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

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 136 posts

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#91

Post by frumper »

ryandrake wrote: post #71
bilbo0s wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example To be fair, neither can Bill Gates. So it points to something fundamental about the way in which wealth works that these people can't give money away fast enough. Doesn't mean it's a problem though. Having money flowing up to Gates, Bezos, Scott and then having them give it away is probably the best we can do in the current legal and regulatory envir…

Another fundamental that it points to is that we've somehow set up a system where instead of the general public determining (and funding) the public good through democracy, a handful of rich people simply decide what counts as a public good and steer their money toward those causes.

The US Government funds much more than any handful of rich people, and many times more than all of the charitable giving in the US every year. State and local government spending just piles on to the government spending side of the equation.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#92

Post by frumper »

WithinReason wrote: post #32
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I give $10 to charity, my wealth is reduced by $10. The naive assumption is that if Bill Gates gives $10B to charity, his wealth is also reduced by $10B. Can you explain why the naive assumption is wrong? Because I actually can't, not without more thought and research than I've given it.

You invest $100, now you have $110. You give away $10, you have $100 again.

Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#93

Post by happytoexplain »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #57
gavinray wrote: post #13

Quoted post unavailable.

What's frustrating to me is that seemingly no one who complains about billionaires actually understands why they are billionaires and what the difference between a checking account and a 20% equity stake are. I've spent a lot of time trying to think of ways to remedy wealth inequality, and the best I can come up with is "If you hate Bezos so much, you should probably quit your addiction to Amazon Prime."

Yes, there is probably no way to remedy wealth inequality that is easy or even that doesn't have serious downsides and an enormously volatile period of acclimatization. But that doesn't mean there is definitely no realistic way to accomplish it in the long run. Of course we should try to get consumers to stop participating, but making it 100% their responsibility is highly unrealistic/reductionist. Consequences are incredibly abstracted away from consumer behavior, and the good to the consumer's life is so immediately felt, and consumers are understandably desperate for good in life (even something as simple as convenience has a big impact). It is not entirely, or even mostly, their fault.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#94

Post by ch4s3 »

dontlaugh wrote: post #89
ch4s3 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason public education can't be religious There is the establishment clause of the constitution in the US, which prevents the nation from establishing state sponsored religion. Courts have been pretty clear that compulsory religious elements in public school violates the establishment clause. > The problem is charity with the privatising of schooling as a condition. Not unlike charity with the purchase…

Most countries aren't the US and most people don't live in the US. It's also not where most of Gates' charity goes. Gates offers charity only under specific conditions, especially in Africa. He gives charity for schooling, if it's for private schools he could make money off of elsewhere (at the expense of public schools). He gives charity for agriculture, if it's for some specific seeds he makes money off of (at the…

> if it's for private schools he could make money off of elsewhere

Is he actually doing that?

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#95

Post by fallingfrog »

fy20 wrote: post #63
malfist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. They also overlook that this wealth isn't entirely "earned" by the billionaire. After all, wage theft is the most common form of theft. For a comparison, an amazon warehouse employee making $15 an hour, would have to work 40hrs a week, 52 weeks a year for almost 4 million years to accumulate the wealth Jeff has. Personally, I don't think that's equitable.

Honest question: What is the alternative? We could apply a really high tax rate to billionaires, but that has its own set of problems and doesn't guarantee anything will change for the warehouse workers. Governments are much less efficient than private companies at spending; a lot of the taxes will go towards 'defense'; which government should tax global companies like Amazon?

The employees could vote and decide themselves what to do with the money. After all, they're the ones who do all the work.

If not that, I'm sure if we use our imaginations we could come up with some better system than we have now. Really, it doesn't even have to happen all at once. Incremental change is still change. Perhaps, we could start by mandating that the company's books be open to the workers, or that they have a veto vote over CEO compensation. There are tons of things we could do, the problem is really power dynamics not lack of ideas.

