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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
by 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 agoHaving 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 agoCare 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 agoThey 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 agoMost definitely both. But we, flawed, humans tend to think in black vs white
- untilHellbanned 6y agoI'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 agoWealth isn't zero sum.
- sp332 6y agoYeah I think that's the point.
- missedthecue 6y agoTherefore, 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 agoIf 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 agoThat in no way follows.
- mac01021 6y agoWell.... If he owned 9% instead of 10% and I owned the difference of 1%, then I would be better off.
- missedthecue 6y agoAnd if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle.
- sp332 6y agoRight. 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 agoHence, a portion of the debate.
- 01100011 6y agoI 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 agoThat’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 agoThis 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 agoTo 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 agoBecause 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 agoIt'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 agoWhat happened with Michael Bloomberg? Worth billions, wanted to run for President, spent hundreds of millions on ads and got nowhere.
- mola 6y agoThat'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 agowell, a hundred other people of similar circumstances not liking him?!
- refurb 6y agoBut 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 agoWhat 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 agoThis was also part of the debate.
- taurath 6y agoI'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 agoA 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 agoWhy 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 agoNot 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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 agoThis 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...