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Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

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621–630 of 875 posts

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Government is owned by its people, who are effectively shareholders of a corporation.

That's a good analogy, and explains how we ended up with banana republics. They were just hostile takeovers of competing companies in Central America, leveraging our superior military assets. When you phrase it in those terms, Jeff Bezos looks much more like David than Goliath. And it's why I want government to use its monopoly on violence to stick to keeping the peace, and create an environment where actual companie…

That's a fair perspective, but there are also many essential or mundane aspects of life which don't lend themselves to competition.

Local roads, for example. You can have companies compete for contracts to perform the work, but ultimately the asset needs to be owned by the people, otherwise you inevitably get rent-seeking behaviour—which effectively replaces an elected Government with dozens of smaller unelected ones. Same goes for water, sewerage, and electricity distribution.

Public healthcare service delivery is another example. You can have companies compete for invention, manufacturing and certain boutique services, but for dealing with measles and broken arms, the profit motive does a hilariously poor job. Wealthy people get the absolute best service on this planet; poor people seem to get the most expensive service on this planet. (Yes, that's after factoring in the "cost" paid through taxes.)

Society works best when we all have healthy bodies, clean water and a decent education. Whether we all make good use of these resources is entirely up to the individual—Governments shouldn't mandate equality of outcome—but a functioning society is one where everyone has the opportunity to get a good education and not be a walking disease vector.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maimonides was a smart dude, but I must say I don't understand the highest level here: do you have to know they are about to be impoverished? If so, don't you know their identity to give them a job, a loan, or a gift? Payday lenders might qualify? Maybe I need to consult a rabbi.

This is sincerely meant, but if you consider 2 and 1, isn't that a description of progressive taxation in the modern, regulated-capitalist, social-democratic welfare state? (btw, I made that description up to try and describe the kinds of states I'm referring to. e.g. the USA once was in that category and no longer is in my view, while many European countries probably are in that category). EDIT: I'd like to point ou…

Not really; taxation is compulsory. If you steal everything I own and distribute it to try to improve other people's lives, I don't suddenly have any kind of charitable moral high ground because of where my money went, and neither would I be complicit if it were used to hire puppy hitmen or whatever evildoers like to do these days. The end effect is similar, but intent matters.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are we talking about it?

Because societally we want to encourage the act of giving anonymously with a big reveal in the twilight years? Doesn't sound that hard to understand.

Sorry, I guess i interpreted anonymous donation as a Truly Morally Selfless act, and the fact that we're talking about it now would be some weird flex.

But sure, if you put out a call for solicitiations when you announced you were giving it all away, you probably also need a big announcement when you're done or you'll be dealing with development officers all day every day.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#624

> “ Where did $8 billion go? Feeney gave $3.7 billion to education, including nearly $1 billion to his alma mater, Cornell, which he attended on the G.I. Bill. More than $870 million went to human rights and social change, like $62 million in grants to abolish the death penalty in the U.S. and $76 million for grassroots campaigns supporting the passage of Obamacare. He gave more than $700 million in gifts to health r…

Why? It was his money and he could have bought diamonds and shot them into the sun if he wanted. Instead it seems that the vast majority of the spending was a net positive to society and will do some good.

Yes, there was probably a more impactful way of spending it from a humanitarian perspective, but presumably there wasn't a more satisfying way to spend it for Feeney.

Nearly everything that everyone does is a negligent homicidal waste if you view it through the lens of opportunity cost. Unless you are living the life of an acetic, working every living hour, and donating it all to charity, you personally are hundreds if not thousands of people a year.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#625

Is a person who invests that money for-profit but makes giant advancements in maths/science while doing it an equally big giver? Take for example, Elon musk. Even though he hasn't given monet away to charities like Chuck, his for-profit enterprises like electric cars, solar farms, spacex and possibly neuralink might just have been things that end up equally great for humanity. So if you have billions I guess timtowtd…

What giant advances has Elon Musk made in maths/science?

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very Christian way of looking at donations: personal sacrifice / self-deprivation is what matters. I don't think it's what matters necessarily, but I do think that this is why he is receiving praise here and elsewhere. That's a problem, because if we're going to praise him for his sacrifice, we should remind ourselves that his sacrifice is minor compared to other donations due to the nonlinear effect of m…

Why praise sacrifice at all? Personal suffering/sacrifice adds no value to the community, and in fact reduces it. Maximizing positive impact should be the goal. Perhaps someone with 25 to their name better serves the community by keeping it?

> Perhaps someone with 25 to their name better serves the community by keeping it?

We have to assume that in the given scenario the other person needed it more and nobody else was stepping up.

> Why praise sacrifice at all?

You don't even have to praise the concept of sacrificing in general to praise caring enough to help those less fortunate even when helping has a cost. The alternative is for nobody to help except those for whom money no longer has any meaning, ie billionaires, and I don't see Jeff Bezos building homes for the homeless.