A lot of effort goes into doing things like raising taxes and spending public money on education and health- mostly because those are the levers we have access to right now. Not because those are the things the left would really like to change.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#97

Post by Workaccount2 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #88
Workaccount2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their products. Fixing wealth inequality doesn't necessitate throwing out the entire legal and economic system we have. Workers can form unions if they they are not being recognized. There is no need to topple capitalism so that amazon can become a nationalized business with an inverted pay hierarchy.

"It's their products." Amazon as we know it today wasn't made by Bezos, but by the thousands of people that work for him. It's their company, not his. If anyone has a right to Bezos' billions it's them. He, of course, deserves a nominal fee... maybe on par with the lowest-paid worker at Amazon.

Legally, no. The company belongs to investors and the workers signed a contractual agreement with those investors.

Any single one of those workers could have spun off and sold their value to any other buyer willing to pay the price they(the worker) wanted. Most don't do this though because they are willing to take a lower pay in order to (greatly) mitigate risk.

Also, as you might be surprised to learn, workers already keep the majority of value they produce. Quick example: Gold mine owner lets workers keep 90% of everything they mine. Gold mine owner doesn't mine at all, but is by far the wealthiest person in the operation.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#98

Post by antisthenes »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #54
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I give $10 to charity, my wealth is reduced by $10. The naive assumption is that if Bill Gates gives $10B to charity, his wealth is also reduced by $10B. Can you explain why the naive assumption is wrong? Because I actually can't, not without more thought and research than I've given it.

Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time. Gates can give substantially more money if he leverages it to grow over time. I would wager that it is going to take decades if ever that the Gates fund will hit $0. Yeah it's not as flashy as "Died with $0 of his fortune left", but under the hood the net good done is orders of magnitude greater.

> Because you can use $10B to give $500M/yr for a limitless period of time.

If you can do that in perpetuity, then it actually means you're giving away none of your wealth away. You're selling the time value of money back to the people that generated it for you.

You've essentially taken out a giant loan, but the interest is being borne by the people who generated that wealth for you in the first place. And your "charity" amounts to sometimes reimbursing those people for paying the interest.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#99

Post by antisthenes »

fy20 wrote: post #63
malfist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. They also overlook that this wealth isn't entirely "earned" by the billionaire. After all, wage theft is the most common form of theft. For a comparison, an amazon warehouse employee making $15 an hour, would have to work 40hrs a week, 52 weeks a year for almost 4 million years to accumulate the wealth Jeff has. Personally, I don't think that's equitable.

Honest question: What is the alternative? We could apply a really high tax rate to billionaires, but that has its own set of problems and doesn't guarantee anything will change for the warehouse workers. Governments are much less efficient than private companies at spending; a lot of the taxes will go towards 'defense'; which government should tax global companies like Amazon?

> Governments are much less efficient than private companies at spending;

This is frequently touted as an axiom, but usually 0 evidence is provided. Can you back this up in any way or form? Or is this just something you've heard as a political talking point?

Looking at the VC craze and company overspending during the Remove/Covid craze, it's completely not evident that private companies are 'better' at spending money than governments. If anything, many of them displayed poor fiscal discipline through overhiring and basing long-term strategies off of a limited-time pandemic.

Re: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

#100

Post by toomuchtodo »

ch4s3 wrote: post #78
toomuchtodo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking different scales. Billionaires vs your run of the mill millionaires.

I mean, Bezos started Amazon for a relatively modest amount of funding in a garage and built the "everything store" with a relentless focus on customer service. It's not like he's some 19th century oil baron. I don't want to fall into the trap of reading a mans mind from a distance, but you claim of "extractive mindset" is utterly unsupported and ideological.

Of course it’s ideological. How else does one arrive at ideas and concepts after a review of empirical evidence? The facts are the same, the conclusions we arrive at (including our ideologies) will be the intersection of the facts, our mental models, and our life experiences.

Edit: wrt to your reply, agree to disagree.

Post reply on HN