifetime without having to prove the money was actually spent towards a cause.
Yeah, but once it's in a donor advised fund, it can't come out. No, it doesn't have to be spent right away but at some point it needs to be given away. It's not like you can just put money in a DAF and take it back out when you want to buy a yacht.
If someone can accumulate that much wealth in a lifetime it means way too much was extracted from each individual.
Then they distribute it back to mend the damage as they see fit, not as society deems needed.
I'm not against millionaires but the exponential level up to billionaires probably shouldn't exist because it means the balance in the system is beyond broken.
No-one has contributed billions of value to society.
That someone can make billions of dollars by creating a website while teachers and other workers who actually help people often risk their lives for shitty pay is sheer insanity.
You're going to see a lot of cynicism in this thread so I want to be a dissenting voice. This is a great thing. I'm glad the ideas behind the Giving Pledge are catching on.
The cynicism is warranted in my opinion. Because we've seen rich people give money only the further their wealth and power by influencing politics around the world, even when it appears that they're helping poor people.
Realistically how can he do that without tanking the stock price? He owns 100B in Amazon stock. Anyone with knowledge care to chime in on how he could ever access it? For comparison, Vanguard and Blackrock (shares owned by little folks like us) own 69B and 59B.
Mackenzie, his ex-wife, owns 33B and has pledged to give hers away as well on The Giving Pledge.
He can give the shares away directly. Start a charitable foundation, give the shares to the foundation, and then the foundation can liquidate slowly (over decades if need be) to access capital.
He won't sell it all at once. Bill Gates used to own lots of Microsoft stock. Over time he sold it off and diversified, to the point that it's now only about 25% of his net worth.
The key thing is that over time, Microsoft transitioned to a point where Bill Gates wasn't running things day-to-day and investors became comfortable with him not having any control. At that point, him selling shares was no big deal.
At the other end of the extreme would be someone like Elon Musk, where Tesla's stock price is almost entirely dependent on him being at the helm. If he were to walk away now, the shares would tank in value.
Jeff Bezos is somewhere in between. Clearly, Amazon would run okay without him, but he still has some involvement. He certainly can't sell all of his shares, but if he sells over time and makes it clear (and credible) that he is selling in order to use his money elsewhere (rather than trying to time the market because he thinks the stock is overpriced), the share prices of Amazon should hold up just fine.
I'm the last who thinks he cares about people well-being, but..
What the F is going on. Apparently this is in response to a lot of criticism towards Jeff on how he should spend his money? I mean, excuse me? He can spend his money any way he freaking wants IMHO.
So he is basically going to be creating a tax free way to pass all of his wealth to his kids? I am against taxing inheritance, but people praising billionaires for pledging to get around it legally is annoying.
Bozo was part of that pledge with Billionaire Bill, along with Warren Buffet.
Billionaires in general are just a sign of the apocalypse, a social defect.
.. what a crock. yet another scoundrel ploy to skirt paying relevant taxes, etc. just like gates. just like peter thiel. just like Yvon Chouinard [patagonia ceo]. just like warren buffet. blah, blah, blah ...
can't wait for adam conover [adam ruins everything] to jump on this one.
Surely you have heard opposite opinions to your own that are not reductive (as you have written yours)? I.e. I understand that you might disagree with the opinions of others, but I don't understand the implication that you should feel "like a lunatic", since that usually implies that you don't comprehend the opinions of others (which is different from disagreeing).
No you're not the only one, plenty of people think like that which is why they keep capturing most of the value created by their employees and getting away with it.
I totally agree. They also overlook that this wealth isn't entirely "earned" by the billionaire. After all, wage theft is the most common form of theft.
For a comparison, an amazon warehouse employee making $15 an hour, would have to work 40hrs a week, 52 weeks a year for almost 4 million years to accumulate the wealth Jeff has. Personally, I don't think that's equitable.
We could apply a really high tax rate to billionaires, but that has its own set of problems and doesn't guarantee anything will change for the warehouse workers. Governments are much less efficient than private companies at spending; a lot of the taxes will go towards 'defense'; which government should tax global companies like Amazon?
The employees could vote and decide themselves what to do with the money. After all, they're the ones who do all the work.
If not that, I'm sure if we use our imaginations we could come up with some better system than we have now. Really, it doesn't even have to happen all at once. Incremental change is still change. Perhaps, we could start by mandating that the company's books be open to the workers, or that they have a veto vote over CEO compensation. There are tons of things we could do, the problem is really power dynamics not lack of ideas.
A lot of effort goes into doing things like raising taxes and spending public money on education and health- mostly because those are the levers we have access to right now. Not because those are the things the left would really like to change.
It sounds like "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
If someone is starving, and you have food to give them, you don't say "We could give them food, but that has it's own set of problems. I guess there's no way to solve the problem"
> Governments are much less efficient than private companies at spending;
This is frequently touted as an axiom, but usually 0 evidence is provided. Can you back this up in any way or form? Or is this just something you've heard as a political talking point?
Looking at the VC craze and company overspending during the Remove/Covid craze, it's completely not evident that private companies are 'better' at spending money than governments. If anything, many of them displayed poor fiscal discipline through overhiring and basing long-term strategies off of a limited-time pandemic.
I don’t understand how you can possibly think that someone’s contribution to the world is so outsized as to be worth millions of times that of say a teacher or a care worker. Would the world really be that much a worse place without bezos? I actually think there’s a decent argument to be made that it would be better…
Have you just swallowed the idea that the market value of something is equal to its value to society?
I guess I would like to hear your justification that billionaire’s deserve their wealth, bearing in mind that this typically does come at the expense of others.
