Absolutely. Especially being an American. We have such a materialistic, maximalist culture. There’s definitely a psychological element here to be able to tune out all those negative messages (“Why don’t I have a nicer car/house/yacht than Alice/Bob?”). I’d be interested on where he falls on the satisficer/maximizer scale.
Myanmar is an exceptionally devout Buddhist society with many monasteries supported through traditional almsgiving. I suspect that's why Myanmar tops even the U.S. in the World Giving Index, which merely asks whether you've donated money or time (volunteered).
Not that faith-based giving is inferior, but different people have different notions about what constitutes philanthropy and charity.
>Not that faith-based giving is inferior, but different people have different notions about what constitutes philanthropy and charity.
I'm sure there are people who will find a way to invalidate this kind of charity. But it takes a level of dedication, discipline and a moral code to take 10% of earnings for benefit of your community and do it without legal compulsion. And it's the latter part that makes it different then those that pat themselves on the back for merely voting for higher taxes or disparage others for not voting for higher taxes.
> But it takes a level of dedication, discipline and a moral code to take 10% of earnings for benefit of your community and do it without legal compulsion.
Absolutely, but I think that's pretty rare among the general population. IIUC, if I drop $10 into the offertory basket at Sunday Mass I'm counted just the same as a Mormon who tithes 10% of their income.
Most countries don't let you deduct your donations from your taxes. It's hard to compare levels of giving across nations because of this.
A lot of people only donate to reduce their tax bill.
Also, because we don't have a social safety net in the US, a lot of people donate to make up for that, which is certainly noble, but would be far less necessary if we had a stronger social safety net that more evenly distributed that wealth giveaway.
With very few (and even then, extremely capped) exceptions, the US absolutely does not let you deduct donations from your taxes. You’re allowed to deduct your donations from your pre-tax income, which is equivalent to being able to deduct some percentage (typically less than 30%) of your donations from your actual tax burden.
It’s not being pedantic; this changes the calculus altogether. Deducting from your taxes means you can say “oh well, I have to pay $1M in taxes, I might as well just use that money to make a donation to a charity of my choice and gain some PR instead,” whereas deducting your taxable income means “instead of parting with $1M in tax, I would need to part with $5M in charity to zero out my tax burden,” which is a very different decision and still largely a philanthropic one at some level or the other.
Debatable considering that donating art works (whose valuations can be, let's say, subjective) for tax purposes is a fairly well known way to reduce your tax burden.
It's not about saving money. As this thread shows, charity is akin to a good PR move. Paying taxes is seen as neutral, at best. If you're "spending" either way, you might as well get something for it.
It's better than spending the money on yachts or luxury goods, which is the other way people signal status. I'm a big fan of conspicuous philanthropy over conspicuous consumption.
A lot of people don't understand how tax deductions work, and assume that they get the full value. Also, as noted below, it has a PR benefit while also giving you a 30% "discount".
I'm not sure that's the case at all. And even if they did assume that they got the full value, they would be quickly corrected of that belief when they actually filed their taxes.
Having volunteered to help people fill out their taxes, I think you vastly overestimate people's abilities to understand complex math. Most people just don't understand how deductions or graduated tax brackets work, even after having it explained to them.
Also, it's hidden. If you used TurboTax for example, you put all your numbers in and get a number out. All you've heard is "donations are deductible" but there really is no obvious connection to putting in your donations and seeing how much it saves you.
I have never heard the complete opposite so thanks for the data.
It’s interesting because having grown up steeped in the culture for 30 years I have never once heard this or seen much real charitable action. I see small donations and token donations but very rarely anything like donating most of ones wealth or giving up excess to donate to those less well-off.
I’d love to better understand this discrepancy. I hear more about how much money people spend more than how much they donate in the media. And even anecdotally I can’t think of anyone talking about a donation they made in conversation. It seems like this should be something we talk about and champion more.
If you were raised a certain way, in a certain era, it wouldn't be rational to spend it on 'frivolity'.
There are a lot of people like this. Tons of very rich folks living in normal homes, driving normal cars that they 'never buy news'.
I think in some ways more common than not, especially in more rural and suburban areas wherein projecting wealth isn't actually necessary to their professional identity.
I agree. I don't think it's a surprise that someone who grew up during the Great Depression could be so frugal, even with massive wealth. Many people who were young during this time seem traumatized by it, often including their children.
most people say the would do something like this if they ever became extremely rich, but only a few would actually be able to do it. I'm in awe of the strength of character this guy must have.
You don't need to "become extremely rich" for charitable giving to be quite worthwhile. Even donating trivial amounts of money to high-impact charity can easily come with a factor of 1000× in value created, compared to just spending the same amount of money on your own private consumption. (Of course this assumes that you're choosing the right causes, generally involving very poor countries and the like; not just "donating" to your local art gallery, or for that matter your local college with a billion-dollar endowment.)
Well, if you're working in paid employment it will usually be a lot more effective to put in some more time at work, and give away some of the resulting income. "Donating your time" can of course be genuinely worthwhile if you're, e.g. a scientist who might want to do useful research on globally-relevant, critical issues; just not very much otherwise.
I disagree. I wouldn't spend too much time thinking about what other people have done. Just what I can do. Just working in a food bank or picking up roadside trash on a weekend. It doesn't take much.
Basically if you make a high tier engineer's salary, you could do more utilitarian good by hiring several people to work at a food bank on the weekends. Roadside trash pickup is an example of a problem in need of a systemic solution, so if you can reduce litter in the first place, or build a machine that cleans everything, you might be doing more good that way, even though it doesn't look or feel as "noble".
But others have pointed out that it is useful to donate your time if you are giving your skills, and not just effort.
Now there is no way of obviously measuring this, but I'd make the case that donating time (volunteering on the ground) to organizations is way better than donating money. First, money goes through so many layers that it's hard to actually know what they go to, and how much actually ends up being useful and not just scavenged by middlemen. Secondly, donating your time by volunteering gives you more than just the feeling of feeling good. You also gain so much more perspective on life that will make you a better person, you'll appreciate what you have more and you can make sure what you actually spend time on is worthwhile.
So, please donate time by volunteering! But if you can't, money is also good of course.
This is nice, but money very likely goes further than time. The work done by volunteers in organizations is typically not that high impact and usually grunt work. If you work in a high paying industry such as tech, working money and donating it will absolutely have a larger impact than volunteering. I agree volunteering can have a greater personal benefit, but from a utilitarian standpoint donating is better. Peter Singer makes this argument very well in his book the most good you can do.
The thing is, you can only donate time to organizations who are local to you, and there's a limit as to what causes these organizations can work on - highly-impactful local causes are quite few and far between. So if you're going to volunteer for some charitable purpose, be sure to choose something that has a decent chance of being genuinely worthwhile. (Advocating for criminal justice reform might be a good example.)
Yes, you are right. Because there is always someone else who is paid less than you who will run around and do the actual work whilst you take all the credit. Genius.
It's far more important to be there and take the credit in person, doing the job of someone who could be doing a better job than you for $15/hr, while not just doing the job you get paid $50/hr to do and sending the money.
Everybody knows the most important parts of charity are who gets the credit and one's own personal growth.
I am always amazed by the poor comprehension ability of people on HackerNews.
I am saying that credit isn't the point. Also, I am not entirely clear on why you would require $15/hour to volunteer at a charity...but...good for you turning charity into a second source of income.
Btw, my point (I will spell it out) is that the problem is almost never money. Money is required to the extent that is required to pay other people...but, particularly for almost all local problems, the issue is not money but time. There is no reality in which people donate enough income to solve these problems but they could donate time, and that would be effective.
I respectfully disagree. Trying to accomplish something with lasting impact with volunteer labor is really hard. Sure you can clean up litter and staff a soup kitchen on the weekends but to make a meaningful, lasting difference requires organizational structure and sustained effort by dedicated people. In other words, you can have volunteers ladle out soup, but running the actual soup kitchen as an institution requires a professional staff. That requires money to pay those people's salaries.
By all mean, volunteer at your local soup kitchen. It is a great thing to do! But the money is more helpful on an ongoing basis.
Lots of us have highly specialized technical skills. It's nearly impossible, logistically and financially, for a small non-profit to hire a software developer or a web developer or an IT tech for two or three hours. Donating your time and talents can be very valuable for small organizations.
I would say the best place where everyone could donate time effectively would be a mentorship program like the Boys and Girls club. Having a positive role model, even just hanging around doing "boring" stuff, makes a huge difference at a young age [0]. One day I'll psyche myself up to actually being a mentor.
I think some of the chronic ills of our society are rooted in the (incorrect) belief that solving any given problem is simply a matter of throwing $X at the problem.
"Donating time" is a deceptive phrase because it just sounds like you are paying out some currency other than money and that's it. "Donating time" encapsulates "building friendships, lifting up others, increasing love/unity in communities, gaining new perspectives" and more, unlike "donating money" which encapsulates none of them.
it will usually be a lot more effective to put in some more time at work, and give away some of the resulting income.
I'm paid salary. I'm of the opinion that it is usually the self-absorbed that think that after they leave the office they are still worth what their employer pays them.
Making it a requirement that your time donation be within your professional skillset is saying, "such work is beneath me". I'm not above ladling a bit of soup into a bowl or picking up the dog shit while at the animal shelter.
> I'm not above ladling a bit of soup into a bowl or picking up the dog shit while at the animal shelter.
I'm not opposed to that if you're doing it for your own benefit. But you should be thinking of this as leisure time for yourself, rather than assuming that you're "donating time" for the sake of real social impact. There's picking up dog $#!+, and then there's actually impactful stuff.
Then you don't understand the specialization of labor very well, and you're being very disingenuous to the parent post. They made no reference to certain work being beneath them, only the idea in maximizing resources. Maybe you could help the shelter with some database work while a junior high kid picks up poop.
There is far more dog shit to be picked up than database work to be done. I sometimes get the impression that folks think non-profits have an endless stream of IT projects, if only someone would volunteer time to do them. That has not been my experience, most volunteer organizations need physical work, not another web app. Most of the software needs can be taken care of by off-the-shelf products that will be supported longer than one-off volunteer projects that get abandoned.
I try to give away 10% of my income, after hearing about how some Christians I know did it (largely but not only to their churches). I don't give to religious institutions myself.
You don't have to be rich to do this. Although yes, some people truly can't spare 10%, that's fine, nobody needs to reply saying so. Anyone can spare what they can spare, whether that's 0 or more. For a lot of people 10% seems about right to be enough to feel it without being a hardship. (I calculate 10% of take-home, post-tax. It is still enough to feel it).
I give about half of it in automatic monthly contributions, the other half in spontaneous one-offs. I (in the USA) don't require to be tax deductible, but enough of it is that I reliably increase my tax refund every year.
It definitely makes me feel better about what I'm supporting and doing with what I'm lucky enough to have. Although of course "making me feel better" should not be the goal if I want to maximize impact, but nobody would do it if it weren't rewarding in some way. I don't give enough to get any kind of 'public recognition' (and wouldn't want any), my reward is feeling like I'm putting my money where my values are and hopefully contributing to what i want to see in the world.
To be that good at making money and that intent at giving it away is such a massive paradox not to mention paradigm shift from how we typically discuss wealth and wealth accumulators.
He didn’t get caught up in the money trap that almost everyone is, and I wondered how he did that? Is it religion? Is it innate morals? How he was raised? Very interesting.
Hope I can learn something from this. What does a non rich person do? I guess it is about trying to influence things rather than injecting money.
Time is money and if you don't have money then give your time. It's the most generous thing a person can do. More so than money in many ways since you can always make more money but you can't make more time.
You can't expect to make a major change in the world. But you can make some small changes that means the world to some people.
I don't see a paradox at all. He made a lot of money by being good at operating organizations. He seems to have given away his money by working with organizations. He just wanted to make an impact on the world and he did.
I don't pretend to know the motivations of Bezos or even Musk (even though I think he has been clear) but I see this as consistent with what Feeney did.
I can at least conceive of a thought process like "I can help humanity now and in the future by making money to fund new businesses that would not otherwise exist." Maybe the best way to contribute is to give away money to charity, maybe it is to start a rocket company. I don't think either of those are wrong, and I think they can have the same base motivation.
Maybe naively I believe I grasp some of it, but I don't know, to me it takes maybe a little bit of hubris? I certainly see how parts of the mechanics feel very contradictory. The idea that sticks to me is "people are spending money, so it may as well become my money".
It feels like a weird and maybe bad example, but it feels like sort of a chaotic good version of The Dark Knight Joker. You have the idea of "if you're good at something never do it for free", combined with a more wholesome version of "some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money."
Maybe you just have weird anomalies where you have someone who likes business, like what their work entails, but for whatever reason aren't drawn as much to some of the other trappings.
I think the assumption being the baseline is that the interest follows the money.
This is a role model I can actually appreciate. I can't figure out why this is the first time I've heard of him. I've seen lots of news about people buying expensive shit, but the fact that this has never come to my attention is a horrible indicator of what the media chooses to report on.
