16 ms·

Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Giridharadas

115 points by colinprince 6y ago

Loughla 6y ago
This is the same argument that has been around for decades - the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. The difference is the out-in-the-open, stark, startling, and seemingly completely baked in income inequality. I think people outside of academia are finally talking about the morality of a billionaire's mere existence.
- reallydontask 6y ago
  > the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. maybe both?
  - curiousgal 6y ago
    Having worked with multiple researchers who received grants from the Gates foundation for noble projects such as abolishing famine in Nicaragua and improving food security across central America, the amount of wasted money opened my eyes to the shallowness of their attempts to fix the world.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      Care to expound upon this? It seems natural to me that something fighting against market failures would do things that would be financially irrational.
      - curiousgal 6y ago
        They spend a few thousand bucks conducting the experiments and collecting samples in those countries and then pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to gene sequencing companies. They get a spreadsheet in return that no one knows how to read or that has glaring discrepancies. I had to explain to 3 biogists that even though their PCA plot looks decent, a total explained variance of like 10% is not much to brag about. They had grants in the millions of dollars...
  - andresgottlieb 6y ago
    Most definitely both. But we, flawed, humans tend to think in black vs white
- untilHellbanned 6y ago
  I'm confused. How could the argument about Gates' philanthropic motives been obvious for decades but those about economic inequality not been simultaneously obvious? It's all one in the same problem. Philanthropy comes from wealth accumulation.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Wealth isn't zero sum.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Yeah I think that's the point.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      Therefore, it's not a real problem that Jeff Bezos owns 10% of Amazon. You wouldn't be any better off if he owned 9% or worse off if he owned 11% instead. It's a wedge issue.
      - mistermann 6y ago
        If half of Jeff's shares were transferred to a non-profit organization that assists homeless people, would that make a physical difference in the world, or would it have no effect?
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        That in no way follows.
      - mac01021 6y ago
        Well.... If he owned 9% instead of 10% and I owned the difference of 1%, then I would be better off.
        missedthecue 6y ago
        And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle.
      - sp332 6y ago
        Right. It's much more of a problem that his employees are getting less value than they create for the company, and he is taking a lot of the difference. Since all billionaires have made their fortunes this way (or inheriting from someone who did), billionaires should not exist. P.S. He owns 11.1% and had more before his divorce.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. ¿Por qué no los dos?
  - Loughla 6y ago
    Hence, a portion of the debate.
- 01100011 6y ago
  I know there are a whole host of issues, racial inequality, climate change, pollution, etc, which I consider to be 'one percenter problems' now. I'm just trying to save enough to retire one day and keep a roof over my family. Fixing global issues is a luxury. Maslow's hierarchy and all that...
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    That’s not the only issue, non-profits and foundations apply all kinds of political pressure in opaque ways. There are many non-profits funded by elites that operate to advance societal good superficially while pushing ulterior political motives. For a concrete example, a tremendous amount of money has recently flowed into sex education advocacy, some of which doesn’t have donor names attached to it. Organizations that aim to provide resources around things like consent and healthy sexual behavior find that courting this new money involves adopting an abstinence-only approach as a mandate. As a result, it’s hard to know if the organization you’re donating to is actually doing the advocacy work they used to advertise, and they’re not always inclined to be transparent around who calls the shots from a donor perspective. We like to think that political money lives only in super PACs and lobbying efforts, but this isn’t the case, and in some ways this makes the non-profit situation even more insidious. To be clear, I’m not denigrating all non-profit work, there are just some major transparency issues that need to be addressed.
    - growlist 6y ago
      > There are many non-profits funded by elites that operate to advance societal good superficially while pushing ulterior political motives. George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.
    - DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
      This comment hits on one particular issue of ulterior motives in the actions of a non-profit. But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?
- tetrometal 6y ago
  To this day I find the focus on income or wealth inequality to be perplexing. I literally just don't get it. Why should I care whether or not some crazy rich person can buy a yacht? It does me no harm.
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    Because it's a way to feel and connect with the group. It's a unifying message of propaganda. Examples: Look at how people argue over fictional characters or franchises.
  - mola 6y ago
    It's not the yacht, nor the money per se. It's the power they wield. A single person can entirely overtake democracy when he has billions. He can own press, politicians, etc.
    - refurb 6y ago
      What happened with Michael Bloomberg? Worth billions, wanted to run for President, spent hundreds of millions on ads and got nowhere.
      - mola 6y ago
        That's because he tried to play fair. Look at Sheldon Adelson, I won't talk about US politics, but during the last twenty years he pretty much changed the entire press landscape of Israel subordinating it to Netanyahu. He made a huge impact on Israel politics and public opinion.
      - fock 6y ago
        well, a hundred other people of similar circumstances not liking him?!
        refurb 6y ago
        But I keep hearing billionaires wield the power to do whatever they want. Bloomberg couldn’t even get his parties nomination. I guess billions doesn’t get you that much power.
- haecceity 6y ago
  What do you think about the claim that non profits like Bill's are only designated such to get favorable tax policies and are actually profit driven investment vehicles? http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/dylan-rodriguez-the-political-logic-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/ http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-...
  - Loughla 6y ago
    This was also part of the debate.
- taurath 6y ago
  I've done a bit of math on Jeff Bezos's wealth. Lets say we were looking to put a 5% wealth tax on holdings over $1billion. Jeff owns approx $166,500,000,000 in Amazon stock, at $3000/share, and 11.5% of the company (55,500,000 million shares). Lets assume that this is where ALL his wealth is (its not). That 5% tax on that would be $8,275,000,000. Were Jeff to sell shares to cover this, it would cost 2,758,333 shares. That would reduce his ownership of Amazon from 11.5% to 10.75%. Hardly the loss of a controlling interest. So by what moral justification can there be for the morality of having and holding $166,500,000,000 in wealth? That government is inefficient? That he can make better investments? Who do those investments benefit? Even assuming supply-side economics works to lift all boats (it doesn't, mostly), is it more moral to lift a middle-class person into the upper-middle class, a poor person into the middle-class, both, or neither? What I think is more likely is they just don't have to ever deal with people who are suffering, and have justified it in their minds as themselves being greater and this is the way of things. Certainly those that end up with billions of dollars at their disposal don't hold the same moral compass. And constant reminders of abject poverty haven't helped billionaires in developing countries do more to help the poor.
  - nradov 6y ago
    A wealth tax is attractive in theory but it's hard to put into practice for illiquid assets like privately held companies, real estate, intellectual property, and artwork. The optics are bad when the government effectively forces someone to sell off part of the family farm to pay that year's wealth tax.
    - paledot 6y ago
      Why oh why is it always "the family farm"? At this point, that deserves its own named fallacy. Fine, let's make the first $10 million tax exempt. Or is the hypothetical "family farm" a family farm like Johnson & Johnson is a family company? Of course, the reason that fallacy exists is because it works. Every argument against increased progressive taxation has been extensively focus-group tested, of course it works. But the need to consciously counter that messaging doesn't render the policy impractical.
- snarf21 6y ago
  Not trolling, but how much money is too much? Most everyone on this site is the top 1% of global households. Where is our morality then? Rhetorical question: do you give away a substantial portion of your largesse? But let's say he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. Is that more helpful? I think sometimes big problems take resources. My biggest complaint is that he has shown the ability to execute at scale and most of the companies they invest in don't. Spending even three months operationalizing one of these companies could be like a 100x on the money in.
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    > he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. No one is asking for such naive approach to redistribute wealth. It's to find better ways to utilize the wealth, which Bill himself would also agree in principle. What exactly the format requires discussion. But the first step is to allow such discussion to happen. And we are sure that a lot of the world people are not believing the meaningfulness of such discussion... And that's a big problem.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - snarf21 6y ago
      I guess I'm missing something. Isn't that the whole point of the foundation? To give away its money in ways they find most impactful? They don't tells us how to distribute our charity dollars. It seems silly for us to tell them how to distribute theirs.
  - hoka-one-one 6y ago
