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We can’t leave it to billionaires to solve the world’s problems
- 0x1221 7y agoI'm really not a fan of the rising trend to attack billionaires just because they're billionares. There are plenty of points that each of the mentioned individuals can be legitimately criticised on. Their level of wealth or the decision to donate it to one cause or another is not a valid point of criticism.
- iammyIP 7y agoI'm really a fan of the rising trend to attack billionaires just because they're billionares. There aren't plenty of points that each of the mentioned individuals can be legitimately criticised on. Their level of wealth or the decision to donate it to one cause or another is a valid point of criticism.
- huffmsa 7y agoI'm really a fan of the rising trend to attack the poor just because they're poor. See, I can do it too.
- iammyIP 7y agoI'm really a fan of the rising trend to not attack billionaires just because they're not billionares.
- Frost1x 7y agoThat's a rising trend? Pretty sure culturally, that's been deeply embedded and attacking the poor hasn't improved quality of life for most working class americans. Now, people are looking at other places that might be the problem (finally), such as systemic economic structural abuses by those with great wealth.
- mantas 7y agoThat's same logic how worst regimes of 20th century were born.
- iammyIP 7y agoThat's a totally different logic how best regimes of 20th century were born.
- mantas 7y agoSome members of group X do something big part of society perceive as bad. Then The People gang up and take care of whole group X just in case. I read your comment 2nd time and it feels identical to what Nazis said about Jews. The group owns disproportional amount of wealth, some of their practices are questionable... So why not remove whole group for good.
- ds_ 7y agoIt's only not a valid point of criticism if you believe any level of wealth is justified as it must be proportional to that individual's contributions to society.
- mech1234 7y agoI think that billionaires' wealth is justified, with the exception of criminal billionaires. Assuming that they pay all taxes that they are legally required to pay, why do you think that they do not have a right to their own personal property? They earned their property through voluntary agreements with other individuals. A Warren-style wealth tax comes up surprisingly short in terms of funds collected for the government relative to the risks it faces ($2.75 trillion over 10 years, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/facts-on-warrens-wealth-tax-plan/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/facts-on-warrens-wealth-ta...) The risks it drives include capital flight, worsened corporate governance, and decreased economic dynamism. These are all long term risks that are difficult to quantify. Most countries that have ever instituted a wealth tax have later repealed it. In every economic sense, taxing income is a better idea than taxing wealth. Much of our understanding of wealth distribution is biased toward our home country. There's a pretty good chance that if you are an HN reader you are in the top 1% of income or wealth in the world (http://www.globalrichlist.com/ http://www.globalrichlist.com/). When I consider how little of the government's efforts try to solve global humanitarian problems compared to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I tend to think that the Gates' charitable contributions do more to address income inequality than a wealth tax on Gates would have. In many ways the charitable contributions by billionaires solve problems that the government is poorly equipped to solve due to collective action problems. Forcing any large-scale charitable effort to be redirected through the government risks stultification, political misappropriation of funds, endless bickering about policy goals, projects cancelled due to changes at each election cycle. Having a two-pronged approach of private and public charity is more robust.
- mantas 7y agoLet alone that sometimes problems and/or ways to solve them are... subjective to say the least. Or priorities are different. It's OK to spend money without getting approval from the hive mind. It feels like rehash of centrally governed rehash. If non-profit problem solving shall be centralised, maybe for-profit activities shall be done according by government-approved plan as well?
- anonsivalley652 7y agoTheir balance sheet isn't the point, it's what they did and are doing to get there that is the point: - taking away healthcare from the poor, killing people - destroying/privatizing what was once free and part of the shared commonwealth - privatizing what never should've been profit-motivated in the first place: hospitals, prisons, schools and so on. - "deregulating" removing pollution and safety protections that were written in blood - spending money to corrupt the political process in order to buy passage of laws - underpaying workers so they have to live in their cars and cheating them out of the profits they helped create It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair (One could also call it the "Upton Sinclair-effect".)
- ickwabe 7y agoOne of the major problems with the concentration of wealth in such few hands is that the societies/countries where these folks live don't get to make collective decisions about how the money is spent. Most have made their money using the many advantages of their countries. Roads, infrastructure, eductaion, stability, government, etc. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But when we allow such concentration of wealth we have given away the decision power to this handfull of people about how all that wealth gets used. The very top wealthy may in some cases believe their motivations and decisions are altruistic. That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent." So while the fault for how we get in these situations of terrible wealth inequality may be shared by the peoples and governments that allow it, the wealthy themselves cannot escape their share either. And in terms of who has more individual power to help restore balance by influencing the system, it sure isn't the single parent working a minimum wage job. Or a family barely getting by after an economic downturn destroys their jobs. Or the student struggling to pay their loans because they chose to get a degree in social work or eductaion instead of compsci or finance quant. So it would be nice to see a lot more effort by more these lucky billionaires to actually correct wealth inequality and the systemtic issues that leads to this type of inequality.
- 0x1221 7y ago> That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent." Owning the wealth gives them authority on how it's spent.
- nickpp 7y agoI much more trust the billionaires to solve the world's problems than the politicians. I know it's popular to rain crap on rich people (just see Hollywood's long list of well moneyed villains) but in the Real World I have many billionaires I respect and admire (from Gates to Musk and Bezos) and ZERO politicians.