It is. Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich, on the one hand, and are paternalistic on the other. The only things that get funding are things that can attract the attention of our "betters." If we had taxed them on the front end to the point they couldn't become billionaires in the first place then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable. And with the added bonus that the negative effects of they got to be billionaires don't cause more problems (Feeney worked in private equity. PE are strip & sell firms)
I’ve noticed this community is very bullish on the ends justifying the means, ie a founder that bends the rules and causes some damage and hurts some people but has a huge exit and gives some to charity is still a hero and role model.
You can't become a billionaire through honest earnings. The degree is variable but the presence is inevitable, becoming required more the more billions you amass. Of course, you can take the ethical route, but those people don't get the billions.
I know a billionaire who basically was in the right place at the right time during the biotech boom. He started a company as a side project (he was a professor), got a deal to supply a major pharmaceutical company, and expanded from there. I don't know every decision he ever made but I'm not aware of any unethical behavior. He lives fairly frugally and has made a point of staying under the radar (he's successfully avoided being put on Forbes's list of billionaires, for example).
I'm willing to argue that it is in fact possible to become a billionaire though honest earnings.
I probably shouldn't make such absolute statements, they do beg for counterexamples. I'd be surprised if your friend didn't engage in some anti-competitive or employee-exploiting practices, but of course I have no idea.
'CrazyStat answered the ethics part, but I also want to point out that "earning to give" doesn't mean you have to become a billionaire. It means you want to maximize your earnings to the degree you're capable and comfortable with ethically. "Ends justify the means" is not a part of "earning to give" philosophy, even though some people probably adopt this principle.
Yeah, I've noticed this. See this kind of thinking a lot on the left, and partly explains its tendency towards totalitarianism. See for example the recent riots as opposed to more moderation
I think the jist was that BrainInAJar believes that most people who get super rich do so, not by simply providing value, but by exploiting vulnerabilities in how society works so that they create a need for the value they are going to provide.
I'm not sure how accurate of a representation this is, but it certainly appears to work that way in some places. Realtors are a really good example of this, and of course, Butler's "War is a Racket" is a classic regarding the US military-industrial complex.
Cable originally started because people in valleys of PA and the like could not get antenna reception. So the CATV companies put up lines and started selling the service.
Sure, they were filling a 'need'. But I think when we look back at how the CATV Industry itself punishes 'piracy' there is more than a little irony. The only reason they started paying was because it was codified into law.
Also, the CATV Industry's general union-busting structure; lots of linework invovles 2-3 layers of contractor companies. By doing so, they help prevent unionizaiton (which is a thing in the Phone line side of things, their workers tend to get paid more and be happier in my experience) and also 'absolve' themselves of much of the responsibility when something goes wrong (especially in the contractor industry, that 'last layer' may not be around in 1-2 years.)
> The only reason they started paying was because it was codified into law.
Aye, there's the rub. The greatest evils are when the billionaires team up with the government. Shifting money from the villains with money to the villains in the legislature doesn't solve that problem, and the villains in the legislature already spend close to half the GDP.
Yeah, to put this in some context, giving to "education" sounds good, but then when you see over $1B or 12.5% of his fortune went to elite private universities (one of which, Stanford, already has the 3rd or 4th largest endowment in NA), that really stretches the definition of "philanthropy".
Doesn't it depend what the private universities do with the money? If it's spent on enabling people to attend who otherwise wouldn't be able to, that seems good (regardless of how large the endowment at that university is).
Instead of rationalising, try researching. Ivy League universities, for example, almost uniformly use "need-blind admission". Meaning they admit you first, and the decision comes with a promise to find a way to make it affordable for you to attend given your circumstances.
The very first commenter on that article really says it best (and succinctly):
> I feel this is one of your lesser thought out pieces. I mean false equivalencies are rampant in it.
but... if we must, a few hard counterpoints:
> 1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?
This point misrepresents how journalism & counter-criticism occur.
People criticize billionaires. Full stop. Criticism of their philanthropy is not selective: it's a criticism of the billionaire when they receive press due to their philanthropy, not because its philanthropy. Billionaires don't receive wide-reaching press because of their new yachts because those articles are only of interest to niche audiences, whereas philanthropy is promoted more broadly. THAT's the only reason it receives more criticism.
> 2. If attacks on billionaire philanthropy decrease billionaires’ donations, is that acceptable collateral damage in the fight against inequality?
This is cross-referencing the first point and doesn't hold water once the first point is debunked: the "attacks" on billionaire philanthropy are directed at billionaires because they receive positive press, not because they are philanthropic. This question only makes sense if you believe non-philanthropic billionaires should not be criticised for being billionaires.
> 3. Do billionaires really get negative reactions from donating? Didn’t I hear that they get fawning praise and total absence of skepticism?
(a) the question is bizarrely worded and I don't understand how any answer to this question would either confirm or debunk... anything.
(b) the author's "research" has sample sizes of 25 (Twitter search) and 10 (Google search) respectively. i.e. is basically junk.
> 4. Is it a problem that billionaire philanthropy is unaccountable to public democratic institutions? Should we make billionaires pay that money as taxes instead, so the public can decide how it gets spent?
This is again a poorly worded question but the content of the "answer" essentially amounts to a (rightful) critique of the current US government, and compares it to 3 cherry-picked examples of philanthropy that the author believes were better than what the current government would do.
Moving past the obvious point that... dear god what a low bar that is... as a general simple rebuttal: criticism of billionaire philanthropy generally centres around the fact that their philanthropy does less good than the negative impacts of their existence as billionaires. These negative impacts are absolutely the reason for the current state of the US government.
Arguing that billionaire philanthropy is inherently better than functioning democratic government in general is obvious nonsense.
> 5. Those are some emotionally salient examples, but doesn’t the government also do a lot of good things?
Same point as 4
> 6. The point of democracy isn’t that it’s always right, the point is that it respects the popular will. Regardless of whether the popular will is good or bad, don’t powerful private foundations violate it?
I mean this is slightly different but it's essentially 3 Qs on the same thing...
> 7. Shouldn’t people who disagree with the government’s priorities fight to change the government, not go off and do their own thing?
4 Qs on the same thing. This is a crafty technique to seem like you have more bullet points than you really do.
> 8. Is billionaire philanthropy getting too powerful? Should we be terrified by the share of resources now controlled by unaccountable charitable foundations?
We're now wandering off-topic from the original "should we criticise billionaires" to "is billionaire philanthropy dangerous in theory", and starts with the argument of whether they wield too much power. For this, they use their total philanthropy sp...
> People criticize billionaires. Full stop. Criticism of their philanthropy is not selective...
And Scott's point is that non-selective criticism is dumb. If you don't want your dog to chew the carpet, criticizing your dog, full stop, as you say, is a terrible strategy.
If you're opposed to dogs or people richer than you in principle, then you can make that claim too I guess. But you won't get much sympathy if you do it when they're doing their most praiseworthy things.
Just out of curiosity, do you just think that billionaires are evil, or does that also extend to people in rich countries making six figure salaries in tech, who are also ridiculously richer than most of the rest of the world?
> And Scott's point is that non-selective criticism is dumb
That's a reasonable point to make, but... I don't think I saw Scott making it. Are you sure that was Scott's point, or is it yours?
> criticizing your dog, full stop, as you say, is a terrible strategy
I guess this depends on our definition of "criticising" and it's intent. If you're sitting at home, shouting at your dog, I'm not sure that's particularly productive. If you're having a conversation with a peer, and expressing your frustration at your dog chewing carpet, you may perhaps combine forces to arrive at some solutions to your carpet problems.
You can argue that perhaps discussing the plight of billionaires amongst peers (or even random folk on the internet) is equivalent to sitting at home shouting at your dog, but I think that's a debate for a different day.
Point being: I doubt many "criticising" the billionaires/dogs are expecting them to listen. They're discussing problems (and potential solutions?) in a more general sense by criticising a system/event that exists/occurs.
> do you just think that billionaires are evil
Are you proposing that dogs chewing carpets are evil? I presume not, but I presume you still want to save your carpet.
Billionaires are not necessarily "evil" in intent in the absolute sense. What I am proposing is that their existence is a problem needing solving in and of itself.
The existence of billionaires (or anyone who holds more economic resources than are needed to be content... I think that stands somewhere around the ~$150k mark according to some studies... certainly far short of whatever number of millions/pa leads to billion-level assets) necessitates that those resources have been withheld from someone who has less than are needed to be content (in many cases, to survive).
---
It may be worth noting that Feeney has gone about solving this exact problem (the existence of billionaires), albeit in a very individual way (making 1 billionaire no longer a non-billionaire). Which is quite an remarkable and laudable achievement, even if that billionaire was himself.
(and that's before we get into the very far-reaching, and—in my own experience—enormously positive impact, of his philanthropy)
I am amazed at how easily you skip over the fact that this means government gets to spend that money. As if that were some ideal outcome which would solve all problems.
Which government exactly is it that you think is excellent at solving societal problems and spending taxes efficiently?
I don't know much about Singapore, but it tops the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, which implies it has a fairly low tax burden.
[edit]
The top individual income tax rate is 22 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 17 percent. The overall tax burden equals 14.1 percent of total domestic income[1].
Those sorts of comparisons are always a three way tug of war between the letter of the law (what you can do on paper), enforcement (what you can do in reality) and taxes (the cut the .gov takes).
Depending on how much you value each one depends on the answer you get.
I tend towards the conservative side of center, which has been an uncomfortable place for the past 10+ years in the US -- both parties moving away from the center, but the GOP doing so much faster.
I thought for certain the level of hate the left has for the current federal regime would make my constant refrain of "do we really think the government will do a better job?[1]" finally make sense. However, the empirical fact that government agencies will be directed by those you don't like doesn't seem to deter people from wanting to increase the role of those agencies.
1: To be clear: I'm not an anarcho-libertarian; I think the answer to this question can very often be "yes" but living in coastal California, I too often seem to be surrounded by people who think getting the government involved is the only reasonable solution to any problem. Conversely there is a very large minority of the US right that seems to think that bombs, guns and walls is the only time the answer is "yes"
Seriously! Replace "government" with "Donald J. Trump" and all of a sudden it doesn't seem to appealing to have government in charge of healthcare, education, and Chuck Feeney's fortune, at least to a lot of the people making the argument.
>then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable
Like lobbying their representatives to allow for loopholes and credits to allow them to keep their money and avoid the taxes that the lesser incomes must pay
Sorry you're getting down-votes, because I think you bring up a very important point. We as a society should understand the trade-offs involved when we allow individuals to accumulate truly vast wealth. In general terms, this increases the variance in how the money can be spent. One guy might give it away, another builds rockets, another buys gilded toilets for his estate. Individual decision makers can do much better than government (the benevolent dictator...of their own money) and much worse (irresponsible or even damaging use of it). Government use is less efficient, but also has less variance: it will be spent on a similar range of things, but closer to the middle.
I downvoted, not because of what he said or how he said it, but because there's basically no chance that the comment will lead to an enlightening conversation.
I'm guessing the comment text turned a shade of gray, which happens when the count goes negative. Though it's back to the normal shade currently, meaning it's back above negative territory.
I wonder if philanthropy is used sometimes to garner narcissistic supply as I suspect a lot of billionaires are narcissists or psychopaths (not necessarily malicious but these qualities help in wealth building). If so, I think we should respond positively to these and provide the narcissistic supply (and hold off from criticism even if it's hard to) so this becomes a trend among the billionares.
I doubt it. Real narcissists and psychopaths are incredibly self-centered; they have a lot of trouble even accounting for others' goals in, e.g. a business negotiation, which is why they usually resort to authoritarian or manipulative attitudes. A typical narcissist wouldn't even know how to start looking at good opportunities for philanthropy or charity. Now, I agree that philanthropy might come with selfish side-benefits for the person who donates, but true narcissism is most likely not involved.
In the end, donations are a form of political power, If only deciding what gets funded, and what doesn't, even before all the other self promotion stuff surrounding them.
Whats a better model for deciding the distribution of political power, a democratic one, or a dictatorial one?
At the very least I don't think its an unreasonable position to believe that democracy makes more sense.
Except that government has a lot more political power than your average philanthropist. It's not even close. Tax money inherently involves political power, in a way that's simply not the case for philanthropic donations.
Strictly speaking, the U.S. is a republic not a democracy. Are you sure that your average congresscritter makes better decisions on money allocation at the margin than a private philanthropist would?
Microsoft and Amazon don't care what color my house is or how close my garage is to the property line so long as I keep paying them. Just paying my property taxes is not enough to prevent arbitrary violation of my property rights by my local government.
Why only democracy or dictatorial? There's no form of voting that involves more freedom than voting with your wallet.
If democracy gets involved in that process, suddenly there's only an obstruction to say "No...you can't spend it on that." It's just there to introduce a form of majority control.
