Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

> In 2015, Mr Cook said he would give away his entire fortune before he dies, and is known to have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity.

I'm normally a proponent of reducing income inequality. But this has got me thinking. Is the world actively better off when billionaires like Cook/Gates/Buffett make a ton of money.

Consider the alternative: someone in the 75th percentile of USA income gets a fat raise. Most of this money is spent on a nicer house, a nicer car, eating out, going on vacation, etc. Contrast this against a billionaire who has signed the giving pledge. They spend a small fraction of this money on themselves. And the majority ends up going to charitable causes such as educational initiatives, HIV research, deworming, clean drinking water, etc.

Ironically, big payouts (and tax breaks) for billionaires* would do more to help the needy, compared to raises for the upper-middle-class.

*This only applies to those billionaires who have committed to donating most of their wealth of course

"If every person used their resources for the best of society, the world would be a better place!"

Sure thing.

The problem is, many of those people also burn money for yachts and spaceships.

Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.

And then Gates fought against dropping COVID vaccine patent protection for months. Old habits die hard, I guess.

The COVID vaccine patent protections were not constraining vaccine supply, because they were being licensed to anyone with the capacity to produce the vaccines anyway.

It sure did make for good grandstanding to speak out against the patents and pretend like getting rid of them would change anything about vaccine availability in practice, though, and lots of people jumped up on that grandstand.

So given that dropping the patent protections would not actually help produce more vaccines and given the questions about long-run effects on drug research, opposing the people trying to score easy political points at the expense of actually doing something useful does not seem like a bad choice to me.

> The problem is, many of those people also burn money for yachts and spaceships.

Sure, but upper-middle-class people also burn money on upscale housing/food/travel etc. The main difference is that billionaires who've signed the giving pledge give a much larger fraction of their income and wealth to causes that help the needy.

Also, it seems odd to lump together spaceships with yachts. When anti-intellectuals attack government funding for NASA, we're the first to defend NASA and all the beneficial progress that comes out of funding cutting edge engineering projects. It's disingenuous to then attack people like Bezos when they do the same thing with their own money.

> Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.

Maybe. I'm certainly not saying that billionaires should be given tax breaks because of their virtuous character. Just pointing out that the needy might ironically be best served by a billionaire tax cut.

The world can end up better off in certain cases of one person controlling huge amounts of resources rather than collectively deciding what to do with them.

But if you think that's always going to be the case, why bother having democracies then? We can return to the tradition of noblesse oblige and let kings and lords take all the products of everyone else's labor and just hope that they'll feel sufficiently obligated to be kind and charitable to the rest of us. There are plenty of people who believe this, so you won't be alone, and I'm sure others will argue we're better off now that the men being rewarded by being allowed to own everything got there by being good at product design and regulatory capture rather than past centuries when they were good at raising armies and taking land from other people.

If you force them to donate it's now called a taxes and government fund research.

There’s nothing preventing “someone in the 75th percentile of USA income” from signing that pledge, is there?

Also, why would one assume billionaires are better at judging what’s good for society than, say, elected officials or people currently making peanuts working in Amazon warehouses?

One could argue that the bubble billionaires live in is further separated from society at large than that of those people.

Option A) The money is taxed and spent on HIV research.

Option B) He retires and (maybe) gives it to support HIV research.

So the question is, interest and efficiency.

It's possible in may situations for charitable giving to have greater efficiency, by leveraging the knowledge of the investor, directing the money towards really effective outcomes. Or not. Then there is the public interest.

Option C) Reduce the market power of monopolizing entities, in which case instead of gigantic profits accumulating in specific centres, you have workers, suppliers and consumers getting a better deal across the board i.e. Foxconn staff having more income, consumers getting better prices etc..

I like Option C.

I like Option B when there's effective leadership.

I like Option A when governments are really smart with their investment or redistribution.

Assuming they're telling the truth and will donate their fortunes you're then reliant on their whims as to what gets the money.

I see your point and I somewhat agree. But this is based on the assumption that only upper-middle-class engineers work for Apple. However, the people in factories producing these products for Apple definitely deserve a raise. Income inequality should be fixed throughout the supply chain and not only benefit the upper-middle-class.

If the middle class don’t have money to spend, then that would create more needy people cuz there won’t be jobs. Be careful of trade offs

How did billionaires amass that much riches? How much environmental distrution, erosion of democracy and workers rights, and general negativity brought them up to this level? Giving back a few million to the community does not offset that.

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