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Comment by istingray | Hacker News Reader

Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back". It's the underpinning of this whole Gates/Buffet Giving Tree.

I love how MacKenzie Scott is just jumping in, giving away the money, make smart choices, pull the bandaid off and get to work. At this pace she'll give away all $60B in 7.5 years, assuming she doesn't speed up. I bet she's aiming for 2 years for 99%, so ~$52B next year. She's not trying to spend the rest of her life as a philanthropist, live beyond the grave, supplement government/tax failings, or have hospitals in her name.

To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way.

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Well if you want to ultimately have the most charitable impact, "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" can actually do the most good. By an extraordinary magnitude.

If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years, and then $100 million in another 10 years, and then $1 billion after thirty years total... wouldn't it seem deeply wrong to give away the $1 million today, and throw away the opportunity to do $999 million of good in 30 years? Or from an equivalent perspective, to do $999 million of future harm in exchange for a mere $1 million of good today.

Obviously it depends on whether the money will grow, whether who you give to invests it themselves, it's a balancing of risk reward etc. But the idea that you always ought to give charitably now rather than invest and give later seems deeply flawed.

I suggest going work on climate solutions. Every $1 of progress today will be worth $100,000 of impact within a decade. You're unlikely to capture that value personally of course, but that's not the point. Why take all the risk of needing to become a billionaire when you could have all the impact just by making hard career choices?

With what, good looks? There is no low hanging fruit in solving the climate situation. Whether the barriers are technological, economical or sociological, they will require massive resources and rabid tenacity to turn in the right direction. Resources that are much simpler to marshall with the agency that billions of dollars provide.

Try https://workonclimate.org/

Many charitable causes are time sensitive. As you say though, it is a balance.

"You're starving? Come back in a year when we IPO and then I'll feed you"

It's debatable, because to make that amount of money you will maybe do bad things. Or at least thing that made people unhappy.

Extreme scenario : one person makes all the people of the world work for him during his entire life. And then give his wealth when he dies.

More harm or good ?

> because to make that amount of money you will maybe do bad things.

someone making that kind of obscene wealth is almost certainly doing bad things to get it.

In doing so, you're betting that _you_ can grow your money faster than organizations you give it to can make impact on their communities.

Helping people who need it _now_ rather than in ten years helps _them_ start contributing more effectively to their communities, or blunts negative effects of them _not_ having that help for the next ten years.

Sure, it's a bet you can make that you'll grow your money faster than it would have impact being put into the world --- but it's one that takes a certain amount of hubris.

Would be interesting to model this out, time value of money, time, etc.

What does it look like for someone fresh out of college to dive into making an impact vs waiting till they're 50, a billionaire? Use climate as an example, assume the problem is getting worse at 10% a year. With climate especially there are tipping points too, i.e. maybe there's a cliff at year 49 where it gets 200% worse.

What kind of challenges lend themselves to "get rich then give"? What kind of challenges lend themselves to "dive right in"?

The basic problem with this model is that it guides you to forever procrastinate actually doing good. Sufficiently large fortunes can be sufficiently diversified that you’re basically guaranteed to keep growing your wealth so long as you keep reinvesting it. The good you can theoretically afford to do next year will always be greater than the good you can afford to do today – which means, under this model, that the “right choice” is to never do good today. That’s why this kind of simple utilitarianist thinking is a trap.

"never do good today" I like that framing. Wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon.

What would YC say?

"Do good early, do good often".

Lean philanthropy

Agile philanthropy

There's a good argument to diversify giving type too - as well as diversifying investment. Give some now, give some later. That way, you get the best of both worlds - impact now and greater impact later!

That seems to me like an overly consequentialist view of charitable giving (as is common among the "effective altruist" types). It's possible that billionaires have an obligation to give back to society as soon as possible, even if waiting to make more money would result in more total donations in the long run.

> If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years

I think we have to look at where that other $9million comes from, because it's not just appearing in your pocket magically. When an asset grows 10x and production didn't grow 10x, that means the asset grew by draining smaller pools. The people you're waiting to help may be in the same pool as the ones being hurt in the meantime. Like...if I steal money from all of my neighbors and then give it back to them later, the amount I can give them is greater than what I could give before I took from them. But I bet they would rather me not take from them first just to give them back what was originally theirs.

The number of low income people in the U.S. excited about getting a "tax refund" sorta both belies and agrees with you

By that logic you should never give away money because your principal will never stop growing.

Mathematically, sure. But ethically? Feels hypocritical the pirates of capitalism act the wolf and only later wish to rehabilitate and hang out with the sheep.

Agreed. This is impressive in how fast she has ramped up. I’d guess she’s also ok with not every dollar being 100% effective (ok with failures) as a trade off for speed of execution.

Part of the flaw with assuming people who are really good at one thing are good at other things applies to philanthropy. Is Bill Gates a good philanthropist? Zuckerberg? What if they're abysmal at it but we don't have anybody to compare to?

>To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way.

Well said. I wonder whether at this day and age it's even possible for someone without any ancestral wealth to grow from nothing to such massive wealth without exploiting large number of people or environment or both in some manner? In that case doing every day good by common people is lot more valuable.

> To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way.

Why such an absolutist stance. If I were to follow your advice in the past, I would have had less money to do good with, and my impact would be limited. But because I delayed that, I am able to give more today than before.

> I love how MacKenzie Scott is just jumping in, giving away the money, make smart choices, pull the bandaid off and get to work.

You don't know that these are smart choices. Giving money away in large sums, with little accountability, to organizations that aren't setup to spend it well, can backfire. Look at some of our government's largest spending efforts or at how cities like SF squander hundreds of millions to see what could happen. Startups are given very limited amounts of funding in investment rounds to maintain that sense of hunger and accountability through incremental investments. It is possible that McKenzie Scott's spending is that, since it is spread across such a large number of grants. But since this is the largest gift many of the recipient organizations have ever received, it remains to be seen how this will play out from an impact perspective.

