Worst ways to spend a fortune, and her politics largely align with mine, but..
"funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels"
We won't "raise awareness" ourselves to a carbon-free future. We aren't going to vote away the need to heat/cool/power our homes/factories/transport/etc.
I'm also let down by "kitchen sink progressives" who while espousing the desire to end fossil fuel usage, are basically funding/promoting just about every left of center activist topic you can think of. I don't think this leads to great success in any one area.
I am fairly confident that activist-driven stuff around the edges like banning gas stoves in NYC is not putting a dent in the path to a carbon-free future.
The only things that will are nuclear/wind/solar generation, storage tech, transit, smart grid/transmission lines, and all the permitting reform needed to keep the NIMBYs & degrowthers & fake environmental review people from slowing it all down. Basically boring non-sexy stuff that doesn't animate the base.
I always find the 2nd/3rd generation philanthropist class a bit opaque as well. At least with the 1st generation, you have a pretty solid idea of their net worth and thus how much of a "sacrifice" their charitable works are (Gates/Mellon/Buffet/etc). With people like Hunt-Hendrix, you have only a pretty spotty record of giving (10s of millions) with no idea how much money she got for being born (50M? 100M? 2B?).
This lines up with the other numbers we have seen of oil&gas loving, renewable-hating Texas is also... the leading builder of renewables. Why? Because regardless of what the party controlling the statehouse prefers in red & blue states, it's just easier to build anything in a red state.
Similar anecdote re: housing permitting/building in blue districts/states - in the entire 5 boros of NYC, there were ~200 housing unit permits approved in July.
Blue northeast states like NY/PA/MA/NJ/MD are clocking in 18-30 units per 10K residents of construction. ID/UT/CO/SC/FL/NC/TX range from 66 to nearly 90 units per 10K residents. DC is an outlier as a high construction blue area around 66 as well.
The article reminds me of the philanthropists of the late 19th/early 20th century like Andrew Carnegie. His attitude was to amass wealth in the first half of your life and then give it away in the second.
It makes sense to me that once you accumulate sufficient wealth, the surplus is for 'the greater good'. The big question is what is that greater good. I guess an easy answer to it is 'leaving the next generation in a better place than the previous'.
Well he grew up in poverty so I don’t think it was from the beginning. I do think that he became interested in philanthropy from his thirties onward and I believe he made his first library donation at at 44, but didn’t retire and commit himself to philanthropy full-time until his sixties.
Undoubtedly Andrew Carnegie distributed his fortune to the benefit of the populace and created a lasting legacy while doing it. However, he believed wealth was supposed to be in the hands of a select few and not in the broader population: leveraging the working man to attain his position of privelege.
most gold prospectors work hard to find that boulder. you could argue one could fall upon it in the middle of Manhattan, but that is a good story, not a typical example
well if the way to make that wealth is more nefarious to society that whatever philanthropic behavior you do afterward when you retire, then was it worth it ?
for you if you only care about how it made you feel then probably,
but for society I'm not sure.
Even if you're actually able to accumulate masses amounts of wealth, would you be able to better redirect it based on 1. other ideas of 'better' 2. how you achieved it.
He shouldn't have acquired it in the first place, and appropriately allocated ownership to those doing the work in the first place
The act of accumulating it in the first place is unethical
If you then, on your own WHIM and directed however you and you alone want to, give your money away it's no different than starting yet another "going concern" of people who are now employed to give your money based on how YOU want to spend it
Yes. And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. They amass great fortunes on the backs of the labor force then tell them what's good for them is to ... go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
No. Hell no. People shouldn't be allowed to be THAT wealthy. I don't know how that looks but just no.
[1] Knowing full well that same labor force won't be invited.
> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that.
Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively.
Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt.
> go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.
> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
I believe that there are genuine skills separating billionaires from normal people, but I'm not sure that the primary one is reliably "[being] better than average at doing the rational thing". Being OK at logic, starting with some money, and having an enormous tolerance for risk seems to be a common formula for becoming billion-scale rich (and also, in most cases, much poorer than that). I'd argue that this kind of appetite for risk, and volatility in general, makes such people questionable managers of society's resources, though I guess there are more "steward-style" billionaires like Buffett that might be more palatable.
> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
I call BS.
First, Musk is all about the irrational.
Second, being a billionaire doesn't mean you have some super power. It's luck and rich parents (usually). Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO!
> Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO!
Amazon has ~1.5 million workers. If Jeff Bezos donated his entire fortune to them, that would be a one-off payment of $11,000 each. That is quite substantial, but it isn't enough to be a political issue - for example the US wasted an order of magnitude more money on the Afghanistan war (completely pointless) and about order of magnitude people were displaced. We should be more worried about allowing people like Bush having influence.
Do you expect to be typing my comments for me? Of course it isn't what you said! It is what I said.
You're focusing on the rounding error. Focus on the big issues. Bezos is making great use of those resources compared to the next-best non-billionaire institution, which is the US government.
Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, amounts to quite little. For instance, the Iraq War cost around $2 trillion. [1] Take the complete wealth of the richest 25 Americans [2] and you still couldn't even come close to funding that one conflict. And it's not like Iraq was an outlier. This happens repeatedly, and endlessly.
The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today.
I think you'll find that even if you cap lifetime earnings and max inheritance at one billion dollars (and were able to rigorously enforce that), you'd still have a healthy population willing to start large enterprises.
If someone needs more motivation than earning billion dollars to start large industrial enterprises, I guarantee there's someone who'd be willing to try it for a billion or less.
pg has an interesting essay exploring this question called Billionaires Build[0], the TLDR is that he finds that these people are intrinsically motivated to keep going for reasons other than monetary gain. Otherwise they would’ve quit long before a billion dollars anyway.
"One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do."
That there's nothing you'd rather do in the present context, doesn't mean that'd also be true if you make it literally financially pointless.
In any case, I think this is all a non-starter. If loop-holes were not readily available, people would simply move to different countries. The exact thing is happening in Norway to a somewhat comical degree. They recently chose to increase their wealth tax on billionaires. Dozens of billionaires thus chose to leave the country directly because of this, resulting an overall decline in tax revenue than if the country had retained the previous tax levels. [1]
I wonder how much that motivation is about 'well, if I sold out- these other people are purely about the monetary gain from it and me cashing out' vs the original mission. Or in other words, the altruism of the motivation.
This requires a person to believe that money which wends its way through a political system, with its attendant cronyism and moral hazard, is better spent than money with a shorter path between its donors and recipients. The caveat is that the overall level of outflows from rich to poor might be (would probably be?) lower without taxation, but it is possible for individuals to be telling the truth when they say they believe that money does more good as charity than as tax revenue.
Well, luckily we have billionaires to explain it to us.
Most billionaires seem agreed that its mandatory health policies + a bio-metric management id scheme, education, less children, protect the environment, etc. No need to worry! And anyway, once your children are educated in the right way, they'll know too!
Isn't Norway a bit hypocritical: Amass wealth from providing fossils to other countries polluting the world, then be super environmental locally? Sure, still miles better than most of the other fossil rich countries, but the Netherlands for instance are actively shutting down their gas fields if I am informed correctly..
I've always wondered if Norway turning all its oil into dematerialized paper securities as fast as possible, is really a better long term investment strategy than just leaving this tangible commodity right where it is, to be tapped when it becomes really scarce at some point decades from now.
The average amount of energy to extract new reserves has steadily increased. I think ATM it's around 1/8th of oil/energy extracted is needed to extract said oil.
So even if it's not scarce, the factor of how economical it is to grab it is a factor.
The philosophy behind Norways management of the oil wealth is that the natural resources are the property of every future generation, not just the one that happens to extract the wealth. So it is invested to last "forever", and max 3% is taken out of the found every year. This had the added benefit of avoiding the "Dutch disease".