    It's always been interesting to me that the people most opposed to wealth gaps live in SF and LA. I'm sure they love the weather but I don't think that's all they're after. A counterargument is that "nothing happens in a vacuum" and their lack of economic fulfillment is due to this wealth gap. But I think we owe billionaires this same level of uncertainty. They only exist because society doesn't want to know what would happen if they were forced to give their wealth away. Side note, in my experience living in California many of my "broke" friends are actually terrible with money. I was talking to a guy the other day who spends $800/month on rent and $1500 on food. I'm sure it doesn't represent the whole, but in general I look at California liberals with a critical eye when talking about the wealth gap.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  This is the same argument that has been around for decades - the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. I think it's unfortunate that this part of the debate gets the focus. What I think is problematic in the Gates approach and those like it, is that they view the world through so many institutional and market filters that they don't notice various problems bubbling up that can't be measured in these terms. The most obvious thing is Gates' line "the world is getting better" which hinges on the fact the more people are moving from outside the money economy to inside the money economy (less people "living on pennies a day"). The problem is Gates can't see that people insider the money economy are in desperate circumstances. The recent interview with Gates was distinctly sad. In one area where he sort-of has things right, he doesn't understand that the flood of irrational here is very pushed by other monied interests which have become used to fending off all spending on longer-term social interests since these serve as threats to their short term profits. See this article describing the similarity of climate denialist and covid denialists: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/ https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...
foghornleghorn 6y ago
Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"
- untilHellbanned 6y ago
  What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? The tangible evidence to me seems to suggest it's a zero-sum game. E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.
  - harryh 6y ago
    The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.
    - wwright 6y ago
      Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?
      - tux1968 6y ago
        That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
        mistermann 6y ago
        We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.
umvi 6y ago
Even non-elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem IMO. For example, cancel culture is the end result of non-elite do-gooders banding together to "do good". I believe the net effect is actually quite bad, but the people engaging in cancel culture really believe they are helping fix the world.
- juliushuijnk 6y ago
  Cancel culture* is not new. If you say you are a cannibal and eat human flesh, you're out of a job, same thing 100 years ago I assume. The thing that is slowly shifting is what is morally acceptable, or perhaps that more voices are part of the discussion of what is morally acceptable. Shame has its function. Personally, I'm more worried about people who are proud to not use morals and are not hypocritical about it, than the do-gooders who put the bar higher than they can live up to. Yes, they are more often hypocrites. That's great, you can point to that and expect some kind of feedback loop to have effect. People without shame, who apply no morals to their deeds, are not to be applauded. I hope you agree when it comes to things like child beating. Now the questions is where to draw the line for cancel culture. Not if cancel culture is a 'bad thing'. * Probably people load the word 'cancel culture' differently. I see it as pointing out morally bad behavior, and asking other people to also notice it, hoping there will be repercussions.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    A lot of people refer to cancel culture this way, because they're bigots who don't like people pointing out that they're bigots (or fans of bigots who they don't like being called out as bigots). However, there is another problem: a “dark side” of people being willing to call others out on their shit. Clickbait. It's surprisingly easy to make it seem like arbitrary person X is an evil evil person, regardless of whether they actually are. If you're familiar with person X, you might be able to spot a lie… but being universally sceptical will protect you from legitimate call-outs as well as fake ones. The average person has no real way of knowing, even if it's occurred to them that they might need to check. So, yeah: overall, I think this is probably a good thing. But it's set back the lives of some good people. (There's a rather simple way to turn this around: remove guilt by association. It should be okay to defend cancelled people. Defending bad actions doesn't need to be okay, but if it's costless to lie / “bend the truth” for social media clicks and costly to rebut them… calling people out on their shit becomes a much less useful force for good.)
ssivark 6y ago
This subject always reminds me of the quote from popular and beloved British actor Paul Eddington, which puts on display a very different and much gentler ethos from the “doer-ism” sprayed on us quite constantly: "A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be, 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little [harm], that would suit me." It’s worth pondering whether the same (limited) perspective that caused several problems is sufficient to fix some problems without exacerbating others. The whole point of democratization of power is to distribute decision-making so people could make the right choices as locally apt.
- kshacker 6y ago
  Interesting... I used to have similar ideas about "at least do no harm", but the intolerance of the times radicalized me somewhat and the new mantra is not only to reduce the harm I do, but to also somewhat counter the harm others do: either by negating them or their deeds. Because if we let some harm seep through because we ignored it, that is still not good enough for our society. Now of course we (the people) look at things differently so me going carbon negative (for example) may encourage others to pollute even more because hey u/kshacker is going to fix it so I know the thought process needs further evolution.
  - ssivark 6y ago
    The point of the quote is not so much about countering harm caused by others, but first: How confident can you be that your actions to help are not misguidedly exacerbating problems? Is there a line beyond which one could be overconfident, our arrogant? What external feedback should you attend to?
throwawaysea 6y ago
I disagree with the notion that "elite do-gooders" (which seems like a pejorative phrasing) are part of the problem. These people have worked hard and brought innovations to the world to generate their wealth. They have great judgment and lots of experience, and they should be afforded the freedom to invest in the problems they value and the freedom to manage those solutions. Chances are, they will end up being more impactful than the typical waste that comes with slow-moving, bureaucratic, bloated governmental organizations. However I do also support creating a more functional market with enough room to enter so that other innovative, motivated entrepreneurs can effectively compete. That doesn't require some kind of destructive ground up rethinking or abandonment of capitalism. It requires a tweak - namely updated anti-trust laws that are actively enforced. This would achieve a different distribution of wealth and power while retaining the mechanisms we have in place to reward success precisely.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > These people have worked hard and brought innovations to the world to generate their wealth. The richest three Americans have more money than the poorest 50% of Americans combined. However hard those three worked worked, there is no way that they worked harder than half the country. As COVID-19 has shown us, you don’t get far without the jobs we value the least. We need supermarkets open, bins taken away, rest homes cleaned etc. Wealth is further concentrating too, exacerbating the issue. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#25b87fbc3cf8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric... https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282-billion-three-weeks-coronavirus/267027/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282...
rayiner 6y ago
Anand Giridharadas has a degree in politics and history. Completely unqualified to comment about issues that are fundamentally about economics, public health, etc. I’ve watched over the last 30 years as the “age of capital” has lifted millions out of poverty, and organizations like the Gates foundation have helped drop the infant mortality rate by 3/4 since my family left the country. Meanwhile, socialists like Giridharadas have done nothing but hold the country back, trying to keep us in poverty. Millions of children are dead because of the multi-decade detour socialists line Giridharadas took India and Bangladesh in during the 1960s-1990s.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Right... Only the rest of us on HN have the right to offer opinions! What could a knowledge of history/politics ever contribute to the discussion? :-)
- royaltheartist 6y ago
  Those are political decisions.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Political decisions that rest on understanding economics.
    - ianleeclark 6y ago
      Political decisions never have rested on understanding economics, they rest on an enforcement of power.
      - royaltheartist 6y ago
        Weird how the people with all the power also have all the wealth. Must be a coincidence.
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    The same Politicians have been in power for 6 decades and haven't achieved anything they have promised every election. So how exactly did their "political decisions" help?
11235813213455 6y ago
I believe a large part of the solution is still to minimize one's environmental footprint, to act by consuming much less, to live more simply In developed countries, less than 1% of the population do that, if it's 50% of the population, it's a total game and climate changer
- quotemstr 6y ago
  50 years of scolding people hasn't worked, but a bit more scolding now might do the trick, right?
  - 11235813213455 6y ago
    it's common sense more than scolding
- scrozier 6y ago
  Making the author's point: "If only...."
  - 11235813213455 6y ago
    yes and no, because I do it, and I do my best to convince other people, that's all I can do anyway
richm31415 6y ago
"Distrust those who profess altruism." "Don't be helpful: be useful, be available." "Helpful people are a nuisance." - Guitar Craft Aphorisms - https://www.dgmlive.com/in-depth/guitar-craft-aphorisms https://www.dgmlive.com/in-depth/guitar-craft-aphorisms
prvc 6y ago
Professional pundits 'offering' old observations, watered down to the point of near-meaninglessness, as their own original ideas, are part of the problem: prvc
dfee 6y ago