Yes, the causes they fund are lauded but are not always the causes we really need funding for or actually want / believe in. In other words, they use their wealth to shape our society without our input.
> then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable.
Conveniently, we can already see what causes we think are valuable, because the US government already spends about 40% of the entire GDP, $8 trillion per year.
Apparently we've decided that Donald J. Trump should manage it, and that $1 trillion per year should go to the defense industry (that's 600 Chuck Feeneys), with another $500B (300 Feeneys) to interest on the national debt.
> Feeney worked in private equity. PR are strip & sell firms.
Chuck Feeney didn't work in PE, and he wasn't one of those creatures you despise. He invented Duty Free Shopping in WWII, selling booze, smokes and cars to returning servicemen. He pioneered airport shopping, doing all the hard, clever work himself, and spent the bulk of his life giving the billions earned to good causes anonymously.
Why? He didn't care about money or reputation. He wanted to make the world a better place.
> Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich
It can be used that way, but Chuck Feeney didn't need or want that. That's why he gave anonymously right up until international money laundering regulations post 9/11 forced him to reveal his identity.
I suggest that it does not align with consumerism/capitalist ideologies which are used in the feedback loop to promote themselves/further substantiate their existence and influence in culture. Philanthropy is great, but to some extent I think the argument that properly taxing such capitalistic gains could have greater effect on society when properly used by the system that can support massive scale projects (i.e. the government).
Indeed, the power goes to the person who can successfully manipulate the most people. Historically that tends to be people who blame minorities for all the ills of the group of people most likely to vote, and come up with what seem like easy solutions (tax the rich, ban the immigrants)
I for one don't have time in my life to be an expert on running an economy, creating an immigration policy, balancing the environmental and societal needs etc. I specialize in my area of expertise and use that money to employ others who specialize in their areas, and that includes government.
> Indeed, the power goes to the person who can successfully manipulate the most people.
Perfect the enemy of good, etc, etc. What I solved is the problem of relying on a potentially authoritarian government which is what was brought up, rather than all possible problems. What I suggest would be better, not perfect.
> I for one don't have time in my life to be an expert on running an economy, creating an immigration policy, balancing the environmental and societal needs etc.
That's the point of liquid democracy. You delegate but reserve the right to override your delegate if needed.
>If you let billionaires make the choices then sure you get some like Feeney/Gates/Buffett but you get Koch brothers.
You just disagree with the things the Kochs choose to fund. You could have easily said Murdoch instead (or Bloomberg if you wanted to pick someone who's hate crosses party lines).
Were the government funding the causes these billionaires fund the causes would still be controversial. We just wouldn't have a single person to have the lion's share of the blame.
That's kind of the point though. Whether you believe that decisions ought to be made by the people, or by whoever has the most money is sort of an axiomatic thing. It's not like we have any good way of testing which one is "better".
> You just disagree with the things the Kochs choose to fund.
Sure, and I'm also not a fan of Jeffrey Dahmer's taste in fine dining, but I don't think it is reasonable to chalk that up to a mere difference of appetite.
> Were the government funding the causes these billionaires fund the causes would still be controversial.
Were the government funding those causes we could stop funding them because they are horrible and people hate them.
Tax dollars go vastly more to dropping bombs on civilians in the middle east and ICE and the NSA than they do to any positive social program (ignoring things like social security that are funded by a separate tax that billionaires wouldn't pay much into under most schemes). I don't love the outsized influence on society that billionaires have, I certainly don't love the Koch brothers -- but I think looking at the $X pool of money spent on philanthropy by billionaires per year, it is probably much better distributed than that same pool of money would be if it was paid as income taxes.
So the thing is... tax dollars go more to dropping bombs on civilians in the Middle East and to ICE and the NSA because that's what people overwhelmingly want. I guarantee you that if public opinion shifted hard against these things, we'd see less funding over the years toward them.
But it doesn't. Regardless of what we say here, the majority of the US wants a big military, and wants hard immigration controls.
Then it becomes a different argument: should we tax the wealthy more if it means the money will go to government initiatives that the majority seems to want, even though a minority of us believe that those things are largely bad for society and the world, and represent short-term thinking that is a result of bad risk assessment? Essentially, should we let the use of this money be directed by the will of the people (rather than a few ultra-rich people) even if we believe the will of the people is often wrong?
I don't have great answers to this. As another commenter mentioned, the billionaire-philanthropist system is good when we have people like Feeney, but fails when we have people like the Kochs. Do we have a net excess of Feeneys in the world, or Kochs? And even if we have the former, is that still a good thing; could we get more fair or equitable outcomes if we did let electorate decide how to allocate these funds? And even if we couldn't, is it antithetical to democratic values to go against the will of the people, even if the people are wrong? And if so, does that matter? I tend to think it does, but I can see the argument for both sides.
In other words: should we let the use of money be directed by the people who will actually pay with their own money for what they want, or should we let a vacuous "majority" pursue whatever goals they might seem to want, with money that's not even theirs to spend in the first place? I know what my answer would be. Even the Kochs are spending money for what they regard as the good of society. There's nothing inherently 'wrong' with that.
> So the thing is... tax dollars go more to dropping bombs on civilians in the Middle East and to ICE and the NSA because that's what people overwhelmingly want.
Support for the War in Iraq was 39% in 2004, 30% in 2006, 34% in 2007, etc. Despite massive PR campaigns on the part of politicians and the natural tendency to ("support the troops"), our various military adventures are actually not very popular among average Americans.
But they are very very popular among rich members of the military-industrial complex, and those people have enough money to win elections and buy politicians, so here we are.
> Do we have a net excess of Feeneys in the world, or Kochs?
Kochs, absolutely, unequivocally. There is no billionaire on Earth who could fix all of the damage caused to the environment by the Koch brothers, any more than a sufficiently well-intentioned German Chancellor could undo the damage Hitler caused.
This is one of the fundamental asymmetries of life: it is easier to destroy than build, easier to harm than heal. With a cheap kitchen knife and a fraction of a Newton of force, you can sever someone's head. Can you as easily put it back?
This is, I think, the core reason why inequality is dangerous. Because when you concentrate power in fewer people, the variance of the resulting outcomes increases. And if you increase that variance, the bad outcomes get worse more than the good outcomes get better.
Say what you will about hunter-gatherer societies, but they never dropped a nuclear bomb, caused a Holocaust, or filled the atmosphere with lead fumes. We obviously shouldn't dial inequality back to pre-industrial levels, but the existence of billionaires is essentially playing global-scale random wildcards in the game of life.
And just to be clear, the Koch brothers fund things like efforts to end civil asset forfeiture, not just the things people like to get mad at them for in the media...
I wonder if a person was more involved in charitable giving if they would have heard about this guy before? Mainstream news coverage isn't going to cover him much but stories have been written, he worked closely with Gates and Buffet.
My takeaway from this story is to spend my time on things that matter to me. It's a reminder that our news sources are really just another form of entertainment, which is not something that can give your life meaning or a sense of accomplishment.
He gave anonymously until 9/11 forced his hand. In the wake of the attacks, international money laundering laws were tightened, and large international transactions were scrutinised.
Feeney donated some half a billion dollars to medical research in Brisbane, Australia, guided by an old friend from his young days in Hong Kong, the tennis player Ken Fletcher.
When Fletcher told former Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley he had a mate with millions to give away to good causes, nobody in Brisbane would take him seriously. It forced Feeney to come out with his philanthropy, and whilst he never cultivated a public profile, Feeney did at least speak in public on a few occasions when dedicating medical research centres that were built with his donations in Brisbane.
This one line
"While notoriously frugal in his own life, Feeney was ready to spend big and go for broke when the value and potential impact outweigh the risk."
Amazing life, made a ton of money and lived to see it all given away.
> I've seen lots of news about people buying expensive shit, but the fact that this has never come to my attention is a horrible indicator of what the media chooses to report on.
While weighing journalist's actions you might want to consider that Chuck Feeney wanted to remain completely anonymous and the media - the members of the media acting in accordance with your desires specifically - made that impossible.
(that some of us have known his name for many years might also indicate that this has never come to my attention is not a meaningful measure of the media's performance - perhaps it's a measure of your use of media)
Buying "expensive shit" is an honest business transaction. Who do you think makes all this expensive shit? They all have families to feed, you know. If you're rich, buying expensive shit is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for society.
By contrast, charities and non-profits get this halo of being socially beneficial, even though they're often some of the most wasteful institutions of all. Cornell gets a billion dollars from this guy, as if they didn't get enough money from the racket that is higher education in the US.
> If you're rich, buying expensive shit is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for society.
That's not true. You can go and pay people a 50 million dollars to make a yacht for you. Or you can pay that 50 million to other group of people to build housing for the poor. In both cases, it provides jobs and puts food on the table of the people you employed. But, the yacht is just a toy for you, while housing will be life-changing for hundreds of families.
"Housing for the poor" is indeed life-changing, but not in the way you like. The government has spent billions on housing for the poor, and the result is usually called a ghetto.
If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something nice for you, they wouldn't be so poor anymore. They could even afford decent housing, if the government didn't prevent that from happening with zoning laws and various other regulations.
>If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something for you, they wouldn't be so poor anymore. They could even afford decent housing, if the government didn't prevent that from happening with zoning laws and various other regulations.
But their labor isn't worth that much, and no one would ever pay the poor that much when they could pay someone else less, or undocumented immigrants almost nothing under the table. "Pay the poor enough not to be poor anymore" is not how capitalism works.
You could do either. Real world economics and history, however, suggests you would do neither, because the incentives of the labor market mean you can get adequate work for far below the cost of a living wage, and you didn't get rich by throwing good money after bad, so to speak.
Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world. He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist. As companies go, Amazon is one of the more laissez-faire, so it's not as if he wants to, but his hands are tied by overburdensome regulations. He doesn't, because why should he? Why not spend a few million dollars on a ten-thousand year clock instead?
Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more. Depending on the free market or the magnanimous (and mostly nonexistent) charity of the capital class to lift up the poor doesn't work.
> You could do either. Real world economics and history, however, suggests you would do neither...
You digress.
> Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world.
Jeff Bezos doesn't have that much cash. I guess he could award that much in stock though. True enough.
> He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist.
Wrong enough. Amazon is already spending most of its income in the areas where it employs most people. Turns out shipping cheap junk for free across the globe isn't that profitable. That business is cross-subsidized by other more profitable areas like AWS.
If Amazon were to use those remaining profits and put them into fulfillment workers' salaries, the company would be pointless from an investment perspective, the stock price would tank, the company would have trouble raising capital, and Jeff Bezos wouldn't be the richest man in the world.
It's similar for other companies like Wal-Mart that work on razor thin margins but employ a lot of people. Sure, all of these people earn a low income, but at the same time they benefit from low prices.
> Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more.
Sure, but "the market" is society as a whole, not just some billionaires. Billionaires aren't forcing down their wages, it's the ordinary people consuming their labor, who only buy at the lowest price.
The least productive people are always going to be poor in relative terms. In absolute terms, the salary of an Amazon warehouse worker puts you close to the global 1%.
You may believe the narrative that all these profits go into the pockets of a few rich people, and if only those people left some of that money on the table, everybody would be way better off, and it's all capitalism's fault. It just doesn't add up. Capitalism doesn't tolerate high profit margins over an extended period of time, it drives prices down for everybody, which benefits those the most who don't have a lot of income in the first place.
Good example of why I really like HN. Quite keen to read up more on Feeny. Reading about anonymous contributions and selfless behavior like this is such a mood lifter when trawling through the day to day news and information floating around
For a great read, and to get a sense of who Chuck Feeney really is, track down a copy of Hugh Lunn's book The Great Fletch, the story of Chuck's mate Ken Fletcher from his Hong Kong days.
Like you said most people don't really have any extra income. They have a mortgage. Their retirement is heavily underfunded. Kids future school is not paid for.
Then there are people that have 100% of everything paid for and already have more than they will ever need... not to mention they can grow their money way quicker than the people who need it.. Yeah, it's pretty easy to be "generous" in that situation because it's literally extra money just sitting around doing nothing but making more money.
edit: wow, downvote me and op for this? Must be by the HN 400k engineers without a family who don't understand what the problem is
> In February 2011, Feeney became a signatory to The Giving Pledge. In his letter to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the founders of The Giving Pledge, Feeney writes, "I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living—to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition. More importantly, today's needs are so great and varied that intelligent philanthropic support and positive interventions can have greater value and impact today than if they are delayed when the needs are greater."
Opinion Coronavirus treatment
Bill & Melinda Gates: Vaccine fairness will make us all safer | Free to read
Sharing Covid-19 jabs equitably would result in fewer deaths and faster control everywhere'
@bena do you have a point to make here? Where are my 'snide comments'???
Gates is exponentially wealthier than Feeney, and is extremely noisy in the media he funds as the second wealthiest human on the planet. I wonder what Feeney makes of Gates in 2020.
