6 ms·

Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees? Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyon

by d-d 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees? Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion?

ggtfggyyy 7y ago
You need it explained why helping vulnerable and poor groups instead of giving a bonus to your already well payed employees is considered philanthropic? I really don't see what you're driving at here.
- d-d 7y ago
  Isn't it just depriving the employees of the philanthropy money they labored to produce?
  - gargs 7y ago
    It is. Also, philanthropy is tax advantaged. It's the giving that keeps on giving back.
    - ggtfggyyy 7y ago
      This is rediculous and dripping with silicon valley "we're workers too" attitude. Employees, especially tech employees, have the luxury of being able to go elsewhere if they don't feel they're being adequately compensated. There is no comparison between helping poor african groups or donating to education and giving your employees, who agreed their wages were fair, a raise. Even if you don't like it, it's ultimately his money. This isn't the alms that could have kept the poor coders from having to endure hardahip. It's difficult to comprehend the mentality that could see the workers as the victims in this situation. They were paid the wages they were promised, is the argument that somehow he's a bad person for amassing more than them?
    - darawk 7y ago
      "Philanthropy is tax advantaged" just means that you don't have to pay tax on the money you donate. You don't keep any extra money for yourself.
      - gargs 7y ago
        Unless the philanthropy is run like a business with you as the investor/stakeholder.
  - darawk 7y ago
    They are not being 'deprived' of anything. They agreed to exchange their labor for a fixed price, and they received that price. There was no 'deprivation' anywhere in the system.
    - d-d 7y ago
      That's legalistic though. If you're withholding the fruits of labor from workers because "too bad, bro; you signed the paper" then you're not really trying to be kind to anyone. You just want to be rich and appear to be kind.
      - mamon 7y ago
        >> withholding fruits of labor from worker How much of the worker output actually is his personal accomplishment, and how much is synergy effect coming from the fact that the employer gave them tools, materials, support of other workers, standard operating procedures, know-how? Therefore not all "fruits of labor" actually belong to a worker.
      - darawk 7y ago
        Respecting human choices and agency is 'legalistic'? That's quite the reductionist leap.
- cjslep 7y ago
  Let the market decide. Paying your employees better would be "trickle down economics" in actual action. If those employees decide to use it for philanthropy then the "trickle down" continues. Except "trickle down" hasn't happened, isn't happening, and won't happen.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    There’s no such thing as “trickle down economics”, the phrase “trickle down” was a joke created by a comedian named Will Rogers. So if you’re waiting for a satirical critique of politics to start shaping the economy, then I don’t know what to tell you. What growth does do is increase competition for labor, so if your economic life plan resolves around earning income from labour, then you benefit from growth. You can see the effect our most recent growth trend has had in the fact that the unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since the 60s [0], wage growth is double CPI [1], and workforce participation is starting to creep back up after a rather long downward trend [2]. [0] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/mobile/median-weekly-earnings-of-full-time-workers-increased-4-point-0-percent-in-2019.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/mobile/median-weekly-earni... [2] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
    - cjslep 7y ago
      I think giving me a charitable interpretation would be a good start. The origin of the phrase is lost in modern day culture and has a well understood meaning, and you denying me that makes it clear what kind of engagement you are looking for: one in which you feel justified and correct. I'll give it to you: You're right! Good facts! Moving on now... I don't care if my neighbors can get one decent job or more-than-one-shitty job (your [0] and [2]) nor do I care that for X years we had growth in wages (your [1]) when the previous N*X years (for large N) that "real growth in wages" was 0. I would love to sell you stock that will grow at 0% for 30 years and only the last 5 have 2% over inflation. I don't want that toxic shit in my portfolio. What I care about is the mentality that is justifying making "the market" be one or a handful of people, who happen to own a massive amount of wealth. It's no longer a free market. They are the market. Its self delusional to think someone shouting "I am the State!" has a democratic government, just as someone shouting "I am the market!" is a free and open capitalist market. Basically, I can't believe my free-market loving friends are ok with its own dismantlement by the concentration of wealth by the ultra wealthy. And I am trying to get through to them. Give the money to the employees. Who cares if they're already overpaid, because if they are then they'll also make philanthropic donations.
chii 7y ago
> Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion? If you're looking to do philanthropic actions, giving all employees $100k doesn't do anything. It merely increases the wealth of those employees by a bit. What about fighting malaria? What about fighting climate change? Do you seriously expect all those recipients of $100k would all contribute as much proportionally? And those employees have already been paid their agreed wages/salaries. So why does giving them extra money makes it more philanthropic?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- js8 7y ago