Resource attribution seems to follow the power law. Is there a way to solve around this without creating unintended consequences which are worse? There probably isn’t even too much difference over the ages either. It’s just in America’s democratic-republic with capitalism the billionaires aren’t royalty.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Can't think of anything but progressive taxation and redistribution of such taxed money. The power law comes from various positive feedback loops on the market, so it sounds only fair that if you want to clamp it down, you need to inject a strong negative feedback loop into the mix.
blisseyGo 6y ago
Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice." - Thomas Sowell https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1133792472063258627 https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1133792472063258627
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  Rather than just downvoting, I'll offer another perspective. Sowell's statement is vacuous, just a bumpersticker retort. Rather than engaging in the issue, it simply questions the motives of the opposite party and in fact dismisses their motives as one of the seven deadly sins. I realize this is twitter and not a well developed thesis, but that just means twitter is a terrible platform to meaningfully engage in nuanced topics. It is a great platform for shallow thinking and insults, though, akin to the excuse, "I have a wonderful proof of this but the margin it too small to contain it."
  - nickff 6y ago
    What you say about Twitter sounds about right, but Sowell appears to have put a bumper-sticker quote on a bumper-sticker; he's written a bunch of long books if you want to find out more about his views.
    - blisseyGo 6y ago
      Note that the twitter I linked to is not Sowell's actual twitter. He doesn't use Twitter. It's an account which tweets useful passages from his books.
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    Sowell has written plenty of books on these topics which are worthy reading. The quote is from one of his books. The twitter account I linked is not actually Sowell's. He doesn't have twitter. The account simply posts quotes from his books. So no, it's not just a bumpersticker retort. Growing up in a poor south asian country, I was taught to only care about the food on my plate and not be jealous of the food on someone else's plate. That made me work hard at putting more food on my own plate without being jealous and stealing from another's plate.
owenshen24 6y ago
I haven't read Giridharadas's book, and this article was very light on substance. I do think this is an interesting topic. Effective altruism has lots of ongoing internal discussion about the efficacy of pushing for systemic change. But I think the claims made in the article would have to be made a lot more substantive. See Scott Alexander's take here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/?reverseComments= https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...). Overall, I think parts of this approach might throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if we do restructure the way that society works, presumably we'll still care about interventions to improve well-being. I think effective altruism (https://www.effectivealtruism.com/ https://www.effectivealtruism.com/) has provided a lot of traction on how to think about these issues. Even if you disagree with their moral stance, I think it's hard to deny that people in the EA community have been very thoughtful about quantifying interventions and thinking about impact. And I don't think these sorts of questions are going to go away, come a social restructuring. There seems to be a lot that we can salvage from the EA viewpoint, even if we decide systemic change is the way forward, and I think that's worth emphasizing.
ChomskyNormal4m 6y ago
The idea that the problem is that some own more than others is itself an idea promoted by those who "own more than others". They set that as the thing to be argued about. The actual problem is social relations. The heir expropriates the surplus labor time of the worker. That is the real problem. Wealth redistribution is, in a dialectic sense, a goal of those who own the most wealth. It is a goal set by this elite. Workers controlling our own labor time has been the clear goal of the worker's movement for at least a century and a half, if not longer.
fnovd 6y ago
Ironically, the author was talking about all those other elites. Click less, but not before you've added my book to your cart! "If only" I could vote on how you spend your money.
- blueagle7 6y ago
  Is it that ironic? From what I can tell, He isn’t looking to become a billionaire but to gain money and recognition to further this idea.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
The article wasn't what I expected. As I read it, his main point is a valid one. If you want change, you have to participate in making that change. That participation is not limited to once every 4 year vote ( in US ), but rather an ongoing participation in society. There are some valid criticism of this approach ( demoracracy doesn't scale well; it does work well on more local level, but you don't want to have a vote for every little issue ).
DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
I read Giridharadas' book, and I found it to be pretty narrowly focused on hypocrisy of the wealthy class. Sure, there is a lot of undeserved back patting about how much good people are really doing in the world, but that's probably always been the case. I would have preferred a serious treatment of the ways in which the world has been improved through the mass reduction of deadly infectious disease, famine, and extreme poverty. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now explores these topics. To read Giridharadas, you might think that all social ills are caused by the wealthy in society, which made it harder for me to take his side on everything. Still, his main point stands that elites should feel bad about their concentrations of power and that the link between money and political power should be weakened.
aziytuiam 6y ago
It is much worse than this; the elite works to actively divide the populace and distract us. Note how divisive politics has become; divide and conquer.
btilly 6y ago
This article is a good example of "the pie fallacy". Read http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html for an explanation of what that is, and why it is a fallacy.
supercanuck 6y ago
It is kind of funny reading through these comments. The author's point is that power should be distributed and decisions should be made outside of those with concentrated amounts of wealth. Kind of like a democracy. Folks on this thread seem to be falling over themselves arguing that billionaires are justified to even be billionaires at all. The issue isn't that billionaires exist, its that billionaires have cornered all the decision making abilities of the public.
- mac01021 6y ago
  But how have they done that? We _do_ live in a democracy (well, a republic -- in the USA). The government/legislature does seem, to a large extent, to be beholden to the wants of the immensely wealthy, but that's only because the electorate at large won't hold their representatives accountable for that behavior. Despite having more resources and more leisure time than has been possible throughout most of history, people don't stay informed, contemplate policy, engage in activism, interact with their legislators ... The laws of human psychology may simply not afford people people enough agency for a large democracy to be fair and effective.
  - supercanuck 6y ago
    Essentially, you, me, the author of this piece is saying the same thing. The populace needs to take back control over their governance, and the way the author is proposing to do that is by getting involved in by "joining organizations, membership lists and movements that work toward building cross-racial, cross-class coalitions of people — with a goal to create a future that benefits most people."
    - mac01021 6y ago
      Would the need for the population to do those things be any less if there were no billionaires?
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
"Giridharadas calls on people to join organizations, membership lists and movements that work toward building cross-racial, cross-class coalitions of people — with a goal to create a future that benefits most people." Thinking for just a few minutes, there are so many facets and nuances to the issue of improving the world for others that the above sentence is a complete throw-away. One could get involved and sign up, but as the article already points out, how to know if the group you are joining is doing good or doing more harm? Did you join a group of virtue signallers or will you roll up your sleeves for Habitat for Humanity, or Doctors without Borders? A couple of notions: - How do you know if your effort is more like bailing water from a sinking ship, or, towing the ship into dry dock for repair? Maybe you have to bail at the same time you're towing. - What is the actual goal? To ensure that people are able to eat today? Are you trying to right a wrong, like human trafficking or environmental crimes? Are you trying to create a level playing field so people are able to go as far as their determination will take them? If you want a level playing field, what system are you modeling? The desire to do something is invaluable. I'd suggest two things: 1) keep it close to home. The farther the served are from you the harder it will be to see the results. If your aspirations are far from you, make it a goal to get there and see first hand what you're trying to aid, at least once. 2) Make it something where you can directly observe the results and know that your efforts are having a positive effect overall.
- mola 6y ago
  There's an old Jewish adage, help your city's poor first. I believe your point is similar.
haecceity 6y ago
"We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence," Anand Giridharadas told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed at a public event hosted by the Samara Centre for Democracy." Violence is unethical. Half of the food is theirs who is the rest to take it away from them?
dzink 6y ago