If you'd actually bothered to read the two 'spam' links as you called them you would understand the point I was making.
Link one: FT oped by Gates published today about Covid19 Vaccines
Link Two: Article about Gates rapidly growing fortune and how difficult it is for people as rich as he is to give away money.
Please make a point rather than just pasting insinuations and links to articles. Neither of the two articles you've provided give any reason Feeney would have a negative opinion of Gates.
I don't assume Feeney has a negative opinion of Gates, everything he has said publicly has been supportive of Gates.
Given Gates central role in driving for global pandemic vaccines, I wonder what Feeney thinks of that huge global and very public project. The Ft Gates oped link above is from today, I just read it before opening HN and seeing the Forbes Feeney post.
Are you suggesting that Feeney thinks less of it because it's public giving? I just get the impression that that's Feeney's style, not that he thinks other philanthropists need to act that way.
i am not making any suggestions, I am wondering what Feeney, who has quietly donated huge sums with no fanfare or hype (example: SF UCSF children's hospital, see elsewhere in these comments, is named the Benioff children's hospital despite the fact Feeney donated more than Benioff for the hospital).
I have no idea what Feeney makes of Gates in 2020 but I'd love to know. No insinuations, me projecting what I think he thinks...
@hamburglar I have no idea hence my question. Feeney's style has been to very privately and anonymously find worthwhile projects and fund them. Gates owns giant swathes of the media and is vastly wealthier than Feeney. I wonder what Feeney makes of that during the current global pandemic. (the reply link is not appearing on posts, so this may be out of thread order)
Aside: the lack of reply link happens when you're in a conversation HN decides is moving too fast, which may indicate a flamewar.
I think you're being misinterpreted by me and others in this subthread, but it's your fault. :) You're literally just wondering aloud what Feeney thinks of Gates and whether that's changed in recent years, but we are reading an insinuation that it has changed for the negative. I don't think our misinterpretation of what you're saying is unreasonable -- someone above states that Feeney has publicly stated that he thinks highly of Gates and your response is to suggest that that's different now, and you link to a couple of articles, seeming to be supplying "evidence" of that, but the articles don't give any reason to think Feeney's thoughts about Gates have changed.
Your responses have convinced me that you really are just asking questions and have no preconceived notion of the answers, but the way you're asking the questions is causing people to bristle because they are presented like insinuations.
FYI.
edit: in my attempt to be helpful I see I'm being a bit repetetive. Was trying to get this out there quickly before the misunderstanding escalated into a shit-fight. :D
Preface: yes, absolutely, all the props in the world to this guy for doing something so thoroughly incredible and selfless and rare for the benefit of humanity. Even if I had the means, I know I'd never have the guts to do something so amazingly heroic in as extreme a way as he did.
That said (i.e. time to be the irritating pedantic little asshole, but I think it's a genuine enough question about the purpose/execution of philanthropy)... does the anonymity really warrant extra props? We know that the guy gave away essentially all of his money; does the anonymity of the individual donations really make it more selfless? If anything the headlines "Feeney gives $100M to cause X" and going on TV to talk about it etc. would likely bring more attention and donations to X, which I assume is why Bill Gates and others tend to do things that way.
Edit: ok, I've just figured out from other posts that it basically wasn't known beyond a small group of people that he was giving away most of his wealth. I didn't realize that (although it's also my first time hearing of him). I agree then, he really did spend the bulk of his life being pretty much truly anonymous and that does deserve extra props.
I guess I'm more cynical than you. I see it as subtracting props to insist that your name be inscribed on the side of every structure you fund. Bill Gates and others like him are not "giving away" money, since there's practically nothing material they could buy with it in the traditional sense. Gates is trading useless wealth for social prestige. Compare to Sergey Brin, who also spends money on humanitarian efforts such as disaster relief, but takes pains to avoid headlines.
Some questions lingered in the back of my mind after I read this article:
- How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make? Is their healthcare fully covered? Do they have generous paid time off and access to higher education for themselves and their children? Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?
- Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill? Giving to Cornell seems counter-productive to me. Giving a bunch of Ivy League jocks more resources doesn’t seem like an equity promoting endeavor.
Not to diminish his other accomplishments. Still, philanthropists get to choose who to include and exclude. Ideally, it wouldn’t have been possible for this guy to amass 8 billion dollars of wealth in the first place - it would have been properly taxed and invested into our communities equitably.
Because the government has such a great track record of collecting tax revenue and then investing it where it is appropriate?
Questions can be raised about some of his specific donations, but when someone gives away $8B of his wealth, spending nearly none on himself, does it globally, influences other billionaires to do the same, picking at any one of his specific donations seems counter productive.
Yes Cornell is an Ivy League school, but it is where he went to school, he probably has very strong ties to that school, perhaps met his wife there, or his business partner, if he chooses to give back to that school that is also good.
Plus there was a tremendous amount he gifted to "education" so without knowing all of the details, hard to imagine that he didn't provide some sort investment in to under represented communities. If he helped Vietnam with their healthcare he obviously wasn't just US centric but helped where he though his donation could have an outsized return.
By the way he gifted a large amount of money to the Obamacare campaign, so by proxy, he was providing healthcare to his workers, and more likely than not.
My argument is that a system that allows $8 billion in wealth to accumulate enough to be controlled by one person has already failed.
The US government is actually really impressively good in a lot of areas, and I personally get fatigued of the oft-repeated notion that government “can’t possibly work” or that they “can’t possibly spend tax dollars responsibly.”
> a system that allows $8 billion in wealth to accumulate enough to be controlled by one person has already failed
I think you have little appreciation of how wealth is created.
Jeff Bezos became the wealthiest person in the world neither by stealing or exploiting , but rather by improving peoples lives. Amazon was able to organize systems, take advantage of technological developments and put capital to work to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers.
The team at Amazon improved people's lives, not Jeff Bezos all by himself. Why couldn't there be thousands more millionaires that helped build Amazon rather than one mega billionaire?
There have been dozens of controversies involving Amazon: shopping for tax breaks it doesn’t need for HQ2, micro-managing warehouse employees’ bladder, union busting, firing a COVID whistleblower, cross-contaminating inventory, insufficient protections against counterfeit items, building a book ecosystem monopoly, probably numerous others I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.
I believe the government's role is to provide protection from foreign threats, guarantee basic human rights, reasonably regulate the business environment, and provide basic public services that are only possible on a society-level basis. When they get into areas that local communities and private charities operate, they'll at best be inefficient and more than likely be corrupt at some level.
> Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?
No idea. Maybe some of it was.
> Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill?
His donation to Cornell was earmarked for opening a new campus (Cornell Tech) to employ more educators and educate more students. It wasn't for replacing a stadium and putting his name on it.
> - How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make?
I have similar thoughts when I hear about the philanthropy of the mega wealthy. Instead of a single person like Chuck Feeney or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates amassing ungodly amounts of wealth and then later choosing how to distribute it, why couldn't the companies they built have made 1,000 or 10,000 or X other people relatively rich instead of one man mega rich?
The middle class hasn't died at all. In fact it is larger today than ever before. It's just a bad narrative people have bought into. [1]
In essence what has happened as the upper-middle class has grown over the last 40 years. Poor, lower-middle and regular middle class percentage has shrunk to its lowest levels. We have fewer poor people than ever before. But because the upper middle class has grown so much, middle class people feel closer to poor people.
We have more well to do people than ever before. The middle class is smaller but the lower-middle and poor classes are even smaller. So people have generally moved up.
Interesting hypothesis. Thanks for the article. I will have to stew on this. It doesn't seem to jibe with the all angst about class that people seem to be feeling.
Some hypothesis I’ve read believe that because the upper middle has grown so much and is so visible, middle class people don’t feel as middle class.
More people have moved up than down. However as the nation has become more wealthy a greater share of the wealth has gone to upper middle than below them.
I think there’s so many dynamics at play here and it isn’t 100% cut and dry. For instance, there are more single parent (or single person) homes. Divorce isn’t socially unacceptable anymore and young people are waiting longer to get married. Do people lose the efficiencies of 2 earners in a household and possibly the class bump?
I’m not an expert on this but the data does show growth in the middle class by growing the upper-middle and a shrinking poverty class.
Well, not saying this is what he did, but if you took away from American minimum wage workers and gave to rural South Asians or sub-Saharan Africans, you are improving world equity.
Interesting! I wonder if he tracked outcomes so we can see what the result is of all this. He seems pretty happy with how his charitable "investments" have done.
That data could reveal which things are the most effective things to operate charitably in terms of increasing human happiness.
That's something I really like about Jack Dorsey's approach. I get to follow along and see what works.
> Where did $8 billion go: health, science, education, and social action
Other than science, those are some very bloated and inefficient causes. $1 billion to Cornell? Aren't most of the prestigious universities already swimming in billions of dollars of endowments? He can do what he wants of course, but it would have been nicer if the money was targeted to long shot bets--that only a super rich person could fund--rather than normal things are already well funded through taxes.
Disagree. There are more than enough resources on effective NGO's. There is no reason to give cornell a billion dollars when that money could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the developing world.
Not only is whether or not he's maximizing the impact of his donation a call he gets to make, whether or not he even wants to maximize the impact of his donation at the cost of other considerations is a call he gets to make.
Yeah. I also think these large contributions to college endowments are of questionable social value. They clearly help the people who go there to get an education but do they really address the issues that people who can't go to an Ivy League school face.
It could have been seen as a force multiplier. If Feeney was educated at Cornell, then that $$ to Cornell could possibly contribute to more Feeneys in the future who could also follow in the footsteps of philanthropy.
Funding top research institutions are in fact long shot bets.
Where else does research get done? Who pays for the buildings, where each one costs hundreds of millions of dollars? Scholarships? Who pays for new tenured positions?
Yes, administrative costs could be cut (I think substantially). But there's this long-going misunderstanding about the roles of endowments at American universities. These endowments have been budged into the next century of operation -- each year they are expected to generate some income to cover operating expenses. These expenses include salaries, financial aid, etc. The larger the endowment, the more income. They can't just drain the whole thing to pay for a building, because then they auction off the future for the present.
On the face it's certainly selfless, but the causes and recipients of the massive sum are important. Certainly you'd think differently if the recipients were foreign militants, no?
> While many wealthy philanthropists enlist an army of publicists to trumpet their donations, Feeney went to great lengths to keep his gifts secret.
Crazy respect for this. Many times billionaire charitable foundations are just tax preferred ways of building your image or amassing influence. Bill Gates has done a lot of good, but his charitable work also served to redeem his image from that of the ruthless businessman crushing competitors that he had in the 1990’s. In addition, it has also given him a lot of soft power. I bet there are dozens of heads of state, especially in Africa and Asia, that he could personally get on the phone within 30 minutes if he really wanted to.
Sure, but what benefit does that power get him except to accomplish the goals of his philanthropy? He doesn't appear to be trying to amass more wealth.
He needs to amass connections and power if he wants to accomplish his philanthropic goals.
As for fixing his image, sure, maybe that was part of it. But I doubt it. He could have just made a few really big donations and then went off to himself to enjoy his wealth.
One of my arguments against the accumulation of vast wealth is that Bill Gates can get an in-person visit with my local representative faster than I, a constituent, can get a return phone call.
I think we need 5x the number of representatives at the House level. Separate their duties, strip power from some of them, and keep them in district most of the year so they can actually be held accountable. Would also help to further democratize the House.
> I think we need 5x the number of representatives at the House level. Separate their duties, strip power from some of them, and keep them in district most of the year so they can actually be held accountable.
That is a a great idea. One idea along those lines, is maybe make the House entirely online with the representatives being in the district 100% of the time. It would do a couple of things. It would make lobbying harder since instead of getting a bunch of people together in Washington at a fancy dinner, the lobbyists would have to travel and meet 1:1. In addition, it might decrease partisan ship by decreasing the power of the party whips. When people are all in a single location, tremendous social pressure can be brought to bear to convince a representative to vote along the party lines, even if it would be going against the wishes of their constituents. With the representatives dispersed and remote, the social pressure would be diminished, and maybe representatives would vote more in line with their constituents’ wishes.
It's great he donated his wealth to charity, but it's a little unfair that he took it upon himself to chose where the money went instead of letting the people choose.
One of the reasons that private charity is somewhat looked down upon in certain countries with a robust welfare state is that historically, private charities were selective in whom they helped. If the private charity felt that your "lifestyle" (i.e. you were a mother out of wedlock, you were LGBT) or ethnicity was objectionable, you were just left to suffer. Or those private charities would assist you, but you were obliged to convert to their religious denomination or sit through a long sermon before getting to eat.
Welfare states run from taxpayer money and overseen by democratically elected officials, while they have their downsides that are often commented on, at least tend to assist groups that would be marginalized otherwise, and there are no religious strings attached.
That and the fact that such charity systems are demonstrably less efficient than welfare. It seems that many of people just want to ignore that evidence though and continue to scaremonger.
