We can’t leave it to billionaires to solve the world’s problems | Hacker News Reader

We can’t leave it to billionaires to solve the world’s problems

theguardian.com

31 pointsseek3r0054 comments

I'm really not a fan of the rising trend to attack billionaires just because they're billionares. There are plenty of points that each of the mentioned individuals can be legitimately criticised on. Their level of wealth or the decision to donate it to one cause or another is not a valid point of criticism.

It's only not a valid point of criticism if you believe any level of wealth is justified as it must be proportional to that individual's contributions to society.

I think that billionaires' wealth is justified, with the exception of criminal billionaires. Assuming that they pay all taxes that they are legally required to pay, why do you think that they do not have a right to their own personal property? They earned their property through voluntary agreements with other individuals.

A Warren-style wealth tax comes up surprisingly short in terms of funds collected for the government relative to the risks it faces ($2.75 trillion over 10 years, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/facts-on-warrens-wealth-ta...) The risks it drives include capital flight, worsened corporate governance, and decreased economic dynamism. These are all long term risks that are difficult to quantify. Most countries that have ever instituted a wealth tax have later repealed it. In every economic sense, taxing income is a better idea than taxing wealth.

Much of our understanding of wealth distribution is biased toward our home country. There's a pretty good chance that if you are an HN reader you are in the top 1% of income or wealth in the world (http://www.globalrichlist.com/). When I consider how little of the government's efforts try to solve global humanitarian problems compared to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I tend to think that the Gates' charitable contributions do more to address income inequality than a wealth tax on Gates would have.

In many ways the charitable contributions by billionaires solve problems that the government is poorly equipped to solve due to collective action problems. Forcing any large-scale charitable effort to be redirected through the government risks stultification, political misappropriation of funds, endless bickering about policy goals, projects cancelled due to changes at each election cycle. Having a two-pronged approach of private and public charity is more robust.

Let alone that sometimes problems and/or ways to solve them are... subjective to say the least. Or priorities are different.

It's OK to spend money without getting approval from the hive mind.

It feels like rehash of centrally governed rehash. If non-profit problem solving shall be centralised, maybe for-profit activities shall be done according by government-approved plan as well?

> They earned their property through voluntary agreements with other individuals.

Employment is not a "voluntary" agreement for many people.

Why stick to billionaires though? There're lots and lot of people whose wealth is much bigger than their contribution to society.

Their balance sheet isn't the point, it's what they did and are doing to get there that is the point:

- taking away healthcare from the poor, killing people

- destroying/privatizing what was once free and part of the shared commonwealth

- privatizing what never should've been profit-motivated in the first place: hospitals, prisons, schools and so on.

- "deregulating" removing pollution and safety protections that were written in blood

- spending money to corrupt the political process in order to buy passage of laws

- underpaying workers so they have to live in their cars and cheating them out of the profits they helped create

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

(One could also call it the "Upton Sinclair-effect".)

Life is adversarial. If you are angry about it, do something about it yourself, like putting up regulations or whatever. You cant attack someone for doing his job.

Sounds like OP is adopting the adversarial approach and trying push the concept of change around.

Its true. But still, hating on bilionaires is just ineffecient

It's quite efficient if you manage to bring together large enough crowd.

It was never efficient ever.

It's an efficient way to get rid of old aristocracy and give space for new aristocracy to raise. Russia and China are sweet cases. French revolution was somewhat similar too.

Maybe it'd be more productive to criticise people based on those points. Rather pick a somewhat correlating group.

How about we pick a skin color correlating with petty crimes and then draw conclusions on that? Not so cool, huh...

Your skin color isn't based on your actions, but your wealth is. It's not a fair comparison to make. You should be judged for your actions.

Exactly, people should be judged for their actions. Not for skin color or net worth.

One's wealth isn't automatically a result of bad actions. It's a very accurate comparison. Generalisation is generalisation.

> One's wealth isn't automatically a result of bad actions.

It almost always is, though. Skin color never is. I don't agree with your take at all.

One of the major problems with the concentration of wealth in such few hands is that the societies/countries where these folks live don't get to make collective decisions about how the money is spent.

Most have made their money using the many advantages of their countries. Roads, infrastructure, eductaion, stability, government, etc.

That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But when we allow such concentration of wealth we have given away the decision power to this handfull of people about how all that wealth gets used. The very top wealthy may in some cases believe their motivations and decisions are altruistic. That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent."

So while the fault for how we get in these situations of terrible wealth inequality may be shared by the peoples and governments that allow it, the wealthy themselves cannot escape their share either.

And in terms of who has more individual power to help restore balance by influencing the system, it sure isn't the single parent working a minimum wage job. Or a family barely getting by after an economic downturn destroys their jobs. Or the student struggling to pay their loans because they chose to get a degree in social work or eductaion instead of compsci or finance quant.

So it would be nice to see a lot more effort by more these lucky billionaires to actually correct wealth inequality and the systemtic issues that leads to this type of inequality.

> That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent."

Owning the wealth gives them authority on how it's spent.

I much more trust the billionaires to solve the world's problems than the politicians.

I know it's popular to rain crap on rich people (just see Hollywood's long list of well moneyed villains) but in the Real World I have many billionaires I respect and admire (from Gates to Musk and Bezos) and ZERO politicians.

While your approach is valid, the problems arise when the billionaires are the politicians. That is how you get corrupt governments.

Oh, but you don't need billionaires to get corrupt governments. You just need politicians. Who then become corrupt billionaires. But they were politicians first.

Benevolent dictators are the most effective may to govern, but it's really hard to prevent malicious dictators from rising in such a system.

