There is absolute and relative generosity. On absolute terms Bill is the most generous. On relative terms even after giving away $30b he still has more money than he could ever spend so there is really no personal sacrifice made.
Anyone with a lot of money can give a lot without any impact on themselves. When someone inconveniences themselves / gives their time and sweat, I’m more impressed.
“””Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.”””
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite
Bill Gates is sacrificing basically nothing by giving away half (or even 90%) of his wealth. He lives the exact same life of supreme comfort that he did before.
Weirdly this is one of the few things the bible was actually abundantly clear about (and it's a pretty good point).
To put it another way, although one can give the Gates generosity-brownie-points for caring about other people, they don’t get fourty thousand times as many such points as a normal couple who “only” donates a million dollars to charity.
First, in terms of ends, it's not better, but you can say it is more virtuous, in the sacrificial sense of putting the needs of others before hers, even though probably pointless in practice.
Thus, in terms of practicality, I do think it's better for the poor to keep their money, and the rich to redistribute their surplus.
But, in this practical sense, I feel it would be even more efficient if our society could improve its systems so that the surplus simply never happened in the first place. What would be both virtuous and better in practice in my opinion is if Bill Gates simply had chosen to give himself a smaller share and a lower wage from the beginning.
Now, maybe if you take into account psychology and motivations, it might be that humans require our current system of winning it all and then giving it back. So its hard to say if it could be implemented at all.
This has always been the argument in favour of things like materialist and capitalist philosophy - the outcomes are much better than the alternative.
There are countless well-meaning individuals who have achieved nothing, because they give their wealth away early on, compared to this one convenient counterexample in Gates, who firstly made obscene wealth with tactics that were pretty shady in my opinion, certainly anti competitive, then did flat-out more good.
If Gates were more relatively generous through his life, it is pretty plausible that he and a lot of poor people throughout in the world would be _worse off_. This is a strong argument against being relatively generous.
I guess part of the problem is that Gates just so happens to have deployed his vast wealth for good, whereas there are plenty of very rich people that are ambivalent at best and (depending on your political viewpoint) negative at worst i.e. rich people funding climate-sceptic organisations.
On balance though I'm sticking to my point, which is that all the people preaching on incessantly about why us evil unenlightened need to mend our ways would do far better to shut up, make a stack of money being an evil capitalist, and then give it all away to their noble cause of preference.
But, in recent years, we're seeing a shift, and that's why people talk about late stage capitalism, because it seems that it no longer creates the reduction in the extremes it did in tbe beginning. The question is, what can be done about this?
And I say that assuming that we learned many times already that a few ultra rich with concentrated power and wealth do not become generous and efficient leaders, solving world hunger, ending poverty, etc.