For someone who is actually in the middle of doing this: Chris Hohn.
He has built one of the largest charities in the UK, and I believe it is top 10 in the world. He has given away his net worth multiple times. His general story is also totally remarkable for the UK, he came from literally nowhere.
Somewhat inevitably these days, he is regarded negatively in the media (most recently, he came up because the UK's finance minister used to work at his fund, so Hohn was the "vulture" capitalist with his beak in govt...funnily enough, their view didn't change when they found he is the main funding for Extinction Rebellion...2020 is amazing).
I think cost of living should be factored into this though. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. 2 million is meager to try and retire in SF. You are correct that he clearly isn't broke.
Most people are some combination of financially irresponsible and uneducated. Honestly, with the numbers you have here I have to lean towards irresponsible regardless of whatever difficulties the middle class faces. Even at a median wage just doing the absolute bare minimum of saving 5%-10%, not even factoring in 401ks, would leave you well past this given the last few decades of market returns.
I mean, I am just some rando engineer and I intend to retire with way more than that in the bank. That's a modest retirement savings and compared to what he has given away is "broke".
I find those people who determine to earn big and then give away big very interesting minds. Their reasons to earn are most of the times very different from a typical person.
Speculating here as I am not spectacularly wealthy... I suspect there is more to relate to than first meets the eye.
Chuck is human like all of us. Most people have to spend some amount of time solving for generating enough capital to meet their (and their family’s) needs - whatever they may be. The fabulously wealthy / successful did too once upon a time but at some point crossed a threshold the vast vast majority of people - which I will refer to as “typical” - will never, and that is having enough to do and buy literally anything they could possibly desire indefinitely.
Thus the motivation to keep on going professionally (ie to earn more and more, something that drives typical people who are solving to meet needs), I suspect, changes to things money can’t buy which are nevertheless “typical”: The desire for impact.
Some want it in their life times, others want it for generations (legacy). Some want it in their church or on their job. Others seek and have the means to achieve it on a global scale.
>>> When I first met him in 2012, he estimated he had set aside about $2 million for his and his wife's retirement.
I don't know about everyone else on HN, but having 2mil in the bank is not my definition of "Broke". I want to see what trusts have been setup. What life estates has he retained? I credit him for giving most all of it away, but "broke" doesn't mean you are worth 0.0001% of some huge number. Broke means you might not cover next month's rent and are parking your car at a friend's to hide it from the repo guy.
The point is that Forbes shouldn't be using terms like broke to describe millionaires when there are millions of people who are actually broke living incredibly difficult lives.
Are they former billionaires though? The point of him being "broke" isn't that he has nothing, it's that he has shared almost all of what he had, to a much greater extent than most of us could ever dream of.
Ask anyone who has shared more of their worth than this man has. Plenty of parents have done more than give up "everything" to support a kids. Talk to any bail bondsman. Plenty of people regularly go past 0 and into negative net assets to help a family members in need. Talk to any veterinarian. They see people give their last dollar, and then leverage out every credit card beyond that last dollar, to save a pet. Broke means broke, not 2mil, not even really 0. Broke means broken. Forbes should not attach that word to this situation because this man is not.
With all due reference to Shai-Hulud, I'd say broke has a lot of different possible meanings. It could mean you declared bankruptcy, have negative net worth, or maybe just like 99% gone (while you don't think it means that by definition, and I agree, I think socially we could agree with that. Someone with a dollar in their pocket isn't broke, but is also broke.).
If anything, having enough money to take care of his needs I think is good. If he was hiding his car from the repo man, it's probably because he's not paying payments on it, and therefore all the people that rely on those payments for their jobs you're kind of "stealing" from, in that you aren't fulfilling the legal and financial obligation. And that doesn't seem very charitable either?
Not that I want to in any way detract from this incredible and selfless accomplishment, but he has held on to a $2M retirement fund, so he's not quite "broke" yet.
I humbly encourage everyone to make giving a larger part of your life.
Consider giving at least 10% of your income to cost-effective charities -- because cost-effective charities can do thousands of times more good than merely regular charities. So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well.
That point about cost effectiveness is what always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when donating. I didn't realize people put lists of recommendations together, that's nice to see.
But how would you go about verifying any stated claims?
If an organization cures blindness for $20 through cataract surgeries in developing nations, and another spends $40,000 to train a seeing eye dog for a single individual, we are looking at ratios of 1:1000 in terms of effectiveness. The amount spent on 'overhead' is irrelevant!
It's very plausible to disagree with some of their choices. For instance, you might be interested in efficient charitable giving within your country, and bite the bullet of "this means I value starving africans a lot less." The important part is to prompt charities to document costs and outcomes in general (preferably to a scientific standard), so that people can make more informed choices about their donations no matter their values.
Well, it depends on your utility function, but judging by Zuckerberg's experience with the Foundation for Newark's Future vs. mosquito netting in Africa, I think that ratio is not out of the realm of possibility.
A $1,000 donation, if given well, can measure better on this metric than a $1 million donation, if given badly. Not a very meaningful thing to say, I agree.
I think thinking in terms of percentage of income doesn't work, because the lower your income, the lower a percentage you can afford to give away. I have found it better to think of it as a percentage of your non-essential expenses. e.g, if you spend $500 per month on non-essential things (eating out, movies, netflix, amazon impulse buys etc.), then you can afford giving away 10% of it ($50 per month) to charity.
That's how I do it. I don't have a 6+ figure salary, or tons of disposable income, so I can't afford to give 10% of my income without reducing how much I put into savings. One thing I do have is more time on my hands than the average person. So for things like open source projects that I benefit greatly from, I always try to give some portion of my time with things like improving documentation, always submitting detailed bug reports, or writing updated versions of tutorials that are out of date.
Shouldn't it be a % of (income - essential expenses), rather than % of non-essential spending?
If you're very frugal, you'd end up giving away a very small amount of money, saving all the rest... Saving is super important, but giving money to effective charities is also a great way to use your money.
To take a typical example of someone that might be reading HN, any software engineer working in NY or the Bay Area can easily give away $10K a year while saving enough money to get a very cozy retirement.
I am not sure if you can easily give away that much money. If it were easy, people would already be doing it. Buying a nice home is a distant dream even for many software engineers in the bay area for example, and future education and healthcare costs are very unpredictable. Putting it in terms of money you are already spending helps put it in context.
There are many beneficial things people can do but are not doing. For example: investing your money. Many people aren't doing it (instead leaving cash in their bank account for a large part of their life) out of pure laziness/ignorance of its benefits.
Let's assume you're a junior SWE in the Bay Area, making $130K. Annual take home is ~$85,753 according to [1]
You pay $3K in rent (nice 1 bedroom apt in South Bay, or just a decent one in SF), $2K for various expenses, that's $60K and you're left with $25K.
This is for a junior engineer, and granted they might want to save $25K vs $15K (arguable; I would consider those savings don't matter much in the long run, the goal being to quickly increase your salary by advancing your career), but an engineer in a large tech company is making closer to $250 - $300K total comp, and you'll see that the $10K donation isn't making much of a dent in your savings at that point.
> but giving money to effective charities is also a great way to use your money
Those charities aren't going to help you when you're retired and subsiding on a meagre state pension. Or if there's a resurgent global pandemic and you lose your job and home.
I mentioned that you can do this on top of saving money. Just saving money with no goal in mind (or with the goal of buying a $1M house) is IMHO not always worth it.
Absolutely for saving to be able to survive ~1 year as life is very unpredictable, but we're talking about altruism here... Let's for a second assume we all want to have the largest positive impact on other people, is that $1M really the best way to spend your money to both improve your and other people's life? Could you instead buy a house/work elsewhere, pay $400K, and invest $600K in saving a hole bunch of people from certain death / extreme poverty?
As each of my children have left home I have had the following conversation with them:
You didn't get here by yourself. You know some of the people who have generously contributed to you. There are more than you know. The ones who stick out are relatively wealthy. Do you think they are generous because they are wealthy? I submit to you that normal wealth does not make it easier to be generous. A person rich enough to buy a boat has just created more demands on their wealth. A big house usually involves more ongoing financial obligations than a small house.
For most people, generosity is not a function of net worth. It is a matter of character. You can make it part of your character beginning today. You are about to leave my house and face the world on your own. There will be challenges. Money will be tight. "Starving college students" isn't always an amusing tagline. I encourage you to make a point of doing something generous. Maybe commit to giving $1 to a random person on the street every week. Maybe donate plasma. Maybe volunteer to be a Salvation Army bell ringer. But make a point to do something frequent. At least once a month. Even when tuition is due, or rent. Even if just an hour of your time. It's up to you. But do it regularly and relentlessly. If you ever get to where it is easy, it is probably because your circumstances have improved but your generosity has not kept pace.
Agreed, Some people are more generous by nature, some are not. For those who are not, one of the main reasons is that they are scared that giving away money now will put them at a disadvantaged position later. Putting donations in the terms of current spending helps alleviate some anxiety.
On the other hand, it's easy to "cook the books" by classifying expenses as essential in your own mind. Or rather, most people (especially the sorts of relatively affluent people who could realistically give 10% of their income to charity) don't really budget that concretely. They just sort of have a lump of money left after paying basic expenses and then spend it on whatever strikes their fancy.
Making a commitment up front to donate 10% just creates a situation in which its not any sort of conscious decision to give $X to charity. You just operate as if your taxes were 10% higher or your income is 10% lower and go from there.
Jewish tradition says to give from 10%-20%. I have been giving 20% for the last few years and that is exactly how it works. The first thing I do when receiving my paycheck is putting 1/5 into a separate account which must be used for charity. It is anyhow all accounted for with monthly donations to various charities. I find it to be incredibly empowering personally, as I can support the charities I choose without agonizing over each donation. I already made that commitment a few years ago.
WRT income, I am thankfully able to afford my lifestyle, but I currently earn 5 digits a year and always have (I am still young). I don't regret a penny I gave.
I'll echo this sentiment and add that during my career I've experienced a number of ups and downs. During the downs, when it felt like I've wasted years of my life for something that went nowhere, what always felt worthwhile to me was the time I spent doing charity work and volunteering. You don't need to be a Feeney to make a huge difference. Many of the people on HN are insanely well educated and knowledgable and have skills and traits that can be put to good use helping others or inspiring a new generation, especially among the less privileged. Just spending an hour or two a week over a period of years can yield tremendous results in the lives of others.
I think a big part of the Feeney story is that he didn't just donate money. He got involved. He took an interest and made sure he was making a difference, or at least was doing his best to make a difference. He gave his time and his personal effort.
I remember watching a documentary on him some time ago. There was some issue he was interested in. I think it involved a community in Ireland. He put his money into the issue, but it didn't have the desired outcome. He looked closely at what they were doing and decided the strategy wasn't a failure, so he committed some astounding amount more with specific strings attached. His strings forced others to put skin in the game with him. Then they worked together towards their desired outcome.
How do you make sure that your donation to the blind center will get that roof repaired? Grab a hammer.
This assumes Feeney is more qualified to know where his money will be most effective and that no one else is out there already doing a ton of research validating the effectiveness of different charities. (both questionable)
I think this could be a convenient excuse that keeps some from donating more money (I'll wait until I can spend time creating my own charity / doing some hands-on vetting on who gets my money). There are already plenty of organizations (GiveWell, OpenPhil, etc.) that have very good research on the impact different charities have, often with RCTs on those interventions proving how much each $ buys (in terms of quality-adjusted life years or else).
If the roofing example didn't illustrate the point, let me try again.
Donate $100 to a literacy campaign, then volunteer for 30 minutes each week at a beneficiary elementary school to have a struggling reader read to you from one of the books your money purchased. You don't have to buy the book. You don't have to decide which books are purchased. You don't have to decide which student gets to read the books. But you can be involved enough to know that books were purchased and the students are benefiting. And your extra effort makes the $100 so much more fulfilling.
While it's great to get fulfillment out of your philanthropic activities, and it may incite you to do more; I hope you keep focus on the main goal: helping others.
A $3 donation (via Against Malaria Foudation) buys a bednet that protects about 2 people from malaria for 3-4 years. As a donor you don't get the satisfaction of meeting the individuals you help (though you can look at some photos). But is the fulfillment you seek important enough to donate to a charity that is a thousand times less efficient at converting dollars to benefits-for-others?
A good suggestion here is to "purchase your fuzzies separately". That is, give to the most cost-effective charities you can find, regardless of how fulfilling it feels. And then find the most fulfilling activity you can, and maximize that until you had your fill.
To be honest, I'd recommend just giving as directly as you can. Right now, I ordered remote teaching equipment for teachers in my community. You can too. Identify people doing good important things, and give them money to do it.
Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.
This is a common viewpoint, but quite different from OP's. $5000 can save a person from Malaria or it can buy all the history teachers at a first world school document cameras. No doubt, both are worthy causes, but if you are choosing between which change to make in the world, one thought is to choose things like the former, which are seen to do more good for the same resources.
