Hacker News Reader

Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

That's a very naive, but common, viewpoint of wealth. "Worth" 1.3 billion does not mean "has 1.3 billion lying around in liquid cash". Net worth is tied up usually in many bank accounts across multiple banks, securities, real estate, trusts, etc. And that's all excluding capital tied up in corporations/orgs. Freeing up and giving away half of a billion dollar net worth is a difficult and time consuming thing, one which requires effort to do.

I promise they can afford to hire someone to do the difficult and time consuming thing here.

They certainly can. And the list of people who have become rich only to have it siphoned away by bean counters is at least as long as the people who are still rich.

I guess that’s why more billionaires don’t give money away, it’s just too hard.

you can donate assets without selling to cash first, the tax incentives and deductions are even better actually

Well when you say it like that, he’s basically just one of us!

No, he's not. Unless, of course, you've founded a company of comparable size.

gotta upgrade your sarcasm detector

I detected it just fine. Just decided to ignore it.

It's even easier to give away money when you don't have it.

> it's easy to give away money if you have it.

You'd think that, and yet so few of them give anything significant away (unless you count political donations).

For every one Newmark or MacKenzie Scott who does give there are hundreds who only use charitable trusts as a tax haven, if at all.

So when one of them manages to avoid the extreme-wealth-to-meanness pipeline theorized by Paul Piff (et al) I'm happy to recognize the good they are doing in the world when so many of their peers are going so hard in the other direction.

> MacKenzie Scott

What exactly has been achieved with the billions MacKenzie Scott has given away? She seems to do very little vetting of the organizations she donates to. And upon a cursory inspection, they mostly seem like the kinds of organizations where most of the donor dollars go to white collar non-profit employees that produce little in the way of results, with very little going to needy people.

I feel like the billions might be better used to piggyback on government programs that have already identified need. For example, we could offer universal school lunch for an incremental $11 billion a year (on top of the $18 billion the government already spends). I bet a few of these “giving pledge” billionaires could just fund such a program in perpetuity.

Not really interested in arguing about whether or not she is giving her money away perfectly or to the best causes according to your (or my or anyone's) standards.

She gets credit from me for doing actual philanthropy instead of just cosplaying it for tax purposes, which has been the norm even for quite a few of the other "giving pledge" donors.

As far as bolstering government programs go, I'd love to see billionaires doing more in that area, but I'd also like to see us tax wealth properly to fund the government doing the government's job.

It seems odd to give someone credit for something while refusing to engage with whether those actions have a meaningful positive effect.

> tax wealth

How are all of the old people living off of social security going to pay the wealth tax on their million dollar homes?

Also, we already “properly” tax equity wealth. We tax income at the time it actually exists. We don’t tax notional valuations.

It makes no sense to tax shares of e.g. SpaceX when the company is $42 billion in the hole. What’s really happening is that people wants to tax future income today.

It's easy for some to give away money if they have it, but it's hard to accumulate that much money if you're one of those people.

Newmark maybe representing the occasional exception, most people who accumulate great wealth through their effort and ideas are afflicted with an addiction problem and have a hard time saying "this is enough for me". They become attached to how much more wealth they might be able to gather and recognize how the wealth they already hold plays a role in making the most of that.

Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically.

And if you don't have that kind of mindset, you're probably just not going to climb your way into the level of riches we're discussing here. You might still do quite well as far as most people are concerned, but that billionaire milestone is hard to catch without some propensity for wealth addiction.

> Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically.

What you're describing sounds exactly like Effective Altruism. The issue is that the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero.

> the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero

It doesn't have to be an unspecified time. Imagine you make $100K and want to donate $50K of that every year. One might say "well, I will bank that money instead, buy a property for $250K, then donate the rental income forever". You now have a specific time in the future (almost, depending on how property prices fluctuate in the next 5 years).

It is empirically not easy.

You would not, tho. The people that think they need to get rich first before giving away won't ever give away. They always want more.

t's also really easy to get greedy or ambitious/selfish.

I'd be okay with someone who has it giving it to poor old me who has not

I find that the people complaining the most about billionaires, don't put much effort into help others.

You can always give away labor, in the form of volunteering.

Giving away money is stupid. With that much money I would rather fund companies that push the frontier on something. If it fails no biggie, if it succeeds it will probably end up employing people and giving them a source of income for life while simultaneously contributing to human progress.

Why wouldn’t you fund nonprofits and artists?

Artists don’t need money. More money is poured into the arts than at any time history.

Motion picture arts, literary arts, video game arts, graphic design arts,

and also at no time has it cost less to get an audience and find supporters. YouTube , TikTok, instagram, twitch, patreon, starsubscribe, gumroad, etc…

> Artists don’t need money. More money is poured into the arts than at any time history.

That first sentence is patently untrue especially in the US. We have been defunding and ridiculing the arts since the Reagan years. And is “more than before” enough? I’d say clearly not. The only arts that receive large sums of money are those that are commercial enterprises designed to generate enormous profit, they are integrated into capitalism. Are you going to tell me that poetry and painting are heavily funded in the US? How about your local symphony? Are these not “worthy investments” in our culture and humanity?

And let’s say we buy that argument: How does this not apply to private companies? Are you really going to argue that we prioritize the arts anywhere near as much as for-profit businesses?

A lot of non-profits are just jobs programs for people who run in the same educational/social circles as the wealthy people. Not all non-profits obviously. But a shocking amount when you get close to it.

And for-profit companies are better than a quality non-profit…how?

Note my caveat: "Not all non-profits obviously."

I didn't say anything about a "quality non-profit." I said that a lot of non-profits are jobs programs for people who travel in the same social circles as wealthy people. Those non-profits often make little meaningful impact. Those non-profits are worse than for-profit companies because ineffectual for-profit companies at least go out of business. By contrast, fund-raising for non-profits generally isn't based on results, it's based on social networks. Donors get the same tax write-off whether the non-profit is effective or not. And they have social reasons for donating to non-profits run by people they or their spouse went to school with, grew up with, etc.

Why does any of this need to be discussed? Did you think I was saying just throw money at any random nonprofit without any research? Do you think I blindly trust all non-profits? Clearly the implication is “give to quality non-profits.”

I didn’t just start talking about how there are lots of bad private companies, I assumed what you meant. So this just feels like an attempt at spiking the conversation.

Because you get very little value from them. I haven’t seen anything paradigm shifting come out of non profit besides OpenAI which they then promptly turned into a for profit spinoff.

You're saying charities like OpenAI that people have given money to haven't pushed the frontier on anything?

You'd rather vibecode a SaaS or start a dropshipping business because that is somehow pushing the frontier more than a charity like OpenAI people gave away money to?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com