Importantly, the goal is NOT to make a better world in general, but to secure income for the future generations while avoiding "clearly very bad stuff". Typical middle of the road stuff. This is a political discussion, and some parties want to "pull the wealth out of the hands of the money-bureaucrats and back under democratic controll" and use it to make a better world, even if means spending a significant chunk of future generations money. But currently the dominating view is that the primary goal of the wealth found should be a stable income, while avoiding the worst companies.
I don't know if this is a satisfying answer to what a private person should do with their inherited wealth. Does she feel a moral obligation for her descendants to also be rich? Maybe she feels some obligations towards those suffering from climate change? Is she afraid of destroying local economy with inflation? Anyway, Norway don't have all the answers.
No it couldn't have? The article is about an oil heiress who has spent her adult life working with and bankrolling various leftist causes, and is a long examination of how that kind of person fits into those causes. As the article puts it:
> When libertarian or right-wing plutocrats buy influence—fossil-fuel executives pushing for deregulation, hedge-funders who want lower taxes—it’s easy enough to understand what they’re up to. But leftist class traitors are harder to pin down. They can always be suspected of performative reputation-laundering, or dilettantism, or dual loyalty. The left is wary of them for having been born into an obscene level of privilege; the right resents them for not having the common sense to shut up and enjoy it. It’s one thing to be a rich liberal—acknowledging your unearned privilege, endeavoring to leave the world a little better than you found it—and another to be a rich anti-capitalist radical, galvanized by the conviction that you are complicit in a historic injustice.
Norway's oil fund, as far as I know, was started to exchange the country's hydrocarbon revenues for less volatile income and, in more recent years, avoid investing in places and companies that it deems unethical. It is still basically about growing investments, and its ethical choices are much more conservative and institutional than those covered in the article. I don't see how anybody could actually read this article and think it's asking a question that Norway's oil fund answers.
> “She has better politics than anyone else who’s that rich, and she’s better at fund-raising than anyone else with her politics,” Max Berger, who worked on Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign in 2020, told me.
Is all you need to know about the direction of this idiotic culture war piece.
Nope. I read it and found many interesting points on how the ultra rich on the left operate, as well as about this family that I had never heard of. If you want to see it as a culture war piece, then you will see it as a culture war piece, can't really help with that.
Sure they spent it on Norwegian people, but at the same time they're still enabling an unsustainable way of life for the rest of Europe. E.g. the gas and oil-dependence of Germany.
I can’t tell if this Max Berger quote is a lament or just unintentionally ironic: “Whatever you want to call my faction—the Bernie wing, the Warren wing, democratic-socialist, social democrat—we would have way less power if Leah didn’t exist.”
We won't "raise awareness" ourselves to a carbon-free future. We aren't going to vote away the need to heat/cool/power our homes/factories/transport/etc.
I'm also let down by "kitchen sink progressives" who while espousing the desire to end fossil fuel usage, are basically funding/promoting just about every left of center activist topic you can think of. I don't think this leads to great success in any one area.
I am fairly confident that activist-driven stuff around the edges like banning gas stoves in NYC is not putting a dent in the path to a carbon-free future.
The only things that will are nuclear/wind/solar generation, storage tech, transit, smart grid/transmission lines, and all the permitting reform needed to keep the NIMBYs & degrowthers & fake environmental review people from slowing it all down. Basically boring non-sexy stuff that doesn't animate the base.
I always find the 2nd/3rd generation philanthropist class a bit opaque as well. At least with the 1st generation, you have a pretty solid idea of their net worth and thus how much of a "sacrifice" their charitable works are (Gates/Mellon/Buffet/etc). With people like Hunt-Hendrix, you have only a pretty spotty record of giving (10s of millions) with no idea how much money she got for being born (50M? 100M? 2B?).