Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which billionaires are doing the most good?

billionaireboard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#91

Post by ausbah »

forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #22

It is often the case that soft social pressure is the best way to enforce desirable behaviors amongst people. 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 use…

I think informal social pressures are just as fallible as formal legal systems, a billionaire can donate everything to philanthropy where the philanthropy is controlled entirely by them - effectively subverting the point of philanthropy

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#93

Post by rtkwe »

warent wrote: post #49
nacho2sweet wrote: post #2

Just tax them.

I've wondered about this. Would it be possible to have an income/asset tax such that it introduces a wealth cap of some amount which can never be reached? 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 argu…

An annoying side effect of extreme wealth is they have a lot of money to spend finding ways around taxes. If any country ever does move to a hard wealth limit I imagine there will be a lot of rich people suddenly getting sweetheart deals on 'renting' all the things they used to own from fly by night offshore companies or something.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#94

Post by munk-a »

tyrust wrote: post #68
kemiller2002 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that they are at least partially in control of the fund either through a DAF or their own charity. You're right they can't spend it on anything they want, but they have the ability to direct in many specific instances with few exceptions. Often if it's their own foundation, to further almost any goal they want. So yeah, they get to not pay taxes on their money and at least spend it partially how t…

A DAF is just donating to a charity with an extra step, so let's put that aside. 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.

By running a charity and notably donating to it those people can get clout though and further raise themselves in the eyes of their peers while not paying very much for it. Additionally they can get some other soft benefits from the charity like hosting events with money they paid no taxes on, or, if they're Trump, just buying things they want with their charity fraudulently.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#95

Post by ggreer »

qqssccfftt wrote: post #78
ggreer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I can think of several off the top of my head. 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.

> J. K. Rowling became a billionaire by writing the Harry Potter books. 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.

If you consider voluntary association and compensation for labor exploitative, then I'm not sure what to say to you.

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.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#96

Post by munk-a »

malandrew wrote: post #77
kemiller2002 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that they are at least partially in control of the fund either through a DAF or their own charity. You're right they can't spend it on anything they want, but they have the ability to direct in many specific instances with few exceptions. Often if it's their own foundation, to further almost any goal they want. So yeah, they get to not pay taxes on their money and at least spend it partially how t…

Required reading for anyone making this criticism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio... 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 go…

Funding the military is, irrationally, politically untouchable in America. Both parties have let the military-industrial complex deeply embed itself into the political process and need to toe the line when it comes to the very powerful defense lobbying groups. That said society at large generally approves to good pay and equipment for troops while being less enthusiastic for military research and stock purchases - this is a bit contradictory since folks want troops in a war to have good stocks but don't approve of spending money on maintaining equipment during peacetime.

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.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#97

Post by munk-a »

forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #22

It is often the case that soft social pressure is the best way to enforce desirable behaviors amongst people. 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 use…

> 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.

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.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#98

Post by munk-a »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #19
Arainach wrote: post #3

Are the metrics for this described somewhere? I find the top two surprising. From their numbers, Dorsey has donated $1B (26% of his current $3.8B net worth), while Gates has donated $36B (36% of his current net worth). 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?

Just above the billionaire cards it says: Top Donors This Month. So Dorsey donating this month likely put him at the front. 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!"

I'd really like to talk to any designer that endorsed this site because there are three titles - One top-title (annoyingly in all-small) one caption title in title case (Well done on it's own but quite conflicted against the all-small over-title) and then an additional sub-title that is, unaccountably, placed after a social media callout... in other words placed in a position after the thing everyone ignores... Also it's in all-caps because having your titles in three different capitalizations and utilizing capitalizations in the opposite order of general assumption is just what we like doing to not make the user think. At least they didn't use three separate font faces, but I feel like that might just be by chance.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#99

Post by basch »

OJFord wrote: post #9
Arainach wrote: post #3

Are the metrics for this described somewhere? I find the top two surprising. From their numbers, Dorsey has donated $1B (26% of his current $3.8B net worth), while Gates has donated $36B (36% of his current net worth). 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?

> Top donors this month 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'.

Larry Ellison is #21, having donated $0 this month.

Re: Which billionaires are doing the most good?

#100

Post by tyrust »

munk-a wrote: post #94
tyrust wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A DAF is just donating to a charity with an extra step, so let's put that aside. 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.

By running a charity and notably donating to it those people can get clout though and further raise themselves in the eyes of their peers while not paying very much for it. Additionally they can get some other soft benefits from the charity like hosting events with money they paid no taxes on, or, if they're Trump, just buying things they want with their charity fraudulently.

My original point was that a benefactor that stays within moral and written rules is not avoiding taxes, as kemiller2002 suggested. Breaking those rules is tangential to that point.

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.

Post reply on HN