Architecting a working system requires objectivity. What happens when you have different doctrines in power? What do the prototypes of each model look like? What does the Big(O) of resource distribution look like (and where are the leaks). In a government managed system, you have a MASSIVE amount pooled resources controlled by whoever activated (or coerced) the most voters. What is the worst case scenario? Whoever is in power has a narrow list of buddies with businesses. Lucrative government contracts with little oversight on spending are taken to people who have some favor with the elected officials or their family members (and pay officials back in insider stock trading, or planned small stock dumps, or some other form of laundering). Money accrues to the family tree of those in power and those in power make all important decisions, eventually draining the country. Read the news in Eastern Europe for a while to see a live simulation. Foundations. Anyone can start one, fulfill a mission, work to make the world a better place. A lot of foundations are doing a lot of good out there, so where does that model leak? With stringent requirement to hold no profit at the end of the day, worst case scenarios with foundations look like this: Similarly to government, the distribution of large quantity of pooled resources can go to the team running the foundation. In some, the executives collect whatever money is left at the end of the day (can't leave a profit after all). In others, a foundation on the side of a lucrative business gets the profits to reduce the tax burden on the business, but then distributes those to friends as contracts or generates sales from that business at increased margins, etc. How do you know this is happening? If you look at the ever increasing number of foundations, there are no incentives to create economies of scale in giving, despite the high fixed costs of running of foundation. Where are the foundation mergers that would make giving more efficient? Thus the tax incentives given by government can sometimes turn foundations south. Where do Billionaires come in? A actually self-made billionaire has presumably lost the need to be corrupt. They have also proven themselves able to lead people to execute projects efficiently. The combination of resources, networks, and lack of misaligned incentives makes them more likely to focus on the impact of the work, than on self-enrichment with it. The down sides can happen if the original billions were a con-scheme and not actually acquired (Madoff), or if the billionaire is completely incompetent in the field they are giving in, or if they do it for the attention and ego boost, and social favors that may come from being asked for money. With all the attention paid to one person, however they can be more easily scrutinized than the other two models. Please do feel free to contribute to this analysis tree.
alpha_squared 6y ago
It's fascinating and saddening that this conversation that clearly needs to be had within this community is being reported so frequently and fervently that it's dropped from front page to third page in less than 30 minutes.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  It seems it becomes a taboo to question the staggering inequality in personal fortune. While at the same time, media are not shy away from waging wars on racial inequality. But it seems to me that addressing economic inequality most likely greatly solves the racial equality. I never saw any individual who are less qualified for an opportunity, where the inequality in opportunity cannot be fixed by strong social support in his or her earlier life through education and community. It of cuz will be slow. But that's precisely the time scale we need to think about to make addressing inequality possible to start. I.e. we don't want Bill gates or Jeff bezos to think we want to deprive their personal fortune. Instead, we are looking for better ways to help them use the resources when they themselves lack the means or techniques.
  - ianai 6y ago
    If we want to discuss topics like this then one way is to be careful to be nonviolent and that means objective. One problem I see in pointing at the billionaires and claiming wrongs is it’s obviously an attack and puts them and anyone who feels they could be pointed at on defense. Instead, point out how people are held back by the systems and positions of power. When I had a particularly abusive management chain (4 managers for 9 workers) they could ask just about anything of me. The corporate policies gave them wide rights over even my personal liberties. For one, they could change my schedule at any time. Meanwhile, I could be lawfully terminated for varying my work schedule in excess of an 8 minute tolerance. That termination would mean all sorts of things - like owing back rent on an apartment I would have left - because I had no way to pay it. The way that particular industry worked, too, meant one termination likely meant I would never again work in that industry. That screams inequality to me. Edit-That inequality has the effect of making any order my management gave me as a functional threat of my ability to maintain my very way of life. Without that job I would have been homeless shortly.
tmaly 6y ago
I think giving others the chance to create competition would even the playing field. If you look at what these larger companies do, they embrace complex regulations. Individuals and smaller businesses with innovative ideas cannot enter the marketplace because these complex regulations act as barriers to entry.
alexashka 6y ago
I like Anand, I find his blind belief in democracy = good, not-democracy = bad - problematic. You can have a disastrous democracy and a neighbour dictator that mounts an attack and wipes your democracy off the face of the earth. It's about competency, not political ideology. Until people get it in their heads that competency and science are two fundamental tools that move humanity where most people would unambiguously want to be headed, we are going to have an endless problem. They call it corruption - it's just people who don't understand what moves the needle for them and others, resorting to moving the needle for them first, the rest maybe later. That's what these Bill Gates and every other rich person in America is about - nobody has a unifying plan to move humanity forward, so they get rich and by the time they become rich, they've made friends with a bunch of other rich people. Now people like Anand come and say hey, you know all those friends you have? They're all doing bad things and you are too, you are bad. What is rhetoric of this sort going to accomplish but separate us into us vs them even further? Until people understand how to move the needle for most people including them, they will always resort to moving the needle for them and their family first and that is where we currently are. If you want a different world - it has to come from a unifying message, not a message of blaming other people for your plight. This call for democracy is really a call for de-throning rich people and unless you want a dictator to come into power and start a civil war - this is not the rhetoric you want to promote.
bobthechef 6y ago
1. The power of money depends on the greed or neediness (also when created through usury) of those receiving it. A billionaire doesn't have any power to do any more than anyone else. It's the willingness of so many to exchange their labor, etc. for money that allows billionaires to exert outsized influence on things they should not have influence over. Instead of blaming the cause of the temptation, take a good look at your own moral mediocrity and how you respond to the temptation to sell out. I know many people in tech who bitch and moan about this or that corporation, but suddenly become silent the moment they end up working for one of those corporations (such as through an acquisition). 2. Conversations about the 1% often betray an underlying pathology of envy. Many hate billionaires because they're envious of what they have. Why would inequality of material goods be a problem per se? You can see that it isn't when you compare someone with an upper middle class household income with a billionaire. Does that upper middle class family really have a reason to shake their fists at the billionaires when it comes to income? No, of course not. Who cares if some guy makes X times as much as you? (If you have a problem, then perhaps you ought to check your envy.) The problem isn't inequality. It's poverty. And the boorish worship of Mammon. 3. The belief in zero sum wealth is utterly false. Everyone who understands basic economics knows that the economic wealth of the world today far outstrips any other epoch in history. The idea that billionaires only have what they have because they effectively stole it from you is exactly the kind of agitation that communists would engage in in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and the tumultuous years that led to their creation. It's the politics of envy and it's a hideous affair. 4. There are of course problems associated with billionaires that is not intrinsic to the wealth they possess. For example, the influence billionaires have over politics and society through the media, through education, through lobbying, and so on. They may be dealt with in various ways, such as actual committed and personal involvement in improving your local community in some way instead of raging ineffectually on Facebook and Twitter. A lazy, effeminate populace that only knows how to complain, and yell, and emote deserves what it gets. 5. While socialism is a tyranny, a grotesque perversion (and no, the Scandinavian countries aren't socialist), rapacious and ideological capitalism is likewise unnatural and perverse. By "rapacious and ideological capitalism", I really mean one that is laissez-faire in a doctrinaire way, where the market is the dominant social institution and the consequent ethos one of consumerism and commodification of everything, one dominated by powerful corporations unanswerable to government or public opinion, doctrinaire about the minimalization or elimination of social welfare institutions even in the absence of a sensible private alternative, and globalist of a kind that is opposed to corporate and individual loyalties to the nation state. 6. Sure, billionaires can run self-serving philanthropies. I doubt it stems from a feeling of guilt, but I don't know the individual consciences of billionaires (and conscience need to be formed to feel guilt, something that has been categorically discouraged by our culture along with shame and the concept of sin). Some may wish to genuinely do good. Some may be interested in their next conquest. Some may be afraid of the mob. Certainly, Zuckerberg's "free internet" plan for India was a patently obvious move to magnify his own power. The guy seems pathetically oblivious to how transparent he is. Social skills aren't his strong suit. 7.
when_creaks 6y ago
"We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence," Anand Giridharadas told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed at a public event hosted by the Samara Centre for Democracy." Effective altruism is clearly an important topic but this is a pretty bad analogy. If we're discussing billionaires a (slightly) better reformulation of the analogy would be something like: "We've got about 400 people in this room... Imagine if there were 40,000 meals carted into this room and four people got 39,000 of those meals" However, this reformulation is also pretty bad. The way both of these are phrased "dinners" are basically a stand in for "dollars" (or whatever your currency of choice is) - and while "dinners" are generally perishable, "dollars" are not. Setting those quibbles aside - how did Anand come to his diagnosis of the problem, and what is Anand's proposed solution? There's so little detail in this article that I'm honestly scratching my head. As a thought exercise - how would Anand fill in the blank for a statement like "The world should follow the shared government, community, and decision making model of <insert_location_here>"?
RickJWagner 6y ago
Add to that list all the wealthy actors and politicians who loudly advocate for climate improvements while travelling by private jet and vacationing on private yachts.