  > It merely increases the wealth of those employees by a bit. What about fighting malaria? What about fighting climate change? Do you seriously expect all those recipients of $100k would all contribute as much proportionally? Yes. In a sane democratic system, I would expect government to finance these projects. And it does. Now you can somehow make an argument that people in democracy are less likely to support these projects than they are alone as wealthy people. I don't see how it would work. Self-selected billionaires are on average less selfish than ordinary people?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    There are more important observations to make: - The budget of a democratic nation isn't under direct control of its constituents, so average selfishness of the citizens has nothing to do with it. - A democratic nation has lots of interests jockeying for the budget, and can easily swallow arbitrary amounts of money. - Almost all of that money is spent on improving the things for that nation, so a nation state is not the best organization to task with solving a global/international problem. Most importantly though, the more diffused the money, the less effective it is. Coordinating people costs a lot (think of how much charities spend on advertising!). With his fortune, Gates can just drop $60M on some promising anti-malaria activity; in the alternative reality d-d/you are proposing, it's unlikely that 600 of his employees would suddenly coordinate to drop their $100k on that operation; most likely, no money would be donated at all. So the argument essentially boils down to focus. Much like with distractions and personal productivity, both the market and a government budget can absorb arbitrary amounts of diffuse money with little of value to show for it; it takes focused, bulk money under control of a person to move the needle on some issue.
oblio 7y ago
As much as I'm generally for wealth redistribution, that's not how it works. Gates and probably Bezos especially want to control their companies. They founded them, after all. So for that they own shares and those shares are the bulk of their money. Also, I don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft was actually famous for distributing wealth quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft > The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That doesn't stop them from sharing the profits if they want to.
  - oblio 7y ago
    True, but does any mega corp do that? I wish it did...
  - koffiezet 7y ago
    Ehm giving shares to employees is exactly that: sharing the profits.
    - oblio 7y ago
      I think his point is for the on-going operations of the company. Employees there at the IPO make a lot of money but those afterwards probably make way less. At many companies employees don't even get any kind of RSU/ESPP/stock option grants, etc. Just as a though experiment, Apple Inc. has about 140k employees and had a net profit of $55bn last year. If they'd keep half the profit, you know, for a rainy day, they could give a yearly bonus of ~$20k$ to each employee. With 0 risk for the company, financially. Now, I'm not sure how this would work out since generally cash based bonuses are considered bad for long term motivation, but it is something worth pondering, at least.
adventured 7y ago
> Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees? Because you have to dedicate immense resources in a concentrated approach for an extremely long period of time, to conquer some major problems like Malaria or to develop an HIV vaccine or to drive down vaccine production & distribution costs (& difficulties) for the third world. Private philanthropy can often maneuver at speeds that government money can't, take risks governments don't like to, and go places that government money takes far longer to go (there are typically few stakeholders, decision makers - Bill Gates can just decide tomorrow to put a billion dollars behind a thing, whereas the same action might take many months or years by a government body). If you have 100,000 people and give them each $100,000, their actions will be wildly disparate and will make essentially no impact on major problems. They may make small dents in very local problems, at best (and or improve the well-being of their unit: their family, neighborhood, community and similar). There's nothing wrong with that mind you. However standard local problems already have heavily proven systems that work on them, particularly local government + taxation (this is obviously dependent on the effectiveness of the local government in question and the taxation; regardless it has been repeatedly shown to be highly effective all around the world).
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  But billionaires can also decide to spend their money on projects that work against the public good. Including those that subvert the value of government spending. Philanthropy is - at best - one side of the coin. The other side is the anti-democratic identity between >$1bn net worth and political leverage. (Actually that leverage probably starts at around $100m - although the more you can put on the table the harder you can push to tilt it.)
newnewpdro 7y ago
Amassing the billions in itself is not philanthropic, it's how those billions are then used. You're certainly not being philanthropic giving those billions to your already handsomely paid employees whose welfare is already more than secured.
WalterBright 7y ago
> sharing profits with employees? Microsoft had generous stock option grants to employees. The Seattle Times reported in the 1990s that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the area. Getting rejected by Microsoft in the 1980s is one of the ways I've cleverly avoided becoming a billionaire :-)
j7ake 7y ago
I believe Microsoft has created a huge amount of money for their employees (their IPO created billionaires and order of thousands or tens of thousands of millionaires). I don't think Microsofot employees feeling snubbed by their CEOs. So in this case Bill Gates is doing both. Sharing profit as well as being philanthropic.
eru 7y ago
Microsoft employees are already pretty well off. At least much better off than the people he's helping with malaria.
0xBA5ED 7y ago
>Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion? Would be a neat social experiment. Give all your employees FU money and see how many show up the next day.
zozbot234 7y ago
Your money just goes a lot further when paying for the general provision of public goods (not just giving someone a bonus and calling it "profit sharing") in very poor countries. Some social scientists and analysts are talking about a 1000x multiplier: the social benefit of spending $1 for targeted philanthropy in poorer countries might be the same as someone in a first-world country spending $1000 on their private consumption.

by d-d 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees? Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion?