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 distorts markets and causes its own problems.
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 they get new information or insights. It's hard for me to think that their model is worse than my lack of model.
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.
There's something to be said for giving to one-off opportunities that you're directly aware of, and that are genuinely underserved by others; this can have some very real impact. But such cases are rare, and limited in scale. The basic benchmark of just donating to save people in very poor countries from malaria and the like is very hard to beat.
I support charities and think more people should give.
At the same time, I think it is a bad systemic solution to rely on charitable giving to solve large-scale problems.
Imagine an island with 100 residents, each with $100. Their moral compass varies randomly from Mr. Rogers all the way to a few outright sociopaths. Each day, everyone decides how much to donate. The kinder people donate more because they're kinder. The selfish assholes obviously don't.
What does tomorrow look like? Well, now all the good people are a little poorer and have a little less power. The sociopaths are richer and stronger. They use their edge to secure a little more power, maybe skim a little more off the top.
Watch that island for a few years and what do you start to see? A few avaricious monsters with all the wealth and a horde of poor decent folks doing their best to distribute fewer and fewer scraps equitably amongst themselves.
This is the real magic of taxes. Because taxes are morally neutral. They don't preferentially take more money away from the most decent folks. Ultimately there are some bad selfish people out there and if you don't have some way of forcibly reducing their power, they will take it all. Taxation backed by the force of government is one of the least violent ways of doing that.
Agree whole-heartedly that everyone should give more. If you find a way to give automatically (ideally from your paycheck, not your credit card) you never even feel it.
It's important to recognize that some causes are not as cost-effective as others, but are still worthy. I'll use my own donations as an example:
1. Against Malaria Foundation - widely recognized as one of the charities that can do the most for a dollar. Malaria nets cost about $2-3 and it's estimated every ~$2500 given to them saves a life from Malaria.
2. Larkin Street Youth Services - helping homeless youth in San Francisco (where I lived). A very expensive city and they provide not just housing but education, job services, medical care, etc. Helping just one full-service client can cost $40,000 a year.
I don't think giving to both of these causes makes me inconsistent. After all, no number of malaria nets in Africa can take a person off the street in San Francisco. And I want both outcomes. I believe nobody should die of malaria, and nobody should be homeless. So I give to both.
Thank you for sharing that. I think at the outset, whenever we all discuss donations, no one should be bullied or told they are doing something wrong. Helping people should be encouraged, even if there are better ways to help.
I think it's a productive discussion when those involved learn something new. My hope is always to share the counterintuitive finding that in today's world we are able to help people a tremendous amount with (relative-to-our-lives) very little financial involvement.
I hope that when people learn about this remarkable fact, they reflect on their goals and consider giving to more-cost-effective charities, and to give more overall.
I'm thrilled to hear you too give to one of GiveWell's top recommended charities!
I mean, props for donating, and I believe that you want both outcomes, but for the sake of completeness the revealed-preferences meaning of your giving patterns is that the marginal badness of a SF youth being homeless is equivalent to 16 africans dying. Like, I'm not saying that to denigrate your choices, it's just an inherent fact of donation splitting.
> Bad Reason #6: I care about multiple issues! I want to end disease so I give to an anti-disease charity, I want to end crime so I give to an anti-crime charity, and I want to end poverty so I give to an anti-poverty charity.
> Yes, we have many different values. But at any given time, one of these will be the most pressing; one of them will be easiest to make headway on. And that's the one we should concentrate on. By focusing all our resources on one cause, we have the greatest chance of accomplishing our cause.
It's not bad logic, but I don't personally buy into it. It may be easy when dividing up a pile of cash, but it's harder when you take it down to a personal level. Imagine if someone on the street says "Can you spare a dollar, I am hungry?", could you look them in the eye and say "No, I gave your dollar to end malaria in Africa. It's more effective". I certainly can't do that! And having met so many of the clients at Larkin Street and knowing how deserving they are of a better life, I can't do it to them either.
Furthermore it's a pretty slippery slope to say that every dollar I spend reveals my marginal preferences when compared to every other dollar I spend. I don't think every person who buys a new laptop for $2500 is saying they'd rather have a faster web browser than save a life from malaria. We don't expect everyone to operate that way. Spending money is a hybrid between emotion and rationality, and I think that's ok.
> I don't think every person who buys a new laptop for $2500 is saying they'd rather have a faster web browser than save a life from malaria.
So there's this thing called "revealed preferences". I have a $2000 laptop, and I was very aware when I bought it that I was saying that this laptop was more important than an african life. I don't have a moral defense for this. I think it's not so much that people don't prefer a laptop to an african child surviving - they do prefer the laptop - but they don't want to perceive themselves to be the sort of people who prefer a laptop to an african child surviving. And so they don't think about it, and get angry at you when you make them think about it. But they still act in that way.
Personally, I sort of feel I'd be a lot more ready to donate a fraction of my income to worthy causes if everyone else was willing to help as well. Maybe we need to run charities like very long term kickstarters - say "we need X trillion dollars over a span of ten years to have an even shot at wiping out Malaria forever, commit yourself to a monthly payment, payment starts once we cross the threshold." I think something like that would be better at motivating me, at least - humans are inherently more sensitive to relative local standing than absolute global effects.
The article says he put away $2m for his and his wife's retirement. While I agree it's not quite 'broke' in the classic American sense, it is .025% of his former net worth of $8b.
Yeah, the word "broke" is clickbait. $2m for retirement is more than most. It's simply "not extravagant" which I guess from the eyes of the wealthy class may as well be "broke".
Certainly not broke, but it seems difficult to find a way without hyperbole to indicate that he's given away billions and now is no longer in the top 10% of people in his age bracket in the US.
2 million is only 0.025% of 8 billion. It's a bit of editorializing to call it "broke" but donating such a huge percentage of his net worth is commendable and he will be living a relatively much more modest lifestyle.
There's probably lots of people reading this comment who are worth two million dollars, but I bet there are none who are worth eight billion dollars. Knocking yourself down from the 99.9999th percentile to the 90th is a real change.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 672 ms ] threadI have always heard the complete opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/12/28/the_ge...
Myanmar is an exceptionally devout Buddhist society with many monasteries supported through traditional almsgiving. I suspect that's why Myanmar tops even the U.S. in the World Giving Index, which merely asks whether you've donated money or time (volunteered).
Not that faith-based giving is inferior, but different people have different notions about what constitutes philanthropy and charity.
I'm sure there are people who will find a way to invalidate this kind of charity. But it takes a level of dedication, discipline and a moral code to take 10% of earnings for benefit of your community and do it without legal compulsion. And it's the latter part that makes it different then those that pat themselves on the back for merely voting for higher taxes or disparage others for not voting for higher taxes.
Absolutely, but I think that's pretty rare among the general population. IIUC, if I drop $10 into the offertory basket at Sunday Mass I'm counted just the same as a Mormon who tithes 10% of their income.
A lot of people only donate to reduce their tax bill.
Also, because we don't have a social safety net in the US, a lot of people donate to make up for that, which is certainly noble, but would be far less necessary if we had a stronger social safety net that more evenly distributed that wealth giveaway.
Unsure if that index referenced, or any other studies/reports on this subject, account for this in terms WHY the donation happened or motive.
It does include willingness to help a stranger and volunteerism too, and those are ranked top 3 as well and doesn't reduce tax bills.
It’s not being pedantic; this changes the calculus altogether. Deducting from your taxes means you can say “oh well, I have to pay $1M in taxes, I might as well just use that money to make a donation to a charity of my choice and gain some PR instead,” whereas deducting your taxable income means “instead of parting with $1M in tax, I would need to part with $5M in charity to zero out my tax burden,” which is a very different decision and still largely a philanthropic one at some level or the other.
But yes, I meant your pre-tax income, as all deductions work. Credits apply to taxes directly, deductions always mean pre-tax income.
It's still money gone from your pocket. It doesn't save you money overall.
That makes no sense. If I get to deduct a donation, then when I donate $1000, it really only costs me $700. But it still costs me $700.
I would have more money if I never donated.
Also, it's hidden. If you used TurboTax for example, you put all your numbers in and get a number out. All you've heard is "donations are deductible" but there really is no obvious connection to putting in your donations and seeing how much it saves you.
It’s interesting because having grown up steeped in the culture for 30 years I have never once heard this or seen much real charitable action. I see small donations and token donations but very rarely anything like donating most of ones wealth or giving up excess to donate to those less well-off.
I’d love to better understand this discrepancy. I hear more about how much money people spend more than how much they donate in the media. And even anecdotally I can’t think of anyone talking about a donation they made in conversation. It seems like this should be something we talk about and champion more.
If you were raised a certain way, in a certain era, it wouldn't be rational to spend it on 'frivolity'.
There are a lot of people like this. Tons of very rich folks living in normal homes, driving normal cars that they 'never buy news'.
I think in some ways more common than not, especially in more rural and suburban areas wherein projecting wealth isn't actually necessary to their professional identity.
I don't know about suburban areas in general. I think it largely depends on which neighborhood.
While it may not impact peoples professional identity, in many suburbs it impacts their social identity.
Basically if you make a high tier engineer's salary, you could do more utilitarian good by hiring several people to work at a food bank on the weekends. Roadside trash pickup is an example of a problem in need of a systemic solution, so if you can reduce litter in the first place, or build a machine that cleans everything, you might be doing more good that way, even though it doesn't look or feel as "noble".
But others have pointed out that it is useful to donate your time if you are giving your skills, and not just effort.
So, please donate time by volunteering! But if you can't, money is also good of course.
Everybody knows the most important parts of charity are who gets the credit and one's own personal growth.
I am saying that credit isn't the point. Also, I am not entirely clear on why you would require $15/hour to volunteer at a charity...but...good for you turning charity into a second source of income.
Btw, my point (I will spell it out) is that the problem is almost never money. Money is required to the extent that is required to pay other people...but, particularly for almost all local problems, the issue is not money but time. There is no reality in which people donate enough income to solve these problems but they could donate time, and that would be effective.
By all mean, volunteer at your local soup kitchen. It is a great thing to do! But the money is more helpful on an ongoing basis.
[0] https://youth.gov/youth-topics/mentoring/benefits-mentoring-...
"Donating time" is a deceptive phrase because it just sounds like you are paying out some currency other than money and that's it. "Donating time" encapsulates "building friendships, lifting up others, increasing love/unity in communities, gaining new perspectives" and more, unlike "donating money" which encapsulates none of them.
I'm paid salary. I'm of the opinion that it is usually the self-absorbed that think that after they leave the office they are still worth what their employer pays them.
Making it a requirement that your time donation be within your professional skillset is saying, "such work is beneath me". I'm not above ladling a bit of soup into a bowl or picking up the dog shit while at the animal shelter.
I'm not opposed to that if you're doing it for your own benefit. But you should be thinking of this as leisure time for yourself, rather than assuming that you're "donating time" for the sake of real social impact. There's picking up dog $#!+, and then there's actually impactful stuff.
You don't have to be rich to do this. Although yes, some people truly can't spare 10%, that's fine, nobody needs to reply saying so. Anyone can spare what they can spare, whether that's 0 or more. For a lot of people 10% seems about right to be enough to feel it without being a hardship. (I calculate 10% of take-home, post-tax. It is still enough to feel it).
I give about half of it in automatic monthly contributions, the other half in spontaneous one-offs. I (in the USA) don't require to be tax deductible, but enough of it is that I reliably increase my tax refund every year.
It definitely makes me feel better about what I'm supporting and doing with what I'm lucky enough to have. Although of course "making me feel better" should not be the goal if I want to maximize impact, but nobody would do it if it weren't rewarding in some way. I don't give enough to get any kind of 'public recognition' (and wouldn't want any), my reward is feeling like I'm putting my money where my values are and hopefully contributing to what i want to see in the world.
Giving away your fortune then letting go is harder.
To be that good at making money and that intent at giving it away is such a massive paradox not to mention paradigm shift from how we typically discuss wealth and wealth accumulators.
Looking for video interviews....
Hope I can learn something from this. What does a non rich person do? I guess it is about trying to influence things rather than injecting money.
Time is money and if you don't have money then give your time. It's the most generous thing a person can do. More so than money in many ways since you can always make more money but you can't make more time.
You can't expect to make a major change in the world. But you can make some small changes that means the world to some people.
I don't pretend to know the motivations of Bezos or even Musk (even though I think he has been clear) but I see this as consistent with what Feeney did.
I can at least conceive of a thought process like "I can help humanity now and in the future by making money to fund new businesses that would not otherwise exist." Maybe the best way to contribute is to give away money to charity, maybe it is to start a rocket company. I don't think either of those are wrong, and I think they can have the same base motivation.
It feels like a weird and maybe bad example, but it feels like sort of a chaotic good version of The Dark Knight Joker. You have the idea of "if you're good at something never do it for free", combined with a more wholesome version of "some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money."
