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Bill Gates pledged the same and yet his wealth hasn't reduced. Worse, the philanthropy has been targetted ideologically (like encouraging private schools) and s

• whatwherewhy 4y ago
  Why should his wealth reduce?
  • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    If I give $10 to charity, my wealth is reduced by $10. The naive assumption is that if Bill Gates gives $10B to charity, his wealth is also reduced by $10B. Can you explain why the naive assumption is wrong? Because I actually can't, not without more thought and research than I've given it.
    • throwaway98797 4y ago
      cuz if i have 100b and give away 10b, but the remaining 90b grows 2x i have more than what i started with
    • WithinReason 4y ago
      You invest $100, now you have $110. You give away $10, you have $100 again.
      • frumper 4y ago
        Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.
        • whatwherewhy 4y ago
          Gates pledged to give his wealth away before he dies, not immediately. And that's good - the world will be getting much more money than it'd get if Gates just gave away all his money the moment he announced it. > Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10. Gates' wealth fluctuates all the time. There was a time when he was rather low due to his donations - multiple 10s of billions down. He got back over $100B from cca $50B - that's $50B more for charity than if he just donated everything he had left.
          • frumper 4y ago
            I'm not saying it's bad to do what you're describing, I'm just saying when you actually donate money, not pledge, it decreases your net worth.
            • whatwherewhy 4y ago
              It does, but that doesn't mean your net worth will decrease by that amount that year. There are other effects - e.g. the rest of his investment portfolio.
              • frumper 4y ago
                if you give away $10 then your net worth at that moment goes down...it may easily recover that price, but if you count it like that then you can surely count that the money you donated would have been worth more too
                • whatwherewhy 4y ago
                  Yeah but nobody has that granular logs of Gates' net worth and donations. At best, it's calendar months, sometimes you can try to assume weeks, with a big maybe.
    • Workaccount2 4y ago
      Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time. Gates can give substantially more money if he leverages it to grow over time. I would wager that it is going to take decades if ever that the Gates fund will hit $0. Yeah it's not as flashy as "Died with $0 of his fortune left", but under the hood the net good done is orders of magnitude greater.
      • antisthenes 4y ago
        > Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time. If you can do that in perpetuity, then it actually means you're giving away none of your wealth away. You're selling the time value of money back to the people that generated it for you. You've essentially taken out a giant loan, but the interest is being borne by the people who generated that wealth for you in the first place. And your "charity" amounts to sometimes reimbursing those people for paying the interest.
      • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        In that case, more power to him, and no argument about net good - I guess for me, the issue is with the wording. 'Most of his wealth' to me implies someone's giving away most of the principle, not most of the proceeds. Which of course Bill Gates did, just to a charity he also controlled. Again, more power to him and I'm glad the precedent is set, regardless of how I feel about the Gates foundation's activities. But it still doesn't feel the same as giving it to a charity someone else controls.
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  • germinalphrase 4y ago
    Probably, the words “give away” imply that all the wealth will, indeed, be given away. For instance, Chuck Feeney gave away billions until it he was left with only $2 million (or so it was reported).
    • whatwherewhy 4y ago
      As far as I know Bill Gates is still alive
      • germinalphrase 4y ago
        So is Chuck Feeney.
        • whatwherewhy 4y ago
          So what? Gates said he will donate before he dies, not immediately.
          • germinalphrase 4y ago
            I think the Gates Foundation does good work, but the cynical "so what?" is that creating a structure like this to "give away most of his $124bn (£107bn) fortune during his lifetime" (RE the linked article about Bezos) is a ruse to maintain control over the money without paying taxes - while also producing some good PR. If they truly wanted to just give it away, Chuck Feeney offer a straight forward model for doing so. You just do it. If "giving it away" merely means putting it into a foundation you control, many people would feel that little has, in fact, been given away.
            • whatwherewhy 4y ago
              I fully believe they're doing it to retain control of their money, and I don't mind, Bill Gates is a master handler of money - in fact I find the system that led to people like Bill Gates working on things that are good for the general humanity to be genius. It's not like he's going to embezzle the money out of his foundation to buy another villa. Bill Gates doesn't fucking care about a hundreth villa. He's really working on the projects, and he's deploying the money in a way that promises results - that's exactly what I want to happen. I am happy. And the PR? Let the guy have his fame, he's really worked for it.
• gsatic 4y ago
  That's cuz saying you want to give it away is not a simple thing, when most people around you only have the skills to accumulate it or spend it on themselves. Not to mention all the pond scum it draws in that has to be constantly filtered out.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    The people who have the skills to accumulate wealth at this scale don’t have the skills to give it away. They are extraction minded, and philanthropy is a direct contradiction to this mental model. Keep some to stay comfortable of course, but you have to be comfortable with your status, influence, and wealth substantially declining as a second order effect of the distribution logistics, and that’s just not who these people are. MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/business/mackenzie-scott-philanthropy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/business/mackenzie-scott-...
    • bilbo0s 4y ago
      MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example To be fair, neither can Bill Gates. So it points to something fundamental about the way in which wealth works that these people can't give money away fast enough. Doesn't mean it's a problem though. Having money flowing up to Gates, Bezos, Scott and then having them give it away is probably the best we can do in the current legal and regulatory environment. Because the reality is that any efforts to change how things currently work would meet with too much resistance from others in power.
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      • ryandrake 4y ago
        Another fundamental that it points to is that we've somehow set up a system where instead of the general public determining (and funding) the public good through democracy, a handful of rich people simply decide what counts as a public good and steer their money toward those causes.
• asadlionpk 4y ago
  The pledge doesn’t mean dumb-throw money at any org you can find.
