Which billionaires are doing the most good?
billionaireboard.com
billionaireboard.com
So....Gates has donated more as a share of his net worth and SIGNIFICANTLY more in raw numbers. What justifies putting Dorsey ahead of him?
Is the (admittedly quite small) heading.
Also I noted that Brin (only one I clicked on) is in last place/#29 at $0 this month. So (and to find out was the reason I clicked) this is 'how much have these 29 billionaires donated this month'; not 'who are the top billionaire donors, all listed are big donors'.
Total % of net worth would be the obvious metric, wouldn't it?
Is this only US billionaires? There are 614 billionaires in the US according to Forbes[0], there are only 29 listed here, ~5% of the total.
Assuming accurate monthly data is even available, I think a 12mo moving average would make more sense. In addition to the %net worth you suggest.
This month Dorsey has donated $1B, Bill Gates has donated $150m (both according to that website).
I totally skimmed right past that and didn't read it either because there's no filter for overall or any other period. Perfect example of design flaw that a designer would argue is the user's fault cause "ITS RIGHT THERE!"
Sorry, which are the three titles?
I see "billionaire board" and "Top donors this month" as two, but what's the third?
Will put the caps in sync!
> Koch Industry's Molex is transforming its production line to help produce Sense's Biodetection new COVID-19 test that produces result in less than 10 minutes.
I wouldn't ever classify this guy as doing something "good", unless good is coincidentally beneficial to him.
Within friend groups where there are no formally established laws or codes of conduct, there are certain implicit standards of behavior people are expected to abide by, and part of why they do is because of the threat of social ostracism.
In a broader scope, in ancient societies social ostracism was often used to deal with those who violated the norms of society; in Athens ostracism was an official punishment.
I'm not saying we can or should literally expel billionaires who don't put their liquid wealth towards philanthropy, but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily avoided.
Social pressure put upon the super wealthy using tools like this could be more effective than people expect. There is the threat of social ostracism, but also the reward of social approval granted to the patrons of philanthropy.
Taxes are easily avoided only because they're designed to be easily avoidable. Simplifying[1] the tax code costs a lot of political capital due to entrenched interests but is technically trivial - ask a seven year old to design a fair tax system and it'd be less of a trainwreck than ours.
Deductible expenses need to be significantly curtailed and capped and alternative minimums could be introduced to be a stop-gap against any loop holes that were missed. Then you just start playing whack-a-mole with various tax credits to cut out targeted and unjust programs like child-credits and mortgage relief.
1. Actually doing this, not just granting a bunch of money to corporations like the GOP did.
For example it has Jeff Bezos donating 10 billion to a new 'Bezos Earth Fund'.
However it hasn't yet issued any grants so as of today, he has merely moved money from one place he controls to another one I assume he still controls.
Meanwhile they are "estimated" to spend "up to" $2m on Mary's place annually, in the future. Let me know when that happens and when their political spending drops down, but I'm skeptical and so far they have spent more on political spending against anyone who suggests taxing them.
Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction of apartments. Of course rents elsewhere are skyrocketing.
That's flat out wrong.
"San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city's 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That's about 75 percent of the city's rental stock.)"
source: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
Please point out a solution from these politicians on the left that won't make things worse.
We seem to hold CEO of coke more culpable for filling oceans with plastic than coke's shareholders like buffet who profit more from it than the CEO. Really bizarre phenomenon.
Perhaps he should - he owns a large stake in Coca cola - one of the largest plastic polluters in the world.
He also is a 'good investor' - ie an actual investor, helping to build conpanies over a long time, rather than a speculator.
Personality - being soft spoken and all that - has probably a big part to play as well.
Coke is killing ppl with coronavirus by causing massive obesity crisis in america.
I think it's a valid thing to make that data public though.
Lmk if you build the site.
It's all arbitrary, IMO. Idk if they're "siphoning off profits", since most of their value is in equity and Amazon, for example, isn't historically very profitable.
Getting richer every year in equity value is a strange concept. I think there should be some additional taxes, but we also shouldn't expect taxes to be a real solution.
Also, the descriptions here seem pretty varied, and highly slanted.
eg. Balmer joined Microsoft when it was still a start-up, and just gets credited for the CEO years, rather than as helping grow it along the way.
Sergey Brin just has "Immigrant" for the second sentence. Martha Ingram "Author of three books". Neither of those provides any insight into the value that provided.
Overall that just makes the whole page look especially suspect, coupled with picking these 29 (or "About 30" as the About page puts it).
There's so little rationale here it makes the whole site look like advertising for something I can't work out.
