Comment by zekevermillion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zekevermillion | Hacker News Reader

Amazon shares have a lot of value, and Bezos is sitting on a pile of them. What should Bezos do with that currency -- hoard it? spend it?

This supermoney represents Bezos' capacity to incentivize his fellow humans to act in concert toward a goal that he can influence. If he hoards it, then it does nothing for society. Bezos doesn't need it for his personal enjoyment either. After he leases a couple jets, buys a few homes, and pays for his staff, I doubt that costs more than tens of millions per year. Not billions.

If he spends it, then he needs to find undertakings that can efficiently absorb billions of dollars in value and still advance a meaningful goal. Space exploration is one of those undertakings. Bezos said he has been spending I think a billion per year on space travel / rocket engineering. There are few other areas that could so easily use this kind of capital. I would think that homelessness is another difficult problem that can absorb large amounts of value.

Maybe this arrangement of accumulation and philanthropy is sub-optimal, and we should instead tax capital to allocate the surplus democratically rather than allow the person who accumulated it to make the decision. Well, we already do that to some degree, with mixed results. Perhaps a little of both is called for.

In any event, I for one am pleased to see this money going to address homelessness. I don't care who is making the endowment, as long as the funds are used well. This is a serious, difficult problem, and this charity seems meaningful to me, not a purchased indulgence like sponsoring a new museum wing for example.

The counter-argument is that, if these super-wealthy individuals didn't feel the need to extract the maximum wealth from the community (the notion that it's their fiduciary duty to pay the least in wages or find loopholes to minimise tax exposure is a myth), then communities in the round would be better off.

Regardless of if you agree with his actions or not, it's pretty tone-deaf from a PR perspective - pretty much anyone could have seen the backlash coming. He doesn't seem to give a monkey's butt about public perception, but there's very little he can do positively for the community whilst there's still the notion he's trying to destroy it with his business interests. The money and help he's trying to provide will just work better and be more effective and efficient if there's active support for it from all sides. Everything that happens with that money now will be caveated and judged by his actions.

I'd argue he should wait until he retires from Amazon (a la Bill Gates) if he does want any efforts to resonate with people. Then again, for good or bad, I don't think he really cares. I just hope the money can be deployed effectively whilst attached to him, even if it should have been in the pockets of the community all along.

The economy isn’t a zero-sum game.

If one closes their eyes to externalities (societal and environmental and political), then yes, it isn't.

If you take those things into account, I can imagine one single source of positive sums: ecological cost efficiency.

If we can produce as much or more wealth with less ecological footprint then we have positive sum.

By that reasoning, people are no better off today, in an economic sense, than they were 200 years ago. In fact, they would be worse off because there are more of us and the same (if not fewer) resources to go around.

True, but its distribution, scale and movement isn't linear either. Like conservation of energy, Bezos and Amazon are a part of "the economy", he technically hasn't extracted anything from it (just storing it). Doesn't mean that money hasn't been extracted from the rest of the community.

I'm not arguing from a philosophical standpoint, merely pointing out that from a public perception standpoint, a backlash on the apparent hypocrisy of him giving a damn about the community by trying to tackle homelessness whilst potentially damaging it in a tangential way through his ways of working is justified.

Each dollar that you hold and don't spend represents one potential vote for what the economy should do next. If you vote wisely, your votes usually get returned to you. If you vote poorly, they usually don't come back.

Rich people are a form of representative election. Some people give their proxies to others that they think will make wise economic choices. If you choose your proxy well, you also get rewarded with more votes.

That system has led to a situation where a viable equilibrium exists wherein those with unspent money can tend to make choices that benefit mostly themselves rather than the whole economy.

Each spent dollar is a production order. Investment is planning; spending is executing. If you don't spend enough money to execute on the plan, it will fail from a lack of material support. If the plan is good, and the work gets done, everyone benefits. That's not zero-sum. You can get out more than you put in. That's the whole point of having a specialized, productive economy.