ggtfggyyy 7y ago

You need it explained why helping vulnerable and poor groups instead of giving a bonus to your already well payed employees is considered philanthropic? I really don't see what you're driving at here.

d-d 7y ago
Isn't it just depriving the employees of the philanthropy money they labored to produce?
- gargs 7y ago
  It is. Also, philanthropy is tax advantaged. It's the giving that keeps on giving back.
  - ggtfggyyy 7y ago
    This is rediculous and dripping with silicon valley "we're workers too" attitude. Employees, especially tech employees, have the luxury of being able to go elsewhere if they don't feel they're being adequately compensated. There is no comparison between helping poor african groups or donating to education and giving your employees, who agreed their wages were fair, a raise. Even if you don't like it, it's ultimately his money. This isn't the alms that could have kept the poor coders from having to endure hardahip. It's difficult to comprehend the mentality that could see the workers as the victims in this situation. They were paid the wages they were promised, is the argument that somehow he's a bad person for amassing more than them?
  - darawk 7y ago
    "Philanthropy is tax advantaged" just means that you don't have to pay tax on the money you donate. You don't keep any extra money for yourself.
    - gargs 7y ago
      Unless the philanthropy is run like a business with you as the investor/stakeholder.
- darawk 7y ago
  They are not being 'deprived' of anything. They agreed to exchange their labor for a fixed price, and they received that price. There was no 'deprivation' anywhere in the system.
  - d-d 7y ago
    That's legalistic though. If you're withholding the fruits of labor from workers because "too bad, bro; you signed the paper" then you're not really trying to be kind to anyone. You just want to be rich and appear to be kind.
    - mamon 7y ago
      >> withholding fruits of labor from worker How much of the worker output actually is his personal accomplishment, and how much is synergy effect coming from the fact that the employer gave them tools, materials, support of other workers, standard operating procedures, know-how? Therefore not all "fruits of labor" actually belong to a worker.
    - darawk 7y ago
      Respecting human choices and agency is 'legalistic'? That's quite the reductionist leap.
cjslep 7y ago
Let the market decide. Paying your employees better would be "trickle down economics" in actual action. If those employees decide to use it for philanthropy then the "trickle down" continues. Except "trickle down" hasn't happened, isn't happening, and won't happen.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  There’s no such thing as “trickle down economics”, the phrase “trickle down” was a joke created by a comedian named Will Rogers. So if you’re waiting for a satirical critique of politics to start shaping the economy, then I don’t know what to tell you. What growth does do is increase competition for labor, so if your economic life plan resolves around earning income from labour, then you benefit from growth. You can see the effect our most recent growth trend has had in the fact that the unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since the 60s [0], wage growth is double CPI [1], and workforce participation is starting to creep back up after a rather long downward trend [2]. [0] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/mobile/median-weekly-earnings-of-full-time-workers-increased-4-point-0-percent-in-2019.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/mobile/median-weekly-earni... [2] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
  - cjslep 7y ago
    I think giving me a charitable interpretation would be a good start. The origin of the phrase is lost in modern day culture and has a well understood meaning, and you denying me that makes it clear what kind of engagement you are looking for: one in which you feel justified and correct. I'll give it to you: You're right! Good facts! Moving on now... I don't care if my neighbors can get one decent job or more-than-one-shitty job (your [0] and [2]) nor do I care that for X years we had growth in wages (your [1]) when the previous N*X years (for large N) that "real growth in wages" was 0. I would love to sell you stock that will grow at 0% for 30 years and only the last 5 have 2% over inflation. I don't want that toxic shit in my portfolio. What I care about is the mentality that is justifying making "the market" be one or a handful of people, who happen to own a massive amount of wealth. It's no longer a free market. They are the market. Its self delusional to think someone shouting "I am the State!" has a democratic government, just as someone shouting "I am the market!" is a free and open capitalist market. Basically, I can't believe my free-market loving friends are ok with its own dismantlement by the concentration of wealth by the ultra wealthy. And I am trying to get through to them. Give the money to the employees. Who cares if they're already overpaid, because if they are then they'll also make philanthropic donations.