They deserve their wealth because you keep buying and using their products. If everyone who hated billionaires stopped using amazon tomorrow, Bezos would be in serious trouble.
But alas, Bezos offers a service that enormous amounts of people seemingly can't quit using, which to me (and the market that prices it), is infact worth hundreds of billions.
I haven't used amazon in 2 years. I'm sick of sitting in peoples apartments listening to them cry about billionaires while I'm tripping over prime boxes to get to the bathroom. Wake up.
>They deserve their wealth because you keep buying and using their products.
Can you elaborate on this? It doesn't follow at all to me. If somebody makes billions and another person makes thousands, but the billionaire does not work proportionally hard or deliver proportional value to society or does not behave morally, and I buy products from both people, you may (and should) criticize me. However, there's no logical reason that means the billionaire "deserves" all their wealth, if we are using the word "deserve" by its normal conversational definition. The offloading of 100% of responsibility to the consumer seems like a really weak scape-goat based on emotions.
Everyone involved was acting voluntarily. No one's forcing people to work at Amazon, nor to buy from Amazon. We all set up these rules of the game, and he played and won.
Don't get me wrong, I think he's an ass. He took Captain Kirk to space, but then dissed him on the ground to pour champagne on the desert. Also I really miss used book stores.
But as a businessman I don't see how he doesn't deserve what he has, he's earned it, eh?
I very much do put the blame on "the consumer", they are the ones who keep giving Bezos money!
Fixing wealth inequality doesn't necessitate throwing out the entire legal and economic system we have. Workers can form unions if they they are not being recognized. There is no need to topple capitalism so that amazon can become a nationalized business with an inverted pay hierarchy.
Legally, no. The company belongs to investors and the workers signed a contractual agreement with those investors.
Any single one of those workers could have spun off and sold their value to any other buyer willing to pay the price they(the worker) wanted. Most don't do this though because they are willing to take a lower pay in order to (greatly) mitigate risk.
Also, as you might be surprised to learn, workers already keep the majority of value they produce. Quick example: Gold mine owner lets workers keep 90% of everything they mine. Gold mine owner doesn't mine at all, but is by far the wealthiest person in the operation.
> Fixing wealth inequality doesn't necessitate throwing out the entire legal and economic system we have
I don't think anyone's suggesting that. More likely they are advocating for higher taxation on the highest earners and perhaps on the largest businesses (notably, we already had this in the 60s/70s/80s). This would leave us with largely the same economic system, except with a counterbalance to a key a flaw in the current setup: that in a given time period, those who already control capital can typically turn that into more capital with much less effort than those who don't start out with that capital.
The global income distribution model (farmers in India -> Jeff Bezos) is problematic.
But it's such a chaotic system that anyone claiming to have the solution (similar to anyone claiming there is no problem) is likely lying.
The only solution (to me) that even starts to make sense is some sort of forced worker ownership, but lord knows what the details of that might look like.
There's a difference between brutal totalitarian regimes in which an elite exercise absolute power over millions of people and actual ownership by workers themselves.
It's the elites of those countries which owned everything and controlled everything.
If you weren't part of the elite you had to follow orders.
There isn't much that is admirable, heroic, or likable about keeping wealth to yourself. Should they be forced to give? No. But I think it is fine for your wife and friends to look down on it. Private beaches, ridiculous mansions, crazy car collections, our culture should criticize that.
Nope you’re not the only lunatic. Add to that the fact that most billionaires don’t “have” wealth the way we think of wealth.
In that, most of it isn’t in some bank account sitting there waiting to be used. What they’re more likely to have truly liquid is probably on the order of many (MANY) millions.
It’s the value of stuff they have like stocks. Yes they can borrow money against those assets but it is never just “why can’t Bezos just do an ACH transfer to ____ nonprofit?”
It’s “just” the size of his stock portfolio in the way your stock portfolio looks if you had put all your money into one stock.
> Add to that the fact that most billionaires don’t “have” wealth the way we think of wealth.
While it's true that if they were to instantly liquidate all of their stocks/assets, the real number of their "wealth" would be significantly reduced, they still operate with insane amounts of money.
The question still remains though whether at that level of ownership they are still generating enough value as a CEO/board member for the outsized returns they are receiving as an owner.
What's frustrating to me is that seemingly no one who complains about billionaires actually understands why they are billionaires and what the difference between a checking account and a 20% equity stake are.
I've spent a lot of time trying to think of ways to remedy wealth inequality, and the best I can come up with is "If you hate Bezos so much, you should probably quit your addiction to Amazon Prime."
Yes, there is probably no way to remedy wealth inequality that is easy or even that doesn't have serious downsides and an enormously volatile period of acclimatization. But that doesn't mean there is definitely no realistic way to accomplish it in the long run. Of course we should try to get consumers to stop participating, but making it 100% their responsibility is highly unrealistic/reductionist. Consequences are incredibly abstracted away from consumer behavior, and the good to the consumer's life is so immediately felt, and consumers are understandably desperate for good in life (even something as simple as convenience has a big impact). It is not entirely, or even mostly, their fault.
Here's how I think about it: Would you be OK if a handful of people in the world suddenly became septillionaires? A septillionaire could give $1trillion to every person on the planet every year for 100 years and still have 99.99% of his money left. How much power and influence over the world would someone like that have, while the rest of us have comparatively close to zero net worth and zero income? There are currently no upper limits in our capitalist system, so it's entirely possible for a person to have $1e24 or one day accumulate it.
I think almost everyone would think this should not be allowed, for obvious reasons. So, therefore there is some wealth threshold beyond which it is not good for society to let a few people accumulate. So, what is that threshold?