But the investment portion of the economy is zero-sum. You can't order more than 100% of the productive economy that exists at any given moment. Every day, one pie the size of the productive economy gets auctioned off in tiny pieces. You can order the productive economy to grow its own capacity a bit, to make bigger pies tomorrow and into the future, but after it does, you will still have to re-vote to use it. Once the investment economy started gambling with itself on which of the candidate economic plans had the best prospects, it turned itself into a realm where someone else has to lose in order for anyone else to win. People stopped voting on bigger pies, and started voting strategically, to get more votes in the future. "Don't make more pie; make more votes!" They forgot that making and eating the daily pie was the important part of the voting process.

As for philanthropy, that might be an attempt to create a standing vote for "let's plan to spend some economic resources on being good to one another, regardless of anything else we might vote on".

> If you vote wisely, your votes usually get returned to you. If you vote poorly, they usually don't come back.

Depends on what you want to do. If you are rich want to fund cancer research you might to do it right away and never see your money back, or invest it in a successful business, earn twice as much ... but die of cancer because you didn't use your votes soon enough.

Was it wise to get your votes back?

Economics has a somewhat different definition of wisdom than human philosophers and ethicists.

Economically, investing in cancer cures research is wise when selling a cure would be profitable. Even if you had a death oracle that could tell you exactly what a person would die of, and when, it might be wiser (economically) to invest in a cure for the disease that will kill Bill Gates in N years than the one that will kill you in N+M years.

Because the money you spend on curing Gates's disease in N years might return enough to allow you to finance a cure for your own in less than M years, whereas the original amount might cure yours in N+M+C years. It's all hypothetical. You make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, but luck and skill are always factors.

But keeping price high and salaries low when you are so rich that you can give away 2 billion is a zero sum game. Every dollar you pull out of customer's pocket and put in yours instead of your employee's makes them poorer nominally by exactly the same it makes you richer. And relatively ... They get way more poorer than you get richer ...

Taking money from people and keeping it is only ok if you have good idea what to do with it.

I'm not saying Bezos is wrong there. Taxing customers and employees to help the homeless is perfectly fine in my book.

Only if he's helping the homeless to the same degree he's taking the money from employees and customers. But let's face it, he is not and he wont.

Instead of relying on one out of 50 billionaires to spend a small fraction of their wealth to "give back" how about we pass something like Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act?

This is factually false because it assumes that the money Bezos takes are taken from other people. But the economy is not a zero sum game, otherwise we would still have the same world wide wealth as cavemen did. What Bezos made, his employees cumulatively made many times over and all that money goes through multiple transactions that can be taxed. Simply spreading out 100b$ to every American would give you a negligible amount of money to each one and then cause the loss of many jobs( you can't expect to spread the money a.k.a. not have rich people but at the same time have the enterprises they create).

There are better methods to define who need that help rather than the super rich opinion. The Gates Foundation model goes in that direction, approaching urgent things first: child mortality, education access, vacine distribution, etc... Those topics are more urgent than space travel according to the general consensus. A good way to define those problems is to check which social programs are being supported for the countries in a specific region. In Latin America for example, poverty is one of those social problems, rather than internet access, for instance.

The problem is in how undemocratic this kind of philanthropy is. Most everyone can agree that homelessness needs to be addressed. But why does one man get to decide how that is done? We as a society should be using our collective resources to help give everyone a good chance, we shouldn't have to rely on the benevolence of certain massively powerful individuals for any good to be done for those in need. It shouldn't be possible for only one person to dictate the terms for which that aid is dispensed either, which could just be another way of helping themselves.

The way this should work is that Bezos should be taxed far more than he currently is and a good government run by and for the people should be redistributing that wealth created by Bezos (but mostly created by all the workers at Amazon, and through the use of society's existing infrastructure) to improve things for everyone.

There is a good discussion of the issues with such kinds of billionaire philanthropy in this podcast [1] and its sequel, where they focus on how Bill Gates has built an image of doing good for the world's most needy, while also using that same power to threaten democracies and worker's rights and build more power for himself.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so...

How about getting his workers off of public assistance? That should be a few drops in the bathtub of his wealth.

But he "wants to help the poor". I call bull on it until he helps his own employees.

Pay his workers better?

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