Maybe you just have weird anomalies where you have someone who likes business, like what their work entails, but for whatever reason aren't drawn as much to some of the other trappings. I think the assumption being the baseline is that the interest follows the money.
Seems like that was by design.
It is. Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich, on the one hand, and are paternalistic on the other. The only things that get funding are things that can attract the attention of our "betters." If we had taxed them on the front end to the point they couldn't become billionaires in the first place then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable. And with the added bonus that the negative effects of they got to be billionaires don't cause more problems (Feeney worked in private equity. PE are strip & sell firms)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give
I'm willing to argue that it is in fact possible to become a billionaire though honest earnings.
but, if that's all morality is, pretty pointless
Sorry, I’m not able to parse this sentence. Could you please rephrase?
I'm not sure how accurate of a representation this is, but it certainly appears to work that way in some places. Realtors are a really good example of this, and of course, Butler's "War is a Racket" is a classic regarding the US military-industrial complex.
Cable originally started because people in valleys of PA and the like could not get antenna reception. So the CATV companies put up lines and started selling the service.
Sure, they were filling a 'need'. But I think when we look back at how the CATV Industry itself punishes 'piracy' there is more than a little irony. The only reason they started paying was because it was codified into law.
Also, the CATV Industry's general union-busting structure; lots of linework invovles 2-3 layers of contractor companies. By doing so, they help prevent unionizaiton (which is a thing in the Phone line side of things, their workers tend to get paid more and be happier in my experience) and also 'absolve' themselves of much of the responsibility when something goes wrong (especially in the contractor industry, that 'last layer' may not be around in 1-2 years.)
Aye, there's the rub. The greatest evils are when the billionaires team up with the government. Shifting money from the villains with money to the villains in the legislature doesn't solve that problem, and the villains in the legislature already spend close to half the GDP.
As a datapoint, "Fifty-five percent of Harvard College students receive need-based scholarship aid, and the average grant this year is more than $53,000." (https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=harvard...)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
> I feel this is one of your lesser thought out pieces. I mean false equivalencies are rampant in it.
but... if we must, a few hard counterpoints:
> 1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?
This point misrepresents how journalism & counter-criticism occur.
People criticize billionaires. Full stop. Criticism of their philanthropy is not selective: it's a criticism of the billionaire when they receive press due to their philanthropy, not because its philanthropy. Billionaires don't receive wide-reaching press because of their new yachts because those articles are only of interest to niche audiences, whereas philanthropy is promoted more broadly. THAT's the only reason it receives more criticism.
> 2. If attacks on billionaire philanthropy decrease billionaires’ donations, is that acceptable collateral damage in the fight against inequality?
This is cross-referencing the first point and doesn't hold water once the first point is debunked: the "attacks" on billionaire philanthropy are directed at billionaires because they receive positive press, not because they are philanthropic. This question only makes sense if you believe non-philanthropic billionaires should not be criticised for being billionaires.
> 3. Do billionaires really get negative reactions from donating? Didn’t I hear that they get fawning praise and total absence of skepticism?
(a) the question is bizarrely worded and I don't understand how any answer to this question would either confirm or debunk... anything.
(b) the author's "research" has sample sizes of 25 (Twitter search) and 10 (Google search) respectively. i.e. is basically junk.
> 4. Is it a problem that billionaire philanthropy is unaccountable to public democratic institutions? Should we make billionaires pay that money as taxes instead, so the public can decide how it gets spent?
This is again a poorly worded question but the content of the "answer" essentially amounts to a (rightful) critique of the current US government, and compares it to 3 cherry-picked examples of philanthropy that the author believes were better than what the current government would do.
Moving past the obvious point that... dear god what a low bar that is... as a general simple rebuttal: criticism of billionaire philanthropy generally centres around the fact that their philanthropy does less good than the negative impacts of their existence as billionaires. These negative impacts are absolutely the reason for the current state of the US government.
Arguing that billionaire philanthropy is inherently better than functioning democratic government in general is obvious nonsense.
> 5. Those are some emotionally salient examples, but doesn’t the government also do a lot of good things?
Same point as 4
> 6. The point of democracy isn’t that it’s always right, the point is that it respects the popular will. Regardless of whether the popular will is good or bad, don’t powerful private foundations violate it?
I mean this is slightly different but it's essentially 3 Qs on the same thing...
> 7. Shouldn’t people who disagree with the government’s priorities fight to change the government, not go off and do their own thing?
4 Qs on the same thing. This is a crafty technique to seem like you have more bullet points than you really do.
> 8. Is billionaire philanthropy getting too powerful? Should we be terrified by the share of resources now controlled by unaccountable charitable foundations?
We're now wandering off-topic from the original "should we criticise billionaires" to "is billionaire philanthropy dangerous in theory", and starts with the argument of whether they wield too much power. For this, they use their total philanthropy sp...
And Scott's point is that non-selective criticism is dumb. If you don't want your dog to chew the carpet, criticizing your dog, full stop, as you say, is a terrible strategy.
If you're opposed to dogs or people richer than you in principle, then you can make that claim too I guess. But you won't get much sympathy if you do it when they're doing their most praiseworthy things.
Just out of curiosity, do you just think that billionaires are evil, or does that also extend to people in rich countries making six figure salaries in tech, who are also ridiculously richer than most of the rest of the world?
That's a reasonable point to make, but... I don't think I saw Scott making it. Are you sure that was Scott's point, or is it yours?
> criticizing your dog, full stop, as you say, is a terrible strategy
I guess this depends on our definition of "criticising" and it's intent. If you're sitting at home, shouting at your dog, I'm not sure that's particularly productive. If you're having a conversation with a peer, and expressing your frustration at your dog chewing carpet, you may perhaps combine forces to arrive at some solutions to your carpet problems.
You can argue that perhaps discussing the plight of billionaires amongst peers (or even random folk on the internet) is equivalent to sitting at home shouting at your dog, but I think that's a debate for a different day.
Point being: I doubt many "criticising" the billionaires/dogs are expecting them to listen. They're discussing problems (and potential solutions?) in a more general sense by criticising a system/event that exists/occurs.
> do you just think that billionaires are evil
Are you proposing that dogs chewing carpets are evil? I presume not, but I presume you still want to save your carpet.
Billionaires are not necessarily "evil" in intent in the absolute sense. What I am proposing is that their existence is a problem needing solving in and of itself.
The existence of billionaires (or anyone who holds more economic resources than are needed to be content... I think that stands somewhere around the ~$150k mark according to some studies... certainly far short of whatever number of millions/pa leads to billion-level assets) necessitates that those resources have been withheld from someone who has less than are needed to be content (in many cases, to survive).
---
It may be worth noting that Feeney has gone about solving this exact problem (the existence of billionaires), albeit in a very individual way (making 1 billionaire no longer a non-billionaire). Which is quite an remarkable and laudable achievement, even if that billionaire was himself.
(and that's before we get into the very far-reaching, and—in my own experience—enormously positive impact, of his philanthropy)
Which government exactly is it that you think is excellent at solving societal problems and spending taxes efficiently?
[edit]
The top individual income tax rate is 22 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 17 percent. The overall tax burden equals 14.1 percent of total domestic income[1].
1: https://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore
Depending on how much you value each one depends on the answer you get.
I thought for certain the level of hate the left has for the current federal regime would make my constant refrain of "do we really think the government will do a better job?[1]" finally make sense. However, the empirical fact that government agencies will be directed by those you don't like doesn't seem to deter people from wanting to increase the role of those agencies.
1: To be clear: I'm not an anarcho-libertarian; I think the answer to this question can very often be "yes" but living in coastal California, I too often seem to be surrounded by people who think getting the government involved is the only reasonable solution to any problem. Conversely there is a very large minority of the US right that seems to think that bombs, guns and walls is the only time the answer is "yes"
Like lobbying their representatives to allow for loopholes and credits to allow them to keep their money and avoid the taxes that the lesser incomes must pay
People’s ability to agree where money should be given isn’t great. Worse so when the people who are giving the most have less say in where it goes.
In my experience, most appeals like the above tend to be driven by the idea that they would make better decisions than the philanthropist.
Whats a better model for deciding the distribution of political power, a democratic one, or a dictatorial one?
At the very least I don't think its an unreasonable position to believe that democracy makes more sense.
Unless you're trying to do things that pretty much nobody finds unsavory (e.g. funding education) money by itself doesn't go very far.
If democracy gets involved in that process, suddenly there's only an obstruction to say "No...you can't spend it on that." It's just there to introduce a form of majority control.
Conveniently, we can already see what causes we think are valuable, because the US government already spends about 40% of the entire GDP, $8 trillion per year.
Apparently we've decided that Donald J. Trump should manage it, and that $1 trillion per year should go to the defense industry (that's 600 Chuck Feeneys), with another $500B (300 Feeneys) to interest on the national debt.
(*edit: assuming 1 Feeney = $1.5B)
Maybe HackerNews needs to read some Adam Smith.
Chuck Feeney didn't work in PE, and he wasn't one of those creatures you despise. He invented Duty Free Shopping in WWII, selling booze, smokes and cars to returning servicemen. He pioneered airport shopping, doing all the hard, clever work himself, and spent the bulk of his life giving the billions earned to good causes anonymously.
Why? He didn't care about money or reputation. He wanted to make the world a better place.
Wikipedia Bio of Chuck Feeney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
Biography of Chuck Feeney https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2842145-the-billionaire-...
> Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich
It can be used that way, but Chuck Feeney didn't need or want that. That's why he gave anonymously right up until international money laundering regulations post 9/11 forced him to reveal his identity.
Yup. Even Adam Smith talked about this, it helps propel the capitalist system.
If you let billionaires make the choices then sure you get some like Feeney/Gates/Buffett but you get Koch brothers.
Government could theoretically do a more equitable job but only if social programs are run competently. Think about the leadership of EPA and HUD.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
I for one don't have time in my life to be an expert on running an economy, creating an immigration policy, balancing the environmental and societal needs etc. I specialize in my area of expertise and use that money to employ others who specialize in their areas, and that includes government.
Perfect the enemy of good, etc, etc. What I solved is the problem of relying on a potentially authoritarian government which is what was brought up, rather than all possible problems. What I suggest would be better, not perfect.
> I for one don't have time in my life to be an expert on running an economy, creating an immigration policy, balancing the environmental and societal needs etc.
That's the point of liquid democracy. You delegate but reserve the right to override your delegate if needed.
You just disagree with the things the Kochs choose to fund. You could have easily said Murdoch instead (or Bloomberg if you wanted to pick someone who's hate crosses party lines).
Were the government funding the causes these billionaires fund the causes would still be controversial. We just wouldn't have a single person to have the lion's share of the blame.
Correct. Then we'd only have the electorate i.e ourselves to blame.
Sure, and I'm also not a fan of Jeffrey Dahmer's taste in fine dining, but I don't think it is reasonable to chalk that up to a mere difference of appetite.
> Were the government funding the causes these billionaires fund the causes would still be controversial.
Were the government funding those causes we could stop funding them because they are horrible and people hate them.
But it doesn't. Regardless of what we say here, the majority of the US wants a big military, and wants hard immigration controls.
Then it becomes a different argument: should we tax the wealthy more if it means the money will go to government initiatives that the majority seems to want, even though a minority of us believe that those things are largely bad for society and the world, and represent short-term thinking that is a result of bad risk assessment? Essentially, should we let the use of this money be directed by the will of the people (rather than a few ultra-rich people) even if we believe the will of the people is often wrong?
I don't have great answers to this. As another commenter mentioned, the billionaire-philanthropist system is good when we have people like Feeney, but fails when we have people like the Kochs. Do we have a net excess of Feeneys in the world, or Kochs? And even if we have the former, is that still a good thing; could we get more fair or equitable outcomes if we did let electorate decide how to allocate these funds? And even if we couldn't, is it antithetical to democratic values to go against the will of the people, even if the people are wrong? And if so, does that matter? I tend to think it does, but I can see the argument for both sides.
Support for the War in Iraq was 39% in 2004, 30% in 2006, 34% in 2007, etc. Despite massive PR campaigns on the part of politicians and the natural tendency to ("support the troops"), our various military adventures are actually not very popular among average Americans.
But they are very very popular among rich members of the military-industrial complex, and those people have enough money to win elections and buy politicians, so here we are.
> Do we have a net excess of Feeneys in the world, or Kochs?
Kochs, absolutely, unequivocally. There is no billionaire on Earth who could fix all of the damage caused to the environment by the Koch brothers, any more than a sufficiently well-intentioned German Chancellor could undo the damage Hitler caused.
This is one of the fundamental asymmetries of life: it is easier to destroy than build, easier to harm than heal. With a cheap kitchen knife and a fraction of a Newton of force, you can sever someone's head. Can you as easily put it back?
This is, I think, the core reason why inequality is dangerous. Because when you concentrate power in fewer people, the variance of the resulting outcomes increases. And if you increase that variance, the bad outcomes get worse more than the good outcomes get better.