- Totally agree. I have all the data on doing percentages. The "score" actually normalizes across their percentage. Will add this more visibly.
- The "last month" is just to give any billionaire a chance to get to the top spot. Also open to making it more.... "last 3 months" or so? We had a lifetime ranking at first, but then the site felt too static and cast a lifetime judgement on people instead of giving them the opportunity to attain a top spot.
- Agreed on the descriptions. All the data was crowdsourced, so we can go through and improve these.
- Suspect in terms of what exactly? We definitely launched early (as one does). Open to more feedback!
"These are the world's most powerful people. Let's track their impact & inspire them to do more good"
This doesn't seem like a good motivator, because doing something for the sake of reputation doesn't directly incentivize solving a problem in an effective way.
And w.r.t. the title of the post, it seems like there are a few steps critical steps being omitted in the relationship between money donated and "doing good". For instance, not all organizations are as effective as others; if the motivator is to increase the $ count of donation, then what's the point in thinking about "doing good"?
Can I be ranked as "doing the most good" by contributing more money than anyone else in the list, while still doing measurable damage to parts of society that aren't being included in the metric?
See, if this website were neutral -- if it just showed the damn numbers without injecting it with an arbitrary value judgement, this would have been great. Instead, this serves to create anxiety to those who view it to do something for the wrong reasons.
The more I think about this, the more banal this site seems to me. I'd appreciate being pointed out if I'm missing something, but otherwise this website tells me more about the mindset of the authors than anything else.
This is the v1 of the site and I'm looking to improve it.
- How can I make it more neutral? - Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital? Can you combine the two incentives?
My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth. Even determining who that is right now is extraordinarily difficult. Making the data public is step #1, and then figuring out how to help them leverage philanthropy effectively is step #2.
Just show the numbers. If there's something you'd like to show what the numbers mean, then be careful about explaining that. Make clear distinctions between metrics and goals. Think about all the metrics you think will tell you that you're approaching a goal; then find all the ways they will break. I already said how your metric-of-choice is broken and cheat-able.
"Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital?"
Is this what you believe your role is?
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"My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth."
You're going to burn yourself out by trying to find human levers to change the world. Some of us will be there to welcome you to the club, but I know some people who haven't made it. I'm not one to say whether you should hop on or jump off that train. Usually, there's something else that's going on in my life that leads me to that kind of mindset.
There are contradictions in our language and value-systems, and it's total bullshit, but we chose to pretend to believe them because that's what you need to do to get in for the ride. Lots of people forget that they are pretending, and some of re-remember it in adulthood or something.
So the difficulty in determining in "who that is" might be one of those contradictions popping up.
I see that argument everywhere, but haven't found substantial proof.
I was at first making it a lifetime-oriented ranking, but that felt like "shame these specific people!"
I think there's a middle-ground between celebration and shame that I'm trying to hit.
It's up to whoever put in the work to have the ability to contribute, decide what cause they support. As long as most of the top causes get support we're in good shape. If they're being ineffective toward their chosen goal, that's something I'd like pointed out.
Anyways, here's the launch blog post: https://www.zachtratar.com/introducing-billionaire-board.htm...
A person donating $10 when his/her net worth $20 is different from a person donating the same amount but the net worth of, say, $1000.
Isn't that what these billionaires are doing? Giving their money away. The more billionaires donate, the closer we get to your world where everyone has as much agency over their lives as possible. (Including the donors, of course.)
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The answers are no, and no.
If billionaires overall do tend to donate significant portions of their wealth, then the fact that wealth inequality is increasing in spite of that practice is hard evidence that individual charity is an ineffective means of lifting people out of poverty. If the converse is true -- that they aren't donating their wealth -- then that too suggests that something like a state is necessary to force their hand.
Examples include: Your data, subsidies from your tax dollars to create asymmetric markets, common things like water quality or environment, or legal asymmetry that allows for rent-seeking.
I don't want Billionaire to feel forced to give "true gifts" through social pressures or otherwise - I'd prefer if their wealth was properly utilized through a just level of taxation.
Why'd you need so many words to say "taken?"
For example, the limit could be $30,000,000 so if you're making more than that in pretax income, your income would be $29,999,999.999 etc. with the fractional cent increasing so people could still compete on a scoreboard.
Also, it seems like one of the biggest arguments against capping wealth is that it would disincentive innovation. But just about every person who became billionaires through innovation never had that intention to begin with. I firmly believe Jeff Bezos would still be running Amazon if he had a wealth cap. Mark Zuckerberg would still be running Facebook. No?
Rather than "giving back", maybe these people should stop taking away in the first place.