It heavily depends on how you made that money though, doesn't it? Sure, she can spend billions to e.g. solve the problem that Amazon workers have to pee into bottles to not get fired. But without Amazon, those workers wouldn't have that problem in the first place and wouldn't need saving from the conditions she put them in.

It heavily depends on how you model the growth of challenges vs your own personal growth. You're assuming that your own personal wealth grows faster than the problem grew. That is not necessarily true. i.e. climate change won't wait around till you're a billionaire.

What is her criterion for what to spend it on, does she state it publicly?

Tax them.

So that the money would be spent on wars in Afghanistan instead?

> Tax them

This is an awkward story to message this on, given a greater fraction of her wealth is going to help the needy than does the U.S. government’s.

Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs who may have been insulated from society their entire lives - Eg the climate denying Koch brothers. Taxing them is systematically putting the allocation of some of that capital back into hands of society and out of the random draw of good and bad.

> Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs

There are about 2750 billionaires in the world, 210 of whom have pledged to give away at least half their wealth to charitable causes, so about 12 billionaires who aren't as generous for every Makenzie Scott (assuming that billionaires can't be generous if they haven't signed the giving pledge).

Those 2750 control the allocation how much of the capital of the entire world? Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital. That’s not even a good basis for a competitive capitalist system to run, let alone a social system that wants to maintain some baseline level of minimum fair distribution of wealth.

Even if you agree with Mackenzie Scott’s allocations, she wasn’t the direct individual who amassed the fortune (though I’m sure she contributed a lot), it’s something of serendipity that she’s in a position to be allocating her portion at all now. It really shouldn’t be this way.

> Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital.

Now apply that same logic to the US government. If you divide the federal budget by the number of elected officials, each one controls over $7 billion of income per year. The amount of wealth they control is far higher than all the billionaires in the world combined. In addition, they create laws that are backed by the threat of violence. They also capture wealth through taxes, which if I don't pay, will cause men with guns to come to my home and put me in a cage. I didn't agree to any of this and there's no way I can opt out of it.

I'm not worried about billionaires pulling me over and putting me in handcuffs, or telling me who I'm allowed to marry, or what substances I can use in my own home. I'm not worried about billionaires taking my money to fund armies and spending decades invading random countries in the middle east. I'm definitely not worried about billionaires restricting where I can travel or what business transactions I can engage in.

If I have to choose between the government controlling more of people's resources or less, I'm picking less.

Perhaps. But the people have control over that money. Deferring control to billionaires on the hope that they will grace us with their efficient money distribution is like hoping for philosopher kings.

In practice, democratic control will be more stable.

World governments spend over $35 trillion annually. Much much more than her total lifetime accumulated net worth.

I don't see why letting them spend $35.05 trillion for one year will make the world a better place. I just don't see the logic there.

The top 10% own 70% of America's wealth, and corporations themselves are taxed quite low. Also, don't dismiss her wealth so easily, $60B is 75% of the annual cost to cover the tuition of every public college student, and that's from a single individual. For perspective, there are over 600 billionaires in this country.

All of the billionaires wealth in the nation wouldn't fund federal spending alone for 12 months.

It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn. I’m all for it however, society needs all the help it can get and I love the places she’s giving money to.

> It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn.

what are you talking about? you think she didn't do anything for the success of amazon? hell she was married to bezos before amazon even started up. What part of that money doesn't she deserve?

> In 1993, Scott and Bezos were married, and in 1994, they both left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and started Amazon. Scott was one of Amazon's first employees, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts and shipping early orders.[4][9] She also negotiated the company's first freight contract.[9] When Amazon began to succeed,[when?] Scott took a less involved role in the business, preferring to focus on her family and literary career.

> Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back"

Well if you want to give back, you need to have something first. As heirs, Scott got money without really (deserving|working for) it. It is not really comparable to Gates and Buttet.

> To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good

Everyone is different, some people choose to do that. It is still better than giving nothing

Making money is not about deserving the money, it's about being good at getting money.

I believe you're being downvoted because of the "heirs" mistake. MacKenzie Scott earned her half.

Commenting on the "have something first". If you're 20 years old you have 60 years you can give. Gates is a poor man comparatively.

I was comparing Scott to heirs. People who got money without being responsible for it. Of course she was the wife of Bezos but how much is she responsible for the success of Amazon compared to another wife ?

I don't get how you could do more good with 40years of life with 0 on a bank account vs 1 day of life and 60bn on bank account

I don't think in this particular case its reasonable to compare her impact on Amazons success to an heir. Jeff Bezos thought quite publicly how superior she was to other potential wives in terms of her resourcefulness which was applied both directly to Amazon in early days and later to Bezos personally. The unfairness of her unearned wealth is not that different from the cofounder or early investor who steps back and retains equity but is not involved in the day to day.

She earned her half only in a narrow legal sense. No one would seriously assign more than \epsilon "real" credit for her contributions.

According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#History) she actually played not such a small role in founding the company.

How did Scott earn her half?

By getting Bezos to sign the dotted line.

The same way any ex-wife "earns" their alimony.

Marriages are team efforts. She was also an early laborer at Amazon.

To be fair most self made billionaires don't "deserve" that amount of money as well. Yes, they have done something great amassing that fortune and worked hard. But others also work hard everyday not getting a millionth of that in return.

I applaud her, Gates, etc. for trying to do good with their fortune. But that also leaves the choice of what to do to the very few, instead of the society deciding (if the fortunes were collected as tax instead)

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