115 points by colinprince 6y ago

This is the same argument that has been around for decades - the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. The difference is the out-in-the-open, stark, startling, and seemingly completely baked in income inequality. I think people outside of academia are finally talking about the morality of a billionaire's mere existence.

reallydontask 6y ago
> the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. maybe both?
- curiousgal 6y ago
  Having worked with multiple researchers who received grants from the Gates foundation for noble projects such as abolishing famine in Nicaragua and improving food security across central America, the amount of wasted money opened my eyes to the shallowness of their attempts to fix the world.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    Care to expound upon this? It seems natural to me that something fighting against market failures would do things that would be financially irrational.
    - curiousgal 6y ago
      They spend a few thousand bucks conducting the experiments and collecting samples in those countries and then pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to gene sequencing companies. They get a spreadsheet in return that no one knows how to read or that has glaring discrepancies. I had to explain to 3 biogists that even though their PCA plot looks decent, a total explained variance of like 10% is not much to brag about. They had grants in the millions of dollars...
- andresgottlieb 6y ago
  Most definitely both. But we, flawed, humans tend to think in black vs white
untilHellbanned 6y ago
I'm confused. How could the argument about Gates' philanthropic motives been obvious for decades but those about economic inequality not been simultaneously obvious? It's all one in the same problem. Philanthropy comes from wealth accumulation.
missedthecue 6y ago
Wealth isn't zero sum.
- sp332 6y ago
  Yeah I think that's the point.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Therefore, it's not a real problem that Jeff Bezos owns 10% of Amazon. You wouldn't be any better off if he owned 9% or worse off if he owned 11% instead. It's a wedge issue.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      If half of Jeff's shares were transferred to a non-profit organization that assists homeless people, would that make a physical difference in the world, or would it have no effect?
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      That in no way follows.
    - mac01021 6y ago
      Well.... If he owned 9% instead of 10% and I owned the difference of 1%, then I would be better off.
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle.
    - sp332 6y ago
      Right. It's much more of a problem that his employees are getting less value than they create for the company, and he is taking a lot of the difference. Since all billionaires have made their fortunes this way (or inheriting from someone who did), billionaires should not exist. P.S. He owns 11.1% and had more before his divorce.
zozbot234 6y ago
> the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. ¿Por qué no los dos?
- Loughla 6y ago
  Hence, a portion of the debate.
01100011 6y ago
I know there are a whole host of issues, racial inequality, climate change, pollution, etc, which I consider to be 'one percenter problems' now. I'm just trying to save enough to retire one day and keep a roof over my family. Fixing global issues is a luxury. Maslow's hierarchy and all that...
- save_ferris 6y ago
  That’s not the only issue, non-profits and foundations apply all kinds of political pressure in opaque ways. There are many non-profits funded by elites that operate to advance societal good superficially while pushing ulterior political motives. For a concrete example, a tremendous amount of money has recently flowed into sex education advocacy, some of which doesn’t have donor names attached to it. Organizations that aim to provide resources around things like consent and healthy sexual behavior find that courting this new money involves adopting an abstinence-only approach as a mandate. As a result, it’s hard to know if the organization you’re donating to is actually doing the advocacy work they used to advertise, and they’re not always inclined to be transparent around who calls the shots from a donor perspective. We like to think that political money lives only in super PACs and lobbying efforts, but this isn’t the case, and in some ways this makes the non-profit situation even more insidious. To be clear, I’m not denigrating all non-profit work, there are just some major transparency issues that need to be addressed.
  - growlist 6y ago
    > There are many non-profits funded by elites that operate to advance societal good superficially while pushing ulterior political motives. George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.
  - DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
    This comment hits on one particular issue of ulterior motives in the actions of a non-profit. But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?
tetrometal 6y ago
To this day I find the focus on income or wealth inequality to be perplexing. I literally just don't get it. Why should I care whether or not some crazy rich person can buy a yacht? It does me no harm.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Because it's a way to feel and connect with the group. It's a unifying message of propaganda. Examples: Look at how people argue over fictional characters or franchises.
- mola 6y ago
  It's not the yacht, nor the money per se. It's the power they wield. A single person can entirely overtake democracy when he has billions. He can own press, politicians, etc.
  - refurb 6y ago
    What happened with Michael Bloomberg? Worth billions, wanted to run for President, spent hundreds of millions on ads and got nowhere.
    - mola 6y ago
      That's because he tried to play fair. Look at Sheldon Adelson, I won't talk about US politics, but during the last twenty years he pretty much changed the entire press landscape of Israel subordinating it to Netanyahu. He made a huge impact on Israel politics and public opinion.
    - fock 6y ago
      well, a hundred other people of similar circumstances not liking him?!
      - refurb 6y ago
        But I keep hearing billionaires wield the power to do whatever they want. Bloomberg couldn’t even get his parties nomination. I guess billions doesn’t get you that much power.
haecceity 6y ago
What do you think about the claim that non profits like Bill's are only designated such to get favorable tax policies and are actually profit driven investment vehicles? http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/dylan-rodriguez-the-political-logic-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/ http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-...
- Loughla 6y ago
  This was also part of the debate.
taurath 6y ago
I've done a bit of math on Jeff Bezos's wealth. Lets say we were looking to put a 5% wealth tax on holdings over $1billion. Jeff owns approx $166,500,000,000 in Amazon stock, at $3000/share, and 11.5% of the company (55,500,000 million shares). Lets assume that this is where ALL his wealth is (its not). That 5% tax on that would be $8,275,000,000. Were Jeff to sell shares to cover this, it would cost 2,758,333 shares. That would reduce his ownership of Amazon from 11.5% to 10.75%. Hardly the loss of a controlling interest. So by what moral justification can there be for the morality of having and holding $166,500,000,000 in wealth? That government is inefficient? That he can make better investments? Who do those investments benefit? Even assuming supply-side economics works to lift all boats (it doesn't, mostly), is it more moral to lift a middle-class person into the upper-middle class, a poor person into the middle-class, both, or neither? What I think is more likely is they just don't have to ever deal with people who are suffering, and have justified it in their minds as themselves being greater and this is the way of things. Certainly those that end up with billions of dollars at their disposal don't hold the same moral compass. And constant reminders of abject poverty haven't helped billionaires in developing countries do more to help the poor.
- nradov 6y ago
  A wealth tax is attractive in theory but it's hard to put into practice for illiquid assets like privately held companies, real estate, intellectual property, and artwork. The optics are bad when the government effectively forces someone to sell off part of the family farm to pay that year's wealth tax.
  - paledot 6y ago
    Why oh why is it always "the family farm"? At this point, that deserves its own named fallacy. Fine, let's make the first $10 million tax exempt. Or is the hypothetical "family farm" a family farm like Johnson & Johnson is a family company? Of course, the reason that fallacy exists is because it works. Every argument against increased progressive taxation has been extensively focus-group tested, of course it works. But the need to consciously counter that messaging doesn't render the policy impractical.
snarf21 6y ago
Not trolling, but how much money is too much? Most everyone on this site is the top 1% of global households. Where is our morality then? Rhetorical question: do you give away a substantial portion of your largesse? But let's say he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. Is that more helpful? I think sometimes big problems take resources. My biggest complaint is that he has shown the ability to execute at scale and most of the companies they invest in don't. Spending even three months operationalizing one of these companies could be like a 100x on the money in.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  > he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. No one is asking for such naive approach to redistribute wealth. It's to find better ways to utilize the wealth, which Bill himself would also agree in principle. What exactly the format requires discussion. But the first step is to allow such discussion to happen. And we are sure that a lot of the world people are not believing the meaningfulness of such discussion... And that's a big problem.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - snarf21 6y ago
    I guess I'm missing something. Isn't that the whole point of the foundation? To give away its money in ways they find most impactful? They don't tells us how to distribute our charity dollars. It seems silly for us to tell them how to distribute theirs.
- hoka-one-one 6y ago
  It's always been interesting to me that the people most opposed to wealth gaps live in SF and LA. I'm sure they love the weather but I don't think that's all they're after. A counterargument is that "nothing happens in a vacuum" and their lack of economic fulfillment is due to this wealth gap. But I think we owe billionaires this same level of uncertainty. They only exist because society doesn't want to know what would happen if they were forced to give their wealth away. Side note, in my experience living in California many of my "broke" friends are actually terrible with money. I was talking to a guy the other day who spends $800/month on rent and $1500 on food. I'm sure it doesn't represent the whole, but in general I look at California liberals with a critical eye when talking about the wealth gap.
joe_the_user 6y ago
This is the same argument that has been around for decades - the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school. I think it's unfortunate that this part of the debate gets the focus. What I think is problematic in the Gates approach and those like it, is that they view the world through so many institutional and market filters that they don't notice various problems bubbling up that can't be measured in these terms. The most obvious thing is Gates' line "the world is getting better" which hinges on the fact the more people are moving from outside the money economy to inside the money economy (less people "living on pennies a day"). The problem is Gates can't see that people insider the money economy are in desperate circumstances. The recent interview with Gates was distinctly sad. In one area where he sort-of has things right, he doesn't understand that the flood of irrational here is very pushed by other monied interests which have become used to fending off all spending on longer-term social interests since these serve as threats to their short term profits. See this article describing the similarity of climate denialist and covid denialists: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/ https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...

