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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.
by 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 agoThe 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 agoMacKenzie 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 agoAnother 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.
- frumper 4y agoThe US Government funds much more than any handful of rich people, and many times more than all of the charitable giving in the US every year. State and local government spending just piles on to the government spending side of the equation.
- ch4s3 4y agoBuilding a business that provides useful products and services isn't "extraction minded." Most of the people I've know over the years who start businesses do so because they want to be the one making decisions and having the ultimate responsibility. A lot of them are very community minded.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoWe are talking different scales. Billionaires vs your run of the mill millionaires.
- ch4s3 4y agoI mean, Bezos started Amazon for a relatively modest amount of funding in a garage and built the "everything store" with a relentless focus on customer service. It's not like he's some 19th century oil baron. I don't want to fall into the trap of reading a mans mind from a distance, but you claim of "extractive mindset" is utterly unsupported and ideological.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoOf course it’s ideological. How else does one arrive at ideas and concepts after a review of empirical evidence? The facts are the same, the conclusions we arrive at (including our ideologies) will be the intersection of the facts, our mental models, and our life experiences. Edit: wrt to your reply, agree to disagree.
- ch4s3 4y agoTo be clear I'm saying that the claims starts from ideology and works backwards ignoring any other factors.