Feeling quite bad about this situation.
A moving average of last 12 months, if you really can get monthly data, would make more sense to me.
Also, a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes, and the money was invested and growing. Its good we have it, but the "we gave away all this money" is an insignificant impact to them for multiple reasons.
No, that's all of them. You don't become a billionaire by being nice and non-exploitative.
J. K. Rowling became a billionaire by writing the Harry Potter books. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire through her brand as a talented talk show host. Michael Jordan became a billionaire thanks to his basketball skills. None of those are even remotely exploitative.
And the hundreds of marketing people and the editors?
> Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire through her brand as a talented talk show host.
And everyone who makes her shows work?
> Michael Jordan became a billionaire thanks to his basketball skills.
And his coaches and trainers?
Without these people, none of those billionaires would've made it.
In the examples you have cited, all of those people were paid for their labor. In the cases of Winfrey and especially Jordan, many of those people were paid extremely well for their labor.
By your standard, anyone who participates in the economy is making money off the backs of others. My mother is now happily retired on the savings she accumulated working as a nurse. She couldn't have done that without all the people working at drug manufacturers, EMR companies, or health insurance providers. Did she make money off the backs of the hospital lab techs? Did she exploit the ER security guards? After all without those people, she wouldn't have made it.
This isn't how taxes work. If you donate money then you've only reduced your taxable principal. You "avoid taxes" in the sense that it's as if you never made that money. You don't magically reduce your burden any further than that.
People won't take your otherwise fine point seriously if you include this commonly made error.
[1] Note that a 200% penalty rate can apply to uncorrected self-dealing transactions. For the board members and officers, an excise tax of 10% may apply, which the non-profit cannot pay on their behalf.
They can't further "any" goal they want, it must be a charitable goal. Bill Gates can't take money from the B&M Foundation to buy himself a yacht. I don't really see what your point is. Anyone that donates money is avoiding taxes to spend money on something they want, where "something they want" is a charitable goal.
It's a common mistake that bothers me because it often is used to dismiss (or even demonize) what is, in the majority of cases, an altruistic act.
Chartiable donations can also come with requirements around evangelism which I personally find aborrent and, as has otherwise been pointed out, yes it's an absolute reduction in take home but abuse of the system is rife and the income reduction mechanic makes this really attractive to some folks if they're hit with a particularly hard year.
In Canada I've actually been pleased to discover that your retirement is mechanically a charity - investing into an RRSP (registered retirement savings plan) counts as a direct income reduction which can mean that swing years when options may be cashed out or other windfalls happen - can be put profitably towards your own future well being while also ensuring you don't become a burden later in life.
It's worth reading that entire well-reasoned and well-researched post, but the tl;dr is that many billionaire philanthropists do a lot more good per dollar spent than the government and they get problems solved that government is often incapable of solving.
Plus, a sizeable portion of every tax dollar goes to the military, so tax minimization helps reduce how much goes to the war machine.
The sort of TL;DR here is that America being the world police isn't something the public approves of and I think it'd be more efficient to pursue addressing this point then hanging your hopes on billionaires. The utter fascination and praise of billionaires is an extremely toxic[1] spin off from general American Exceptionalism which has done quite a lot of damage to... well... Americans actually being exceptional.
1. In my opinion - how you view the effect of this on society is entirely an opinion thing.
One of the reasons I'm working hard and saving money is to provide my family with better opportunities than I had. To say I'm not allowed to better the lives of my family is to deprive me of rights and freedoms to do what I want with what I create.
"Which of our Gracious Lords are doing the moste Good?"
This doesn't make giving bad. You can be selfish and do a tremendous amount of good for others. There's nothing wrong with feeling good or being socially rewarded for helping. This idea that some forms of giving are "altruistic" and others are schemes or manipulations isn't helpful. Attacking a generous person's character because you suspect their motives are somehow impure for unrelated reasons isn't helpful.
By all means, call people out for their bullshit when their motives are hypocritical and transparent, but don't beatify some and demonize others because of unrelated faults in their character. They're all giving for selfish reasons.
It feels more and more relevant in a post COVID world.
E.g. Suckerberg did questionable business tactics to kick out early invester which where the people which enabled him to become successful. After this Facebook under him repeatedly acted in bad faite to gain a competitive advantage even if this meant lying to the government, smaller business being unfairly destroy and even lives being lost.
I'm not sure if he even once put social responsibilities over long term profit. At least it looks that way.
And compared to many other companies this might even be harmless.
Through not that this isn't true for (multi-)millionaires, you can get that while acting morally responsible. It's just harder and you need more luck.