foghornleghorn 6y ago

Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"

untilHellbanned 6y ago
What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? The tangible evidence to me seems to suggest it's a zero-sum game. E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.
- harryh 6y ago
  The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.
  - wwright 6y ago
    Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?
    - tux1968 6y ago
      That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
      - mistermann 6y ago
        We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.

umvi 6y ago

Even non-elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem IMO. For example, cancel culture is the end result of non-elite do-gooders banding together to "do good". I believe the net effect is actually quite bad, but the people engaging in cancel culture really believe they are helping fix the world.

juliushuijnk 6y ago
Cancel culture* is not new. If you say you are a cannibal and eat human flesh, you're out of a job, same thing 100 years ago I assume. The thing that is slowly shifting is what is morally acceptable, or perhaps that more voices are part of the discussion of what is morally acceptable. Shame has its function. Personally, I'm more worried about people who are proud to not use morals and are not hypocritical about it, than the do-gooders who put the bar higher than they can live up to. Yes, they are more often hypocrites. That's great, you can point to that and expect some kind of feedback loop to have effect. People without shame, who apply no morals to their deeds, are not to be applauded. I hope you agree when it comes to things like child beating. Now the questions is where to draw the line for cancel culture. Not if cancel culture is a 'bad thing'. * Probably people load the word 'cancel culture' differently. I see it as pointing out morally bad behavior, and asking other people to also notice it, hoping there will be repercussions.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  A lot of people refer to cancel culture this way, because they're bigots who don't like people pointing out that they're bigots (or fans of bigots who they don't like being called out as bigots). However, there is another problem: a “dark side” of people being willing to call others out on their shit. Clickbait. It's surprisingly easy to make it seem like arbitrary person X is an evil evil person, regardless of whether they actually are. If you're familiar with person X, you might be able to spot a lie… but being universally sceptical will protect you from legitimate call-outs as well as fake ones. The average person has no real way of knowing, even if it's occurred to them that they might need to check. So, yeah: overall, I think this is probably a good thing. But it's set back the lives of some good people. (There's a rather simple way to turn this around: remove guilt by association. It should be okay to defend cancelled people. Defending bad actions doesn't need to be okay, but if it's costless to lie / “bend the truth” for social media clicks and costly to rebut them… calling people out on their shit becomes a much less useful force for good.)

ssivark 6y ago

This subject always reminds me of the quote from popular and beloved British actor Paul Eddington, which puts on display a very different and much gentler ethos from the “doer-ism” sprayed on us quite constantly: "A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be, 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little [harm], that would suit me." It’s worth pondering whether the same (limited) perspective that caused several problems is sufficient to fix some problems without exacerbating others. The whole point of democratization of power is to distribute decision-making so people could make the right choices as locally apt.

kshacker 6y ago
Interesting... I used to have similar ideas about "at least do no harm", but the intolerance of the times radicalized me somewhat and the new mantra is not only to reduce the harm I do, but to also somewhat counter the harm others do: either by negating them or their deeds. Because if we let some harm seep through because we ignored it, that is still not good enough for our society. Now of course we (the people) look at things differently so me going carbon negative (for example) may encourage others to pollute even more because hey u/kshacker is going to fix it so I know the thought process needs further evolution.
- ssivark 6y ago
  The point of the quote is not so much about countering harm caused by others, but first: How confident can you be that your actions to help are not misguidedly exacerbating problems? Is there a line beyond which one could be overconfident, our arrogant? What external feedback should you attend to?

throwawaysea 6y ago

I disagree with the notion that "elite do-gooders" (which seems like a pejorative phrasing) are part of the problem. These people have worked hard and brought innovations to the world to generate their wealth. They have great judgment and lots of experience, and they should be afforded the freedom to invest in the problems they value and the freedom to manage those solutions. Chances are, they will end up being more impactful than the typical waste that comes with slow-moving, bureaucratic, bloated governmental organizations. However I do also support creating a more functional market with enough room to enter so that other innovative, motivated entrepreneurs can effectively compete. That doesn't require some kind of destructive ground up rethinking or abandonment of capitalism. It requires a tweak - namely updated anti-trust laws that are actively enforced. This would achieve a different distribution of wealth and power while retaining the mechanisms we have in place to reward success precisely.

lostlogin 6y ago
> These people have worked hard and brought innovations to the world to generate their wealth. The richest three Americans have more money than the poorest 50% of Americans combined. However hard those three worked worked, there is no way that they worked harder than half the country. As COVID-19 has shown us, you don’t get far without the jobs we value the least. We need supermarkets open, bins taken away, rest homes cleaned etc. Wealth is further concentrating too, exacerbating the issue. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#25b87fbc3cf8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric... https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282-billion-three-weeks-coronavirus/267027/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282...

rayiner 6y ago

Anand Giridharadas has a degree in politics and history. Completely unqualified to comment about issues that are fundamentally about economics, public health, etc. I’ve watched over the last 30 years as the “age of capital” has lifted millions out of poverty, and organizations like the Gates foundation have helped drop the infant mortality rate by 3/4 since my family left the country. Meanwhile, socialists like Giridharadas have done nothing but hold the country back, trying to keep us in poverty. Millions of children are dead because of the multi-decade detour socialists line Giridharadas took India and Bangladesh in during the 1960s-1990s.

ssivark 6y ago
Right... Only the rest of us on HN have the right to offer opinions! What could a knowledge of history/politics ever contribute to the discussion? :-)
royaltheartist 6y ago
Those are political decisions.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Political decisions that rest on understanding economics.
  - ianleeclark 6y ago
    Political decisions never have rested on understanding economics, they rest on an enforcement of power.
    - royaltheartist 6y ago
      Weird how the people with all the power also have all the wealth. Must be a coincidence.
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  The same Politicians have been in power for 6 decades and haven't achieved anything they have promised every election. So how exactly did their "political decisions" help?