chii 7y ago

> Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion? If you're looking to do philanthropic actions, giving all employees $100k doesn't do anything. It merely increases the wealth of those employees by a bit. What about fighting malaria? What about fighting climate change? Do you seriously expect all those recipients of $100k would all contribute as much proportionally? And those employees have already been paid their agreed wages/salaries. So why does giving them extra money makes it more philanthropic?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
js8 7y ago
> It merely increases the wealth of those employees by a bit. What about fighting malaria? What about fighting climate change? Do you seriously expect all those recipients of $100k would all contribute as much proportionally? Yes. In a sane democratic system, I would expect government to finance these projects. And it does. Now you can somehow make an argument that people in democracy are less likely to support these projects than they are alone as wealthy people. I don't see how it would work. Self-selected billionaires are on average less selfish than ordinary people?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  There are more important observations to make: - The budget of a democratic nation isn't under direct control of its constituents, so average selfishness of the citizens has nothing to do with it. - A democratic nation has lots of interests jockeying for the budget, and can easily swallow arbitrary amounts of money. - Almost all of that money is spent on improving the things for that nation, so a nation state is not the best organization to task with solving a global/international problem. Most importantly though, the more diffused the money, the less effective it is. Coordinating people costs a lot (think of how much charities spend on advertising!). With his fortune, Gates can just drop $60M on some promising anti-malaria activity; in the alternative reality d-d/you are proposing, it's unlikely that 600 of his employees would suddenly coordinate to drop their $100k on that operation; most likely, no money would be donated at all. So the argument essentially boils down to focus. Much like with distractions and personal productivity, both the market and a government budget can absorb arbitrary amounts of diffuse money with little of value to show for it; it takes focused, bulk money under control of a person to move the needle on some issue.

oblio 7y ago

As much as I'm generally for wealth redistribution, that's not how it works. Gates and probably Bezos especially want to control their companies. They founded them, after all. So for that they own shares and those shares are the bulk of their money. Also, I don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft was actually famous for distributing wealth quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft > The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees.

jacquesm 7y ago
That doesn't stop them from sharing the profits if they want to.
- oblio 7y ago
  True, but does any mega corp do that? I wish it did...
- koffiezet 7y ago
  Ehm giving shares to employees is exactly that: sharing the profits.
  - oblio 7y ago
    I think his point is for the on-going operations of the company. Employees there at the IPO make a lot of money but those afterwards probably make way less. At many companies employees don't even get any kind of RSU/ESPP/stock option grants, etc. Just as a though experiment, Apple Inc. has about 140k employees and had a net profit of $55bn last year. If they'd keep half the profit, you know, for a rainy day, they could give a yearly bonus of ~$20k$ to each employee. With 0 risk for the company, financially. Now, I'm not sure how this would work out since generally cash based bonuses are considered bad for long term motivation, but it is something worth pondering, at least.

adventured 7y ago

> Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees? Because you have to dedicate immense resources in a concentrated approach for an extremely long period of time, to conquer some major problems like Malaria or to develop an HIV vaccine or to drive down vaccine production & distribution costs (& difficulties) for the third world. Private philanthropy can often maneuver at speeds that government money can't, take risks governments don't like to, and go places that government money takes far longer to go (there are typically few stakeholders, decision makers - Bill Gates can just decide tomorrow to put a billion dollars behind a thing, whereas the same action might take many months or years by a government body). If you have 100,000 people and give them each $100,000, their actions will be wildly disparate and will make essentially no impact on major problems. They may make small dents in very local problems, at best (and or improve the well-being of their unit: their family, neighborhood, community and similar). There's nothing wrong with that mind you. However standard local problems already have heavily proven systems that work on them, particularly local government + taxation (this is obviously dependent on the effectiveness of the local government in question and the taxation; regardless it has been repeatedly shown to be highly effective all around the world).

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
But billionaires can also decide to spend their money on projects that work against the public good. Including those that subvert the value of government spending. Philanthropy is - at best - one side of the coin. The other side is the anti-democratic identity between >$1bn net worth and political leverage. (Actually that leverage probably starts at around $100m - although the more you can put on the table the harder you can push to tilt it.)

newnewpdro 7y ago

Amassing the billions in itself is not philanthropic, it's how those billions are then used. You're certainly not being philanthropic giving those billions to your already handsomely paid employees whose welfare is already more than secured.

WalterBright 7y ago

> sharing profits with employees? Microsoft had generous stock option grants to employees. The Seattle Times reported in the 1990s that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the area. Getting rejected by Microsoft in the 1980s is one of the ways I've cleverly avoided becoming a billionaire :-)

j7ake 7y ago

I believe Microsoft has created a huge amount of money for their employees (their IPO created billionaires and order of thousands or tens of thousands of millionaires). I don't think Microsofot employees feeling snubbed by their CEOs. So in this case Bill Gates is doing both. Sharing profit as well as being philanthropic.

eru 7y ago

Microsoft employees are already pretty well off. At least much better off than the people he's helping with malaria.

0xBA5ED 7y ago

>Like why doesn't Gates or Bezos give everyone a $100k bonus and keep a billion? Would be a neat social experiment. Give all your employees FU money and see how many show up the next day.

zozbot234 7y ago

Your money just goes a lot further when paying for the general provision of public goods (not just giving someone a bonus and calling it "profit sharing") in very poor countries. Some social scientists and analysts are talking about a 1000x multiplier: the social benefit of spending $1 for targeted philanthropy in poorer countries might be the same as someone in a first-world country spending $1000 on their private consumption.