- csunbird 7y agoWhile your approach is valid, the problems arise when the billionaires are the politicians. That is how you get corrupt governments.
- nickpp 7y agoOh, but you don't need billionaires to get corrupt governments. You just need politicians. Who then become corrupt billionaires. But they were politicians first.
- adrianN 7y agoBenevolent dictators are the most effective may to govern, but it's really hard to prevent malicious dictators from rising in such a system.
- osdiab 7y agoWhile I detest the enormous wealth inequality in our world today, governments aren’t shaping up to be an appealing alternative. I can’t speak for other countries but US government seems to systematically undervalue making and executing decisions efficiently. To me, the biggest failure of US-style democracy - often touted as a strength in the form of checks and balances (admittedly, thankfully because Trump has been slowed down quite a bit) - is its inefficiency - so many social problems root from that alone. (I’m of the camp that issues like immigration are less of a “dumb racist conservatives” problem as the American left puts it, and more of a “convenient scapegoats for hopelessly low opportunity” problem, I say as someone who leans liberal but feels repelled by the way the party acts) I got tired of SF government being so thoroughly useless at improving day to day life for its citizens, that I moved out to Tokyo now. They’re not perfect by any means, but the feeling that systems actually seem to work well, is revolutionary for me in a time of intense political disillusionment.
- huffmsa 7y agoFirs thing this article takes a shot at is Bezos deploying $10b "like Gates before him." Gates has, to my knowledge, been vastly more successful than any government program at reducing malaria and getting people vaccinated. Which is an exact antithesis of the subheading of the article.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoI think the operative word is We, because left to their own device drivers billionaires (and soon-to-be the first "Tyrell Corporation" trillionaire): - narcissism, greed & hubris - political, regulatory & media captures become the dominating gradient vectors which tends to aggregate capital in the hands of those with the most power and extract it from those with the least. (Not a conspiracy theory, but a diffuse set of circumstances, patterns, attitudes and behaviors that snatch externalities and collapse from the jaws of success.)
- huffmsa 7y agoIf the government was competent, Tyrell and Wayland Yutani wouldn't be the interspacial leaders in space mining, would they?
- mam2 7y agoYou clearly cant leave it to governements.. whuch one is the worsr devil ?
- datashow 7y agoAnother funny thing is, "we" usually attack both millionaires and billionaires. Now, millionaires are forgiven. It seems many of "we" become millionaires.
- cryptica 7y agoOr more likely it means that millionaires have more social and political influence than before.
- cryptica 7y agoThe government needs to make it undesirable to become a billionaire. There should be an upper limit as to how much money you can have. Most of the world's problems are caused by millionaires trying to become billionaires - Beyond a certain point, it's all zero-sum games that destroy society.
- cryptica 7y agoNo one complains when the government creates regulation to artificially help boost rich people's wealth but if I make a comment about artificially limiting billionaire's wealth, people who are not even billionaires care about that? Even though it doesn't affect them personally?? Then they go around preaching the doctrine of capitalistic self-interest. The law of capitalistic self-interest according to Milton Friedman basically says: Take the money from wherever you can get it, however you can get it. Billionaires have a lot of money, so why don't we all collaborate and take it? Why the double standard? Why is everyone collaborating against the lower and middle classes? If you're reading this, you're the middle class! Unless these billionaires are paying you to down-vote, the law of capitalistic self-interest says screw them.
- huffmsa 7y agoWhat if I told you that no matter how many questions you got right on a test, you'd never score higher than a 70%. Are you going to try to get 100% correct?
- cryptica 7y agoIf nobody knows what is required to get 70% correct and their expectation (based on past experiences) is at 10%, then if they want to succeed, they'll work as hard as they can regardless. Maybe the test is extremely long and challenging and basically no one will even score 50%. That is actually the reality of capitalism. Basically no one becomes a billionaire and almost none of them could have planned for it. You don't need to keep multimillionaires working; after a certain point, they add no new value. Just look at Facebook, after Mark Zuckerberg became billionaire, it was all negative-sum games. It would have been better if he had just retired to Hawaii and let someone else have a go. Why keep the guy under this illusion that he is still playing a fair game? He is not playing the same game as he was playing when he was in his Harvard dorm room... And even that game was way easier than the game that 99.9% of people alive today are actually playing.
- HellDunkel 7y agoThe real dilemma is our eroding trust in politicians. Why is this happening?
- huffmsa 7y agoYou're not supposed to trust politicians. Nothing good has ever come from trusting a politician further than the length of rope you need to dispose of them.
- HellDunkel 7y agoYou probably should not trust a single politician nonetheless you should have some confidence in the democratic process, right?
- huffmsa 7y agoOf course, confidence in the process, but also always prepared to take action if things go off the rails. That's why the Constitution is written the way it is. Trust the system, doubt the people involved.
- bobosha 7y agoThis is a false dichotomy, to put it mildly. Bill Gates singlehandedly did more to eradicate Polio & several other deadly diseases than multiple Governments, WHO, and several development orgs over several decades! This demonization of the billionaires is uncalled for, many of them do plenty of good for society on balance.
- thosakwe 7y agoWhy is this flagged? Stop using a moderation feature as a downvote (or maybe the flag threshold should be raised higher).
- kthejoker2 7y agoThe real issue is we can't leave it to billionaires to decide what the world's problems are.