• chadash 4y ago
  What does that mean his wealth hasn't reduced? Any money that he's given away (and he's given away a lot) has reduced his wealth. He'd be worth more if hadn't given it away.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    The commitment was "commitment to give the majority of their wealth". https://givingpledge.org/about https://givingpledge.org/about
    • chadash 4y ago
      Yes, he has committed to give most of his wealth. And he has also already given a bunch of his wealth.
    • panarky 4y ago
      Promises to do something good in the indeterminate but distant future generate tons of positive press coverage for free. Better to ignore empty PR nonsense and wait for billions in philanthropy to actually materialize before showering sociopaths with praise and adoration.
  • kornhole 4y ago
    His wealth has greatly increased. In retrospect, his donations look more like tax advantaged investments.
• ch4s3 4y ago
  I really don't get the animus against private schools. Surely a one size fits all public school can't possibly best serve the interests of every possible student. Furthermore in a pluralistic society, shouldn't we tolerate people's different preferences in education, especially those who opt for more religious education?
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    Try opening up a Madrasa in your neighborhood and you may find a lot of pushback to private religious schools, even from people who say they are in favor of such a thing.
    • ch4s3 4y ago
      There are several Madrasas in Brooklyn near where I live. I'd never send my child to one, but the suppression of ethnic/cultural/religious education has a long and ugly history in the US. The first public religious schools in the US were cooked up to force Irish and Italian children out of Catholic education. Is that really who we want to be in the 21st century?
  • nevinera 4y ago
    Most of us don't have a problem with _private schools_, just with state money or charity being aimed at them. Private schools are fundamentally capitalistic - they serve their (generally wealthy) patrons, not society.
    • ch4s3 4y ago
      > Most of us don't have a problem with _private schools_, just with state money or charity being aimed at them. State money already goes to a dizzying array of non-profit and religious institutions. Anywhere from local homeless and addiction services to the University of Notre Dame. Why should primary and secondary schools be excluded? > Private schools are fundamentally capitalistic This is a meaningless statement. The VST majority of private schools in the US are non-profits. > they serve their (generally wealthy) patrons, not society. Religious schools in the US started out as a cheap way to educate the poor in reading. Catholic schools in particular still serve poorer communities and are low cost. Residential assignment in public schools comes from a legacy of segregation and anti-catholic laws. The wealth will always have their pick of education for their children and always have. Denying funding for poor students that want to opt out of their shitty assigned schools just perpetuates injustice.
• pmoriarty 4y ago
  Gates pledged to give most of it away when he dies. In the meantime he's given away billions, but obviously he's invested the billions he still has, so unless his (doubtlessly world-class) money managers were completely incompetent he's going to at least break even. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation "now spends more on global health every year than the World Health Organization — not to mention more than most countries on the planet."[1] But that philanthropy has its critics. One criticism is that it's very opaque and it's impossible to measure how effective it is. It's also both hugely influential and unaccountable. Also, from the above-linked article: "One 2008 article by two Oxford researchers, published in The Lancet, argued that the Gates Foundation was "misfinancing global health" — paying most of its grants out to rich countries and prioritizing infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) over major chronic killers such as obesity, cancer, and diabetes." "Another 2009 paper in The Lancet, by a group of University College London health and development researchers, found that despite the Gates Foundation's emphasis on improving the lives of the poor, its grants didn't actually reflect the burden of disease that the poorest face." "An example: the Gates Foundation has received lots of positive press for its role in financing the eradication of polio. And yet, even that campaign had its critics, says McGoey. In her research, she found key stakeholders in some of the countries that were the focus of the campaign expressing the view that "this was really a priority of wealthy nations and not necessarily developing ones, many of which were more preoccupied with battling illnesses that created a far greater health burden in their nations [such as diarrhoeal diseases in India]. They were compelled to emphasize polio [eradication] against their will." "Another concern that comes up in the academic literature is that the Gates Foundation is too focused on drugs, vaccines, and other technological solutions for global health problems. But many researchers, by contrast, would prefer a focus on the less exciting but crucial work of strengthening the health systems of poorer countries." "For similar reasons, the Gates Foundation's work on malaria drew criticism from some corners. In a 2013 article in Global Society, Youde pointed out that the head of WHO’s malaria research, Arata Kochi, sent a memo complaining that the foundation "was stifling debate on the best ways to treat and combat malaria, prioritising only those methods that relied on new technology or developing new drugs."" "The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations." [1] - https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criticism https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  Was the pledge to give away most of us while still alive? I know Warren Buffett's original plan was to give away nothing until death and then give away all of it and his wife or something convinced him to at least give away some while still alive. Note that while I think most of the other replies are not necessarily pertinent in that giving away trickles is clearly not "most," the Gates Foundation has given a total of $65.6 billion to date, which is more than half of the Gates family's current net worth, but it isn't funded solely by him. That also means he can't decide unilaterally what to spend the money on, though. I was under the impression it was mostly global health until recently. The education initiatives are relatively new. He could easily still be on track to give away some amount equal to whatever his net worth is on death by his death, though, and still meet a pledge to do it while alive. I don't know that anyone of extremely high net worth has ever tried to give away 50% all at once. I'm not sure that's even feasible in terms of finding organizations that could take and use that much money in a single year, other than donating directly to the US Treasury general fund.
• returnInfinity 4y ago
  I think, they create a trust and somebody manages it and grows it and gives away the profits to charity. Unless its the best run hedge fund, it will go to zero eventually in a thousand years.
• ryandvm 4y ago
  It takes a while to be an effective altruist with a hundred or so billion dollars. What did you want him to do? Throw it in a fountain?