> Personal suffering/sacrifice adds no value to the community, and in fact reduces it. Maximizing positive impact should be the goal.

The first sentence is false. Donation is zero-sum in absolute dollar terms, no money is gained or lost, but money _does_ have diminishing utility to the individual, so the raised person can gain more than the lowered person loses. So a person can sacrifice AND maximize positive impact.

For what it's worth, I think the right approach is to eat the billionaires instead of waiting for the person with $25 to sacrifice even further for the person with $5. Clearly eating all of the billionaires would maximize positive impact.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, I know people and projects in the developing world, and buy things for (or give money to) people there too. I've also seen the impact of organizations which promise to spend money to save people there, and it's not always pretty. You can't serve two causes well. Picking between Western donors and local recipients, successful NGOs must choose to serve the former and not the latter. That often just di…

To be frank, with that attitude, we'd never make better decisions ever. We'd always see that things get complicated quick. Things ARE complicated. Teams spend time navigating the questions and coming up with their best answers - the poster who started this thread posted a site that has done that exercise https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/giving-recommendations/ They have a model, and they can iterate on that model as t…

Well, no. My claim is that donating to individuals doing work in the field is almost always a better path for individual donors than working through megacharities, or even through charity aggregators like this one.

For large-scale work of the type you describe, family foundations do a pretty good job. Gates, Schmidt, CZI, etc. all have exceptionally competent staffs who are able to take in grant applications, sort through those, and support quality projects in a way in which you or I can't. Program managers are top people in the field hired to rigorously evaluate projects.

They have billions of dollars to throw around too. If you want to fight malaria in Ghana, be Bill Gates. Or if it's something you're passionate about, take your next family vacation in Ghana, understand the people, context, and culture, and THEN donate to good people or organizations you know there. Combine your vacation with your giving.

What family foundations don't have are the cost structure to support individuals in the field or small organizations. If there is a good project in a school in Ghana, there is no way they are raising funding through Gates/CZI/Schmidt/etc. On the other hand, if you see a problem and spend money to fix it, you'll fix it. If you see an organization in need of resources and donate them, they'll have them. It's really not rocket science to do that.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#628

I’ve long argued for massive estate tax rates on large estates in order to incentivize behavior like this. I have no problem at all with Bezos being worth $200 billion (or whatever it is now), but it’s this dynastic wealth that I find borderline sickening. Why in the hell should the Rockefeller’s of today be billionaires??? Also, these giant charitable foundations/family offices are similarly off-putting, as they are…

> Why in the hell should the Rockefeller’s of today be billionaires??? I'm curious what the statistics are for a family remaining wealth over a long period of time. Even with wealth evenly split between each generations kids, given a growth of just 4% it might end up with each generation getting a greater amount of wealth still. In the past large familes prevented this, but if the average extremely wealthy person onl…

> I'm curious what the statistics are for a family remaining wealth over a long period of time.

I don't have statistics, but a fun factoid is that the Grosvenor family, who own many properties in the west end of London, were originally granted those properties because the grantee was the grand-nephew of William the Conqueror. So wealth can last a long time. For those families who are luckiest and canniest, the only major threat is social breakdown as a result of revolution or being conquered.

> Even with wealth evenly split between each generations kids

This is why primogeniture and entailments were invented. They were necessary to maintain dynastic wealth. In cultures where partible inheritance is more common, such as the US, dynastic wealth has a much shorter half-life.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#629
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why in the hell should the Rockefeller’s of today be billionaires? Because we live in a system which rewards good genes, and that is a very good thing. By instituting a generational wealth tax you will be killing the human desire for wealth on a generational timescale. Where does the money go? To other people i assume, you have now created a system where the evolutionary incentive is to leech from the system contrib…

I'm very sceptical about the claim that the incentive to earn staggering amounts of money goes away if your great-great-grandchildren cannot profit from it. Caring about your own children and grandchildren makes sense because you actually get to meet them, but at some point most people probably don't care about their far-far relatives. Also, is this really your main motivation if you're Jeff Bezos? To make even more…

>I'm very sceptical about the claim that the incentive to earn staggering amounts of money goes away if your great-great-grandchildren cannot profit from it.

I'ts not that simple, we are talking about evolutionary timescales here. It's very easy to see that if we live in a universe where accumulating wealth will not benefit your descendants, then accumulating wealth is an energy and time sink which will be selected against.

As for the second point i have no idea what Bezoz's motivations are.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#630

I’ve long argued for massive estate tax rates on large estates in order to incentivize behavior like this. I have no problem at all with Bezos being worth $200 billion (or whatever it is now), but it’s this dynastic wealth that I find borderline sickening. Why in the hell should the Rockefeller’s of today be billionaires??? Also, these giant charitable foundations/family offices are similarly off-putting, as they are…

Curious, what exactly stops these rich families from simply moving their wealth off shore? I'm sure there are many other countries that would bend over backwards to have these uber rich families living in their country instead of the USA.
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