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So, why are so many people against them giving away that money in pursuit of a fairer world? Is it just frustrating to see the rich (aka evil) give away money c

• kstenerud 4y ago
  It's not a problem of giving away to charity; It's a problem of people reaching this level of wealth in the first place. In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth). With 2 million USD in personal wealth, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life in a first world country. Tens of millions or more is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity over time.
  • Joeboy 4y ago
    So many people seem to leap into this "billionaires are bad" rhetoric when EA is mentioned. I mean, fine, but it's not really an answer to what I said. I think it's maybe an example of the "Gordian Knot" mentioned upthread. I'm not asking whether billionaires are bad or not, I'm asking why so many people would prefer that billionaires keep their money, rather than the money being used to save lives. Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than accepting a billion dollar donation from a very rich person?
    • kstenerud 4y ago
      IMO, people would prefer that billionaires keep their money because they also buy into the idea of making it big themselves one day, someday. If you get rid of the billionaires, that prize no longer exists for people to wish for. Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent. > Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars? I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?
      • Joeboy 4y ago
        > I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your EA goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people. It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or controversial "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives. So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. You could tweet about it and probably get a lot of likes. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is that really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd (and frankly horrifying) that anybody would even have to think about that question for longer than a millisecond. 250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.
    • ploum 4y ago
      They don’t use money to save lives. They use the money to maximize their prestige and their power. They save lives when it fits their agenda. Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists". Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves. It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)
  • oh_sigh 4y ago
    Bezos is wealthy simply because he owns a large chunk of Amazon. Because he started the company. He's only a billionaire because literally everyone in the world is willing to pay him a substantial piece of money for a tiny piece of the company. How is that Jeff's problem? The world could make Jeff not a billionaire in a moment by merely saying "none of us want a piece of Amazon". At what point was Jeff supposed to give away his ownership of Amazon? Who should he have given it to? Would they then get to run the company, would Jeff keep running it?
  • jlokier 4y ago
    Wait, the popular author J K Rowling was in the list of wealthy people whose financial actions you've said are a problem. J K Rowling wrote some books that lots of people liked and accepted a modest payment for each copy, making her wealthy. To check, are you saying it's not good enough even if she decides to give away the money now, because she should never have had that much financial power in the first place, to decide what to do with so much? If so, what should she have done instead? I think a wildly successful published author can only avoid getting rich by giving away their royalties. Declining to take royalties in the first place is just another form of giving them away, and that decision exercises equivalent financial power to taking them and giving them to someone else. Same with making the books freely available, free to copy: that's exercising the power to give away the wealth to readers who would have paid, instead of someone else. So taking less money in the first place is not a way out of your ethical constraint. It's just another form of being rich and giving it away, but with a faster cycle. In some sense it's not her fault she acquired financial power, except in the sense that she chose to make something lots of people loved enough to be willing to pay for, which is hardly something to criticise. The power simply exists by virtue of large numbers of people being willing to pay without coercion. If there's no way for a person to avoid having financial power as a result of some welcome action they did, not even by choosing to give every penny of their wealth away while earning it, I don't think it's fair or ethical to blame them for having that unavoidable power, nor sensible to deem them a psychopath. If you're going to judge the person, better to judge how they exercise the power they have, not that they have it.