11235813213455 6y ago

I believe a large part of the solution is still to minimize one's environmental footprint, to act by consuming much less, to live more simply In developed countries, less than 1% of the population do that, if it's 50% of the population, it's a total game and climate changer

quotemstr 6y ago
50 years of scolding people hasn't worked, but a bit more scolding now might do the trick, right?
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  it's common sense more than scolding
scrozier 6y ago
Making the author's point: "If only...."
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  yes and no, because I do it, and I do my best to convince other people, that's all I can do anyway

richm31415 6y ago

"Distrust those who profess altruism." "Don't be helpful: be useful, be available." "Helpful people are a nuisance." - Guitar Craft Aphorisms - https://www.dgmlive.com/in-depth/guitar-craft-aphorisms https://www.dgmlive.com/in-depth/guitar-craft-aphorisms

prvc 6y ago

Professional pundits 'offering' old observations, watered down to the point of near-meaninglessness, as their own original ideas, are part of the problem: prvc

dfee 6y ago

Resource attribution seems to follow the power law. Is there a way to solve around this without creating unintended consequences which are worse? There probably isn’t even too much difference over the ages either. It’s just in America’s democratic-republic with capitalism the billionaires aren’t royalty.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Can't think of anything but progressive taxation and redistribution of such taxed money. The power law comes from various positive feedback loops on the market, so it sounds only fair that if you want to clamp it down, you need to inject a strong negative feedback loop into the mix.

blisseyGo 6y ago

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice." - Thomas Sowell https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1133792472063258627 https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1133792472063258627

tasty_freeze 6y ago
Rather than just downvoting, I'll offer another perspective. Sowell's statement is vacuous, just a bumpersticker retort. Rather than engaging in the issue, it simply questions the motives of the opposite party and in fact dismisses their motives as one of the seven deadly sins. I realize this is twitter and not a well developed thesis, but that just means twitter is a terrible platform to meaningfully engage in nuanced topics. It is a great platform for shallow thinking and insults, though, akin to the excuse, "I have a wonderful proof of this but the margin it too small to contain it."
- nickff 6y ago
  What you say about Twitter sounds about right, but Sowell appears to have put a bumper-sticker quote on a bumper-sticker; he's written a bunch of long books if you want to find out more about his views.
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    Note that the twitter I linked to is not Sowell's actual twitter. He doesn't use Twitter. It's an account which tweets useful passages from his books.
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  Sowell has written plenty of books on these topics which are worthy reading. The quote is from one of his books. The twitter account I linked is not actually Sowell's. He doesn't have twitter. The account simply posts quotes from his books. So no, it's not just a bumpersticker retort. Growing up in a poor south asian country, I was taught to only care about the food on my plate and not be jealous of the food on someone else's plate. That made me work hard at putting more food on my own plate without being jealous and stealing from another's plate.

owenshen24 6y ago

I haven't read Giridharadas's book, and this article was very light on substance. I do think this is an interesting topic. Effective altruism has lots of ongoing internal discussion about the efficacy of pushing for systemic change. But I think the claims made in the article would have to be made a lot more substantive. See Scott Alexander's take here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/?reverseComments= https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...). Overall, I think parts of this approach might throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if we do restructure the way that society works, presumably we'll still care about interventions to improve well-being. I think effective altruism (https://www.effectivealtruism.com/ https://www.effectivealtruism.com/) has provided a lot of traction on how to think about these issues. Even if you disagree with their moral stance, I think it's hard to deny that people in the EA community have been very thoughtful about quantifying interventions and thinking about impact. And I don't think these sorts of questions are going to go away, come a social restructuring. There seems to be a lot that we can salvage from the EA viewpoint, even if we decide systemic change is the way forward, and I think that's worth emphasizing.

ChomskyNormal4m 6y ago

The idea that the problem is that some own more than others is itself an idea promoted by those who "own more than others". They set that as the thing to be argued about. The actual problem is social relations. The heir expropriates the surplus labor time of the worker. That is the real problem. Wealth redistribution is, in a dialectic sense, a goal of those who own the most wealth. It is a goal set by this elite. Workers controlling our own labor time has been the clear goal of the worker's movement for at least a century and a half, if not longer.

fnovd 6y ago

Ironically, the author was talking about all those other elites. Click less, but not before you've added my book to your cart! "If only" I could vote on how you spend your money.

blueagle7 6y ago
Is it that ironic? From what I can tell, He isn’t looking to become a billionaire but to gain money and recognition to further this idea.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

The article wasn't what I expected. As I read it, his main point is a valid one. If you want change, you have to participate in making that change. That participation is not limited to once every 4 year vote ( in US ), but rather an ongoing participation in society. There are some valid criticism of this approach ( demoracracy doesn't scale well; it does work well on more local level, but you don't want to have a vote for every little issue ).

DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago

I read Giridharadas' book, and I found it to be pretty narrowly focused on hypocrisy of the wealthy class. Sure, there is a lot of undeserved back patting about how much good people are really doing in the world, but that's probably always been the case. I would have preferred a serious treatment of the ways in which the world has been improved through the mass reduction of deadly infectious disease, famine, and extreme poverty. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now explores these topics. To read Giridharadas, you might think that all social ills are caused by the wealthy in society, which made it harder for me to take his side on everything. Still, his main point stands that elites should feel bad about their concentrations of power and that the link between money and political power should be weakened.

aziytuiam 6y ago

It is much worse than this; the elite works to actively divide the populace and distract us. Note how divisive politics has become; divide and conquer.

btilly 6y ago

This article is a good example of "the pie fallacy". Read http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html for an explanation of what that is, and why it is a fallacy.

supercanuck 6y ago

It is kind of funny reading through these comments. The author's point is that power should be distributed and decisions should be made outside of those with concentrated amounts of wealth. Kind of like a democracy. Folks on this thread seem to be falling over themselves arguing that billionaires are justified to even be billionaires at all. The issue isn't that billionaires exist, its that billionaires have cornered all the decision making abilities of the public.

mac01021 6y ago
But how have they done that? We _do_ live in a democracy (well, a republic -- in the USA). The government/legislature does seem, to a large extent, to be beholden to the wants of the immensely wealthy, but that's only because the electorate at large won't hold their representatives accountable for that behavior. Despite having more resources and more leisure time than has been possible throughout most of history, people don't stay informed, contemplate policy, engage in activism, interact with their legislators ... The laws of human psychology may simply not afford people people enough agency for a large democracy to be fair and effective.
- supercanuck 6y ago
  Essentially, you, me, the author of this piece is saying the same thing. The populace needs to take back control over their governance, and the way the author is proposing to do that is by getting involved in by "joining organizations, membership lists and movements that work toward building cross-racial, cross-class coalitions of people — with a goal to create a future that benefits most people."
  - mac01021 6y ago
    Would the need for the population to do those things be any less if there were no billionaires?

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

"Giridharadas calls on people to join organizations, membership lists and movements that work toward building cross-racial, cross-class coalitions of people — with a goal to create a future that benefits most people." Thinking for just a few minutes, there are so many facets and nuances to the issue of improving the world for others that the above sentence is a complete throw-away. One could get involved and sign up, but as the article already points out, how to know if the group you are joining is doing good or doing more harm? Did you join a group of virtue signallers or will you roll up your sleeves for Habitat for Humanity, or Doctors without Borders? A couple of notions: - How do you know if your effort is more like bailing water from a sinking ship, or, towing the ship into dry dock for repair? Maybe you have to bail at the same time you're towing. - What is the actual goal? To ensure that people are able to eat today? Are you trying to right a wrong, like human trafficking or environmental crimes? Are you trying to create a level playing field so people are able to go as far as their determination will take them? If you want a level playing field, what system are you modeling? The desire to do something is invaluable. I'd suggest two things: 1) keep it close to home. The farther the served are from you the harder it will be to see the results. If your aspirations are far from you, make it a goal to get there and see first hand what you're trying to aid, at least once. 2) Make it something where you can directly observe the results and know that your efforts are having a positive effect overall.

mola 6y ago
There's an old Jewish adage, help your city's poor first. I believe your point is similar.

