Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

The Gates foundation directs a large amount of resources not to "prudent economic decisions" (eg, it looses money), but to non economic priorities he set.

I have no particular complaints about the Gates foundation specifically, but in an idealized democracy, this scale of resource utilization would be subject to more democratic oversight (eg. Compare the CDC fighting malaria with appropriations from an elected congress to the Gates foundation doing so with appropriations from Bill Gates).

In practice, there is a lot of overhead to the democratic proceds, so we want more private charity then is ideal. And you are correct that there seems to be a limit on how much resources people consume before they start helping others (even if the way they help does not match the priorites of the general public)

Once you've spent the money, though, other people will have it, and they have the power to spend it on their wishes. If you assume that people who did the work for you are basically good, this is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with a paycheck.

Maybe the problem isn't the money, it's the work? Are you creating bullshit jobs by spending your money on bullshit? But how do you evaluate that? What's honest work anyway? There are jobs are unpleasant and/or dangerous, but still jobs people are happy to have. Office work is comfortable, considering, and yet can be considered "soul-crushing" under some conditions. Maybe the yacht builders enjoy the work and live well?

This is all second-guessing other people's decisions at a distance. It's complicated enough that it's tempting to allow the market to hide all these issues under layers of abstraction. You usually don't get to review labor conditions anyway.

There are some attempts at breaking the abstractions by adding other abstractions, so we see labels like "fair trade" and so on. This supposedly lets you know what's going on at the other end of the supply chain. It's all fuzzy and reputation-based, though, which provides opportunities for cheating.

Maybe cut through the layers of abstraction? Directly hiring people makes you the boss and you get to decide what kind of boss you're going to be. But it's by no means certain you'll be a better boss than average, particularly if you're inexperienced.

This is true, and although certainly not a bad thing, is perhaps a sub-optimal allocation of economic output. There is perhaps an argument for having individuals with enough power to do this as a means of making decisions that are sub-optimal in the here and now, but over long enough spans of time turn out to be optimum. Another example would be investing in renewable energies.

The example of the yacht is rather contrived as well. They talk about how all of the craftsmen and lumber workers had to chop down, dry, age, cut and polish the wood to make the yacht, however, it's somehow evil for us to buy it?

This seems rather ridiculous when you consider that the money used to buy that yacht paid the salaries and income of all the craftsmen and laborers that built it for you, compensating them for the value they provide to society. If there was nobody willing to consume or buy products, how would anyone make income?

This article seems to understand capitalism superficially, then demonstrates the authors know little about capitalism in the final paragraphs.

The median home price in Seattle is ~$700k, and Gate's house cost $127 million, so his consumption is probably much closer to two orders of magnitude greater.