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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Some questions lingered in the back of my mind after I read this article:

- How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make? Is their healthcare fully covered? Do they have generous paid time off and access to higher education for themselves and their children? Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?

- Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill? Giving to Cornell seems counter-productive to me. Giving a bunch of Ivy League jocks more resources doesn’t seem like an equity promoting endeavor.

Not to diminish his other accomplishments. Still, philanthropists get to choose who to include and exclude. Ideally, it wouldn’t have been possible for this guy to amass 8 billion dollars of wealth in the first place - it would have been properly taxed and invested into our communities equitably.

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Because the government has such a great track record of collecting tax revenue and then investing it where it is appropriate?

Questions can be raised about some of his specific donations, but when someone gives away $8B of his wealth, spending nearly none on himself, does it globally, influences other billionaires to do the same, picking at any one of his specific donations seems counter productive.

Yes Cornell is an Ivy League school, but it is where he went to school, he probably has very strong ties to that school, perhaps met his wife there, or his business partner, if he chooses to give back to that school that is also good.

Plus there was a tremendous amount he gifted to "education" so without knowing all of the details, hard to imagine that he didn't provide some sort investment in to under represented communities. If he helped Vietnam with their healthcare he obviously wasn't just US centric but helped where he though his donation could have an outsized return.

By the way he gifted a large amount of money to the Obamacare campaign, so by proxy, he was providing healthcare to his workers, and more likely than not.

My argument is that a system that allows $8 billion in wealth to accumulate enough to be controlled by one person has already failed.

The US government is actually really impressively good in a lot of areas, and I personally get fatigued of the oft-repeated notion that government “can’t possibly work” or that they “can’t possibly spend tax dollars responsibly.”

> a system that allows $8 billion in wealth to accumulate enough to be controlled by one person has already failed

I think you have little appreciation of how wealth is created.

Jeff Bezos became the wealthiest person in the world neither by stealing or exploiting , but rather by improving peoples lives. Amazon was able to organize systems, take advantage of technological developments and put capital to work to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers.

The team at Amazon improved people's lives, not Jeff Bezos all by himself. Why couldn't there be thousands more millionaires that helped build Amazon rather than one mega billionaire?

> Why couldn't there be thousands more millionaires that helped build Amazon rather than one mega billionaire?

There probably are thousands of millionaries that helped build Amazon... assuming they held onto their stock from the time they joined to the present.

> neither by stealing or exploiting

Citation needed, as they say.

There have been dozens of controversies involving Amazon: shopping for tax breaks it doesn’t need for HQ2, micro-managing warehouse employees’ bladder, union busting, firing a COVID whistleblower, cross-contaminating inventory, insufficient protections against counterfeit items, building a book ecosystem monopoly, probably numerous others I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.

I believe the government's role is to provide protection from foreign threats, guarantee basic human rights, reasonably regulate the business environment, and provide basic public services that are only possible on a society-level basis. When they get into areas that local communities and private charities operate, they'll at best be inefficient and more than likely be corrupt at some level.

> - How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make?

I have similar thoughts when I hear about the philanthropy of the mega wealthy. Instead of a single person like Chuck Feeney or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates amassing ungodly amounts of wealth and then later choosing how to distribute it, why couldn't the companies they built have made 1,000 or 10,000 or X other people relatively rich instead of one man mega rich?

Agree. I think the greatest ill of our society is the death of the middle class and the widening gap between the haves and the have nots.

Some suggest that taxation is the answer but maybe another answer is for companies to distribute their wealth more widely.

The middle class hasn't died at all. In fact it is larger today than ever before. It's just a bad narrative people have bought into. [1]

In essence what has happened as the upper-middle class has grown over the last 40 years. Poor, lower-middle and regular middle class percentage has shrunk to its lowest levels. We have fewer poor people than ever before. But because the upper middle class has grown so much, middle class people feel closer to poor people.

We have more well to do people than ever before. The middle class is smaller but the lower-middle and poor classes are even smaller. So people have generally moved up.

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...

Interesting hypothesis. Thanks for the article. I will have to stew on this. It doesn't seem to jibe with the all angst about class that people seem to be feeling.

Some hypothesis I’ve read believe that because the upper middle has grown so much and is so visible, middle class people don’t feel as middle class.

More people have moved up than down. However as the nation has become more wealthy a greater share of the wealth has gone to upper middle than below them.

I think there’s so many dynamics at play here and it isn’t 100% cut and dry. For instance, there are more single parent (or single person) homes. Divorce isn’t socially unacceptable anymore and young people are waiting longer to get married. Do people lose the efficiencies of 2 earners in a household and possibly the class bump?

I’m not an expert on this but the data does show growth in the middle class by growing the upper-middle and a shrinking poverty class.

Well, not saying this is what he did, but if you took away from American minimum wage workers and gave to rural South Asians or sub-Saharan Africans, you are improving world equity.

The West is hyper-wealthy.

The guy gives away 8 billion dollars and all you have are complaints... Does he need to turn water into wine before you are happy?

> Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?

No idea. Maybe some of it was.

> Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill?

His donation to Cornell was earmarked for opening a new campus (Cornell Tech) to employ more educators and educate more students. It wasn't for replacing a stadium and putting his name on it.

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