haecceity 6y ago

dzink 6y ago

Architecting a working system requires objectivity. What happens when you have different doctrines in power? What do the prototypes of each model look like? What does the Big(O) of resource distribution look like (and where are the leaks). In a government managed system, you have a MASSIVE amount pooled resources controlled by whoever activated (or coerced) the most voters. What is the worst case scenario? Whoever is in power has a narrow list of buddies with businesses. Lucrative government contracts with little oversight on spending are taken to people who have some favor with the elected officials or their family members (and pay officials back in insider stock trading, or planned small stock dumps, or some other form of laundering). Money accrues to the family tree of those in power and those in power make all important decisions, eventually draining the country. Read the news in Eastern Europe for a while to see a live simulation. Foundations. Anyone can start one, fulfill a mission, work to make the world a better place. A lot of foundations are doing a lot of good out there, so where does that model leak? With stringent requirement to hold no profit at the end of the day, worst case scenarios with foundations look like this: Similarly to government, the distribution of large quantity of pooled resources can go to the team running the foundation. In some, the executives collect whatever money is left at the end of the day (can't leave a profit after all). In others, a foundation on the side of a lucrative business gets the profits to reduce the tax burden on the business, but then distributes those to friends as contracts or generates sales from that business at increased margins, etc. How do you know this is happening? If you look at the ever increasing number of foundations, there are no incentives to create economies of scale in giving, despite the high fixed costs of running of foundation. Where are the foundation mergers that would make giving more efficient? Thus the tax incentives given by government can sometimes turn foundations south. Where do Billionaires come in? A actually self-made billionaire has presumably lost the need to be corrupt. They have also proven themselves able to lead people to execute projects efficiently. The combination of resources, networks, and lack of misaligned incentives makes them more likely to focus on the impact of the work, than on self-enrichment with it. The down sides can happen if the original billions were a con-scheme and not actually acquired (Madoff), or if the billionaire is completely incompetent in the field they are giving in, or if they do it for the attention and ego boost, and social favors that may come from being asked for money. With all the attention paid to one person, however they can be more easily scrutinized than the other two models. Please do feel free to contribute to this analysis tree.

alpha_squared 6y ago

It's fascinating and saddening that this conversation that clearly needs to be had within this community is being reported so frequently and fervently that it's dropped from front page to third page in less than 30 minutes.

justicezyx 6y ago
It seems it becomes a taboo to question the staggering inequality in personal fortune. While at the same time, media are not shy away from waging wars on racial inequality. But it seems to me that addressing economic inequality most likely greatly solves the racial equality. I never saw any individual who are less qualified for an opportunity, where the inequality in opportunity cannot be fixed by strong social support in his or her earlier life through education and community. It of cuz will be slow. But that's precisely the time scale we need to think about to make addressing inequality possible to start. I.e. we don't want Bill gates or Jeff bezos to think we want to deprive their personal fortune. Instead, we are looking for better ways to help them use the resources when they themselves lack the means or techniques.
- ianai 6y ago
  If we want to discuss topics like this then one way is to be careful to be nonviolent and that means objective. One problem I see in pointing at the billionaires and claiming wrongs is it’s obviously an attack and puts them and anyone who feels they could be pointed at on defense. Instead, point out how people are held back by the systems and positions of power. When I had a particularly abusive management chain (4 managers for 9 workers) they could ask just about anything of me. The corporate policies gave them wide rights over even my personal liberties. For one, they could change my schedule at any time. Meanwhile, I could be lawfully terminated for varying my work schedule in excess of an 8 minute tolerance. That termination would mean all sorts of things - like owing back rent on an apartment I would have left - because I had no way to pay it. The way that particular industry worked, too, meant one termination likely meant I would never again work in that industry. That screams inequality to me. Edit-That inequality has the effect of making any order my management gave me as a functional threat of my ability to maintain my very way of life. Without that job I would have been homeless shortly.

tmaly 6y ago

I think giving others the chance to create competition would even the playing field. If you look at what these larger companies do, they embrace complex regulations. Individuals and smaller businesses with innovative ideas cannot enter the marketplace because these complex regulations act as barriers to entry.

alexashka 6y ago

I like Anand, I find his blind belief in democracy = good, not-democracy = bad - problematic. You can have a disastrous democracy and a neighbour dictator that mounts an attack and wipes your democracy off the face of the earth. It's about competency, not political ideology. Until people get it in their heads that competency and science are two fundamental tools that move humanity where most people would unambiguously want to be headed, we are going to have an endless problem. They call it corruption - it's just people who don't understand what moves the needle for them and others, resorting to moving the needle for them first, the rest maybe later. That's what these Bill Gates and every other rich person in America is about - nobody has a unifying plan to move humanity forward, so they get rich and by the time they become rich, they've made friends with a bunch of other rich people. Now people like Anand come and say hey, you know all those friends you have? They're all doing bad things and you are too, you are bad. What is rhetoric of this sort going to accomplish but separate us into us vs them even further? Until people understand how to move the needle for most people including them, they will always resort to moving the needle for them and their family first and that is where we currently are. If you want a different world - it has to come from a unifying message, not a message of blaming other people for your plight. This call for democracy is really a call for de-throning rich people and unless you want a dictator to come into power and start a civil war - this is not the rhetoric you want to promote.

bobthechef 6y ago

1. The power of money depends on the greed or neediness (also when created through usury) of those receiving it. A billionaire doesn't have any power to do any more than anyone else. It's the willingness of so many to exchange their labor, etc. for money that allows billionaires to exert outsized influence on things they should not have influence over. Instead of blaming the cause of the temptation, take a good look at your own moral mediocrity and how you respond to the temptation to sell out. I know many people in tech who bitch and moan about this or that corporation, but suddenly become silent the moment they end up working for one of those corporations (such as through an acquisition). 2. Conversations about the 1% often betray an underlying pathology of envy. Many hate billionaires because they're envious of what they have. Why would inequality of material goods be a problem per se? You can see that it isn't when you compare someone with an upper middle class household income with a billionaire. Does that upper middle class family really have a reason to shake their fists at the billionaires when it comes to income? No, of course not. Who cares if some guy makes X times as much as you? (If you have a problem, then perhaps you ought to check your envy.) The problem isn't inequality. It's poverty. And the boorish worship of Mammon. 3. The belief in zero sum wealth is utterly false. Everyone who understands basic economics knows that the economic wealth of the world today far outstrips any other epoch in history. The idea that billionaires only have what they have because they effectively stole it from you is exactly the kind of agitation that communists would engage in in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and the tumultuous years that led to their creation. It's the politics of envy and it's a hideous affair. 4. There are of course problems associated with billionaires that is not intrinsic to the wealth they possess. For example, the influence billionaires have over politics and society through the media, through education, through lobbying, and so on. They may be dealt with in various ways, such as actual committed and personal involvement in improving your local community in some way instead of raging ineffectually on Facebook and Twitter. A lazy, effeminate populace that only knows how to complain, and yell, and emote deserves what it gets. 5. While socialism is a tyranny, a grotesque perversion (and no, the Scandinavian countries aren't socialist), rapacious and ideological capitalism is likewise unnatural and perverse. By "rapacious and ideological capitalism", I really mean one that is laissez-faire in a doctrinaire way, where the market is the dominant social institution and the consequent ethos one of consumerism and commodification of everything, one dominated by powerful corporations unanswerable to government or public opinion, doctrinaire about the minimalization or elimination of social welfare institutions even in the absence of a sensible private alternative, and globalist of a kind that is opposed to corporate and individual loyalties to the nation state. 6. Sure, billionaires can run self-serving philanthropies. I doubt it stems from a feeling of guilt, but I don't know the individual consciences of billionaires (and conscience need to be formed to feel guilt, something that has been categorically discouraged by our culture along with shame and the concept of sin). Some may wish to genuinely do good. Some may be interested in their next conquest. Some may be afraid of the mob. Certainly, Zuckerberg's "free internet" plan for India was a patently obvious move to magnify his own power. The guy seems pathetically oblivious to how transparent he is. Social skills aren't his strong suit. 7.

when_creaks 6y ago

"We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence," Anand Giridharadas told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed at a public event hosted by the Samara Centre for Democracy." Effective altruism is clearly an important topic but this is a pretty bad analogy. If we're discussing billionaires a (slightly) better reformulation of the analogy would be something like: "We've got about 400 people in this room... Imagine if there were 40,000 meals carted into this room and four people got 39,000 of those meals" However, this reformulation is also pretty bad. The way both of these are phrased "dinners" are basically a stand in for "dollars" (or whatever your currency of choice is) - and while "dinners" are generally perishable, "dollars" are not. Setting those quibbles aside - how did Anand come to his diagnosis of the problem, and what is Anand's proposed solution? There's so little detail in this article that I'm honestly scratching my head. As a thought exercise - how would Anand fill in the blank for a statement like "The world should follow the shared government, community, and decision making model of <insert_location_here>"?

RickJWagner 6y ago

Add to that list all the wealthy actors and politicians who loudly advocate for climate improvements while travelling by private jet and vacationing on private yachts.