All the dictators I know were non-billionaire politicians first.

I think even malicious dictators are OK. They don't last forever and they give the system a good cleanup.

While I detest the enormous wealth inequality in our world today, governments aren’t shaping up to be an appealing alternative.

I can’t speak for other countries but US government seems to systematically undervalue making and executing decisions efficiently. To me, the biggest failure of US-style democracy - often touted as a strength in the form of checks and balances (admittedly, thankfully because Trump has been slowed down quite a bit) - is its inefficiency - so many social problems root from that alone.

(I’m of the camp that issues like immigration are less of a “dumb racist conservatives” problem as the American left puts it, and more of a “convenient scapegoats for hopelessly low opportunity” problem, I say as someone who leans liberal but feels repelled by the way the party acts)

I got tired of SF government being so thoroughly useless at improving day to day life for its citizens, that I moved out to Tokyo now. They’re not perfect by any means, but the feeling that systems actually seem to work well, is revolutionary for me in a time of intense political disillusionment.

I think the operative word is We, because left to their own device drivers billionaires (and soon-to-be the first "Tyrell Corporation" trillionaire):

- narcissism, greed & hubris

- political, regulatory & media captures

become the dominating gradient vectors which tends to aggregate capital in the hands of those with the most power and extract it from those with the least. (Not a conspiracy theory, but a diffuse set of circumstances, patterns, attitudes and behaviors that snatch externalities and collapse from the jaws of success.)

If the government was competent, Tyrell and Wayland Yutani wouldn't be the interspacial leaders in space mining, would they?

The real issue is we can't leave it to billionaires to decide what the world's problems are.

The real dilemma is our eroding trust in politicians. Why is this happening?

Why is this flagged? Stop using a moderation feature as a downvote (or maybe the flag threshold should be raised higher).

The government needs to make it undesirable to become a billionaire. There should be an upper limit as to how much money you can have.

Most of the world's problems are caused by millionaires trying to become billionaires - Beyond a certain point, it's all zero-sum games that destroy society.

No one complains when the government creates regulation to artificially help boost rich people's wealth but if I make a comment about artificially limiting billionaire's wealth, people who are not even billionaires care about that? Even though it doesn't affect them personally??

Then they go around preaching the doctrine of capitalistic self-interest.

The law of capitalistic self-interest according to Milton Friedman basically says: Take the money from wherever you can get it, however you can get it. Billionaires have a lot of money, so why don't we all collaborate and take it? Why the double standard?

Why is everyone collaborating against the lower and middle classes? If you're reading this, you're the middle class! Unless these billionaires are paying you to down-vote, the law of capitalistic self-interest says screw them.

What if I told you that no matter how many questions you got right on a test, you'd never score higher than a 70%.

Are you going to try to get 100% correct?

If nobody knows what is required to get 70% correct and their expectation (based on past experiences) is at 10%, then if they want to succeed, they'll work as hard as they can regardless.

Maybe the test is extremely long and challenging and basically no one will even score 50%.

That is actually the reality of capitalism. Basically no one becomes a billionaire and almost none of them could have planned for it.

You don't need to keep multimillionaires working; after a certain point, they add no new value. Just look at Facebook, after Mark Zuckerberg became billionaire, it was all negative-sum games. It would have been better if he had just retired to Hawaii and let someone else have a go. Why keep the guy under this illusion that he is still playing a fair game? He is not playing the same game as he was playing when he was in his Harvard dorm room... And even that game was way easier than the game that 99.9% of people alive today are actually playing.

USSR was a sweet test case. End result was that people didn't bother to put in much effort since there was little to gain. Which resulted in inefficient economy missing target after target.

Students in USSR were sent to state farms to help local workers. Those farms were stupidly inefficient. Because of that a lot of produce was rotting out in fields. My mom was sent in as well when she was a student. Being a naive city girl she did double the worker's quota on her first day. Next morning local workers told her to slow down because otherwise quotas would be raised for everybody.

Usually such regimes end up in shortage of toilet paper.

Japan seems fine, better than the US even in almost every way, yet they have 1/8 the number of per capita billionaires the US does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...

Pretty sure they have a greater variety of toilet paper than the US does.

When did Japan artificially limit wealth of their billionaires?

I'm sure their economical issues of 90s and 00s did hit their wealthy quite a bit though. But that's not exactly artificial limitation.

Nobody but you used the statement "artificially limit wealth" anywhere. Obviously the Japanese have some policies in place which discourage these social menaces from growing and taking over their political system. What's wrong with adopting some of those? Works for them, and doesn't impact their prosperity or standard of living in any way.

Did you read the comment that I originally replied to? Dude said that in plain text.

Japan is a funny case actually. Massive corporations play a big role there. Both historically and nowadays. Yes, those big corporations take care of their workers. But it doesn't change the fact, that the rich are barely limited in that country.

Firs thing this article takes a shot at is Bezos deploying $10b "like Gates before him."

Gates has, to my knowledge, been vastly more successful than any government program at reducing malaria and getting people vaccinated.

Which is an exact antithesis of the subheading of the article.

Another funny thing is, "we" usually attack both millionaires and billionaires. Now, millionaires are forgiven. It seems many of "we" become millionaires.

Or more likely it means that millionaires have more social and political influence than before.

You clearly cant leave it to governements.. whuch one is the worsr devil ?

This is a false dichotomy, to put it mildly.

Bill Gates singlehandedly did more to eradicate Polio & several other deadly diseases than multiple Governments, WHO, and several development orgs over several decades!

This demonization of the billionaires is uncalled for, many of them do plenty of good for society on balance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com