Say what you will about hunter-gatherer societies, but they never dropped a nuclear bomb, caused a Holocaust, or filled the atmosphere with lead fumes. We obviously shouldn't dial inequality back to pre-industrial levels, but the existence of billionaires is essentially playing global-scale random wildcards in the game of life.
Biography from 2013: https://www.powells.com/book/billionaire-who-wasnt-how-chuck...
The last time he was reported as giving away "the last of his fortune", in the NY Times, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/james-bond-of-ph...
NY Times at $1B left in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/your-money/a-billion-to-s...
At $1.5B left: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/nyregion/a-billionaire-ph...
NYT on his secrecy in 2007: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26about.html
Series when he was outed in 1997 while trying to remain anonymous: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/business/lone-rangers-of-..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/26/weekinreview/they-gave-mi..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/24/nyregion/quiet-man-with-b..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/a-man-who-repaid..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/he-gave-away-600..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/giving-a-fortune...
My takeaway from this story is to spend my time on things that matter to me. It's a reminder that our news sources are really just another form of entertainment, which is not something that can give your life meaning or a sense of accomplishment.
Feeney donated some half a billion dollars to medical research in Brisbane, Australia, guided by an old friend from his young days in Hong Kong, the tennis player Ken Fletcher.
When Fletcher told former Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley he had a mate with millions to give away to good causes, nobody in Brisbane would take him seriously. It forced Feeney to come out with his philanthropy, and whilst he never cultivated a public profile, Feeney did at least speak in public on a few occasions when dedicating medical research centres that were built with his donations in Brisbane.
While weighing journalist's actions you might want to consider that Chuck Feeney wanted to remain completely anonymous and the media - the members of the media acting in accordance with your desires specifically - made that impossible.
(that some of us have known his name for many years might also indicate that this has never come to my attention is not a meaningful measure of the media's performance - perhaps it's a measure of your use of media)
By contrast, charities and non-profits get this halo of being socially beneficial, even though they're often some of the most wasteful institutions of all. Cornell gets a billion dollars from this guy, as if they didn't get enough money from the racket that is higher education in the US.
That's not true. You can go and pay people a 50 million dollars to make a yacht for you. Or you can pay that 50 million to other group of people to build housing for the poor. In both cases, it provides jobs and puts food on the table of the people you employed. But, the yacht is just a toy for you, while housing will be life-changing for hundreds of families.
If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something nice for you, they wouldn't be so poor anymore. They could even afford decent housing, if the government didn't prevent that from happening with zoning laws and various other regulations.
But their labor isn't worth that much, and no one would ever pay the poor that much when they could pay someone else less, or undocumented immigrants almost nothing under the table. "Pay the poor enough not to be poor anymore" is not how capitalism works.
Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world. He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist. As companies go, Amazon is one of the more laissez-faire, so it's not as if he wants to, but his hands are tied by overburdensome regulations. He doesn't, because why should he? Why not spend a few million dollars on a ten-thousand year clock instead?
Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more. Depending on the free market or the magnanimous (and mostly nonexistent) charity of the capital class to lift up the poor doesn't work.
You digress.
> Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world.
Jeff Bezos doesn't have that much cash. I guess he could award that much in stock though. True enough.
> He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist.
Wrong enough. Amazon is already spending most of its income in the areas where it employs most people. Turns out shipping cheap junk for free across the globe isn't that profitable. That business is cross-subsidized by other more profitable areas like AWS.
If Amazon were to use those remaining profits and put them into fulfillment workers' salaries, the company would be pointless from an investment perspective, the stock price would tank, the company would have trouble raising capital, and Jeff Bezos wouldn't be the richest man in the world.
It's similar for other companies like Wal-Mart that work on razor thin margins but employ a lot of people. Sure, all of these people earn a low income, but at the same time they benefit from low prices.
> Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more.
Sure, but "the market" is society as a whole, not just some billionaires. Billionaires aren't forcing down their wages, it's the ordinary people consuming their labor, who only buy at the lowest price.
The least productive people are always going to be poor in relative terms. In absolute terms, the salary of an Amazon warehouse worker puts you close to the global 1%.
You may believe the narrative that all these profits go into the pockets of a few rich people, and if only those people left some of that money on the table, everybody would be way better off, and it's all capitalism's fault. It just doesn't add up. Capitalism doesn't tolerate high profit margins over an extended period of time, it drives prices down for everybody, which benefits those the most who don't have a lot of income in the first place.
Biography of Chuck Feeney https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2842145-the-billionaire-...
For a great read, and to get a sense of who Chuck Feeney really is, track down a copy of Hugh Lunn's book The Great Fletch, the story of Chuck's mate Ken Fletcher from his Hong Kong days.
https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/the-great-fletch-story-of-a-tenn...
And then those celebrities say "You should also donate Joe Doe, we must ALL be charitable".
Meanwhile Joe is in debt and cannot even afford to eat non-pesticide laden food while the celebrity retain 99% of his $$$$.
Like you said most people don't really have any extra income. They have a mortgage. Their retirement is heavily underfunded. Kids future school is not paid for.
Then there are people that have 100% of everything paid for and already have more than they will ever need... not to mention they can grow their money way quicker than the people who need it.. Yeah, it's pretty easy to be "generous" in that situation because it's literally extra money just sitting around doing nothing but making more money.
edit: wow, downvote me and op for this? Must be by the HN 400k engineers without a family who don't understand what the problem is
Opinion Coronavirus treatment Bill & Melinda Gates: Vaccine fairness will make us all safer | Free to read Sharing Covid-19 jabs equitably would result in fewer deaths and faster control everywhere'
If you want to say something, say it. Use articles to bolster your point, sure, but posting them without commentary isn't discussion.
Gates is exponentially wealthier than Feeney, and is extremely noisy in the media he funds as the second wealthiest human on the planet. I wonder what Feeney makes of Gates in 2020.
Stuff like that.
My point is that spamming links with no other commentary makes me wonder if you have a point here.
We're not going to try and guess what you're thinking, you have to tell us.
Given Gates central role in driving for global pandemic vaccines, I wonder what Feeney thinks of that huge global and very public project. The Ft Gates oped link above is from today, I just read it before opening HN and seeing the Forbes Feeney post.
I think you're being misinterpreted by me and others in this subthread, but it's your fault. :) You're literally just wondering aloud what Feeney thinks of Gates and whether that's changed in recent years, but we are reading an insinuation that it has changed for the negative. I don't think our misinterpretation of what you're saying is unreasonable -- someone above states that Feeney has publicly stated that he thinks highly of Gates and your response is to suggest that that's different now, and you link to a couple of articles, seeming to be supplying "evidence" of that, but the articles don't give any reason to think Feeney's thoughts about Gates have changed.
Your responses have convinced me that you really are just asking questions and have no preconceived notion of the answers, but the way you're asking the questions is causing people to bristle because they are presented like insinuations.
FYI.
edit: in my attempt to be helpful I see I'm being a bit repetetive. Was trying to get this out there quickly before the misunderstanding escalated into a shit-fight. :D
That said (i.e. time to be the irritating pedantic little asshole, but I think it's a genuine enough question about the purpose/execution of philanthropy)... does the anonymity really warrant extra props? We know that the guy gave away essentially all of his money; does the anonymity of the individual donations really make it more selfless? If anything the headlines "Feeney gives $100M to cause X" and going on TV to talk about it etc. would likely bring more attention and donations to X, which I assume is why Bill Gates and others tend to do things that way.
Edit: ok, I've just figured out from other posts that it basically wasn't known beyond a small group of people that he was giving away most of his wealth. I didn't realize that (although it's also my first time hearing of him). I agree then, he really did spend the bulk of his life being pretty much truly anonymous and that does deserve extra props.
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16513124
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6081804
- How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make? Is their healthcare fully covered? Do they have generous paid time off and access to higher education for themselves and their children? Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?
- Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill? Giving to Cornell seems counter-productive to me. Giving a bunch of Ivy League jocks more resources doesn’t seem like an equity promoting endeavor.
Not to diminish his other accomplishments. Still, philanthropists get to choose who to include and exclude. Ideally, it wouldn’t have been possible for this guy to amass 8 billion dollars of wealth in the first place - it would have been properly taxed and invested into our communities equitably.
Questions can be raised about some of his specific donations, but when someone gives away $8B of his wealth, spending nearly none on himself, does it globally, influences other billionaires to do the same, picking at any one of his specific donations seems counter productive.
Yes Cornell is an Ivy League school, but it is where he went to school, he probably has very strong ties to that school, perhaps met his wife there, or his business partner, if he chooses to give back to that school that is also good.
Plus there was a tremendous amount he gifted to "education" so without knowing all of the details, hard to imagine that he didn't provide some sort investment in to under represented communities. If he helped Vietnam with their healthcare he obviously wasn't just US centric but helped where he though his donation could have an outsized return.
By the way he gifted a large amount of money to the Obamacare campaign, so by proxy, he was providing healthcare to his workers, and more likely than not.
The US government is actually really impressively good in a lot of areas, and I personally get fatigued of the oft-repeated notion that government “can’t possibly work” or that they “can’t possibly spend tax dollars responsibly.”
I think you have little appreciation of how wealth is created.
Jeff Bezos became the wealthiest person in the world neither by stealing or exploiting , but rather by improving peoples lives. Amazon was able to organize systems, take advantage of technological developments and put capital to work to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers.
There probably are thousands of millionaries that helped build Amazon... assuming they held onto their stock from the time they joined to the present.
Citation needed, as they say.
There have been dozens of controversies involving Amazon: shopping for tax breaks it doesn’t need for HQ2, micro-managing warehouse employees’ bladder, union busting, firing a COVID whistleblower, cross-contaminating inventory, insufficient protections against counterfeit items, building a book ecosystem monopoly, probably numerous others I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.
No idea. Maybe some of it was.
> Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill?
His donation to Cornell was earmarked for opening a new campus (Cornell Tech) to employ more educators and educate more students. It wasn't for replacing a stadium and putting his name on it.
I have similar thoughts when I hear about the philanthropy of the mega wealthy. Instead of a single person like Chuck Feeney or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates amassing ungodly amounts of wealth and then later choosing how to distribute it, why couldn't the companies they built have made 1,000 or 10,000 or X other people relatively rich instead of one man mega rich?
Some suggest that taxation is the answer but maybe another answer is for companies to distribute their wealth more widely.
In essence what has happened as the upper-middle class has grown over the last 40 years. Poor, lower-middle and regular middle class percentage has shrunk to its lowest levels. We have fewer poor people than ever before. But because the upper middle class has grown so much, middle class people feel closer to poor people.
We have more well to do people than ever before. The middle class is smaller but the lower-middle and poor classes are even smaller. So people have generally moved up.
[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
More people have moved up than down. However as the nation has become more wealthy a greater share of the wealth has gone to upper middle than below them.
I think there’s so many dynamics at play here and it isn’t 100% cut and dry. For instance, there are more single parent (or single person) homes. Divorce isn’t socially unacceptable anymore and young people are waiting longer to get married. Do people lose the efficiencies of 2 earners in a household and possibly the class bump?
I’m not an expert on this but the data does show growth in the middle class by growing the upper-middle and a shrinking poverty class.
The West is hyper-wealthy.
That data could reveal which things are the most effective things to operate charitably in terms of increasing human happiness.
That's something I really like about Jack Dorsey's approach. I get to follow along and see what works.
Other than science, those are some very bloated and inefficient causes. $1 billion to Cornell? Aren't most of the prestigious universities already swimming in billions of dollars of endowments? He can do what he wants of course, but it would have been nicer if the money was targeted to long shot bets--that only a super rich person could fund--rather than normal things are already well funded through taxes.
Where else does research get done? Who pays for the buildings, where each one costs hundreds of millions of dollars? Scholarships? Who pays for new tenured positions?
Yes, administrative costs could be cut (I think substantially). But there's this long-going misunderstanding about the roles of endowments at American universities. These endowments have been budged into the next century of operation -- each year they are expected to generate some income to cover operating expenses. These expenses include salaries, financial aid, etc. The larger the endowment, the more income. They can't just drain the whole thing to pay for a building, because then they auction off the future for the present.
Crazy respect for this. Many times billionaire charitable foundations are just tax preferred ways of building your image or amassing influence. Bill Gates has done a lot of good, but his charitable work also served to redeem his image from that of the ruthless businessman crushing competitors that he had in the 1990’s. In addition, it has also given him a lot of soft power. I bet there are dozens of heads of state, especially in Africa and Asia, that he could personally get on the phone within 30 minutes if he really wanted to.
He needs to amass connections and power if he wants to accomplish his philanthropic goals.
As for fixing his image, sure, maybe that was part of it. But I doubt it. He could have just made a few really big donations and then went off to himself to enjoy his wealth.
I think we need 5x the number of representatives at the House level. Separate their duties, strip power from some of them, and keep them in district most of the year so they can actually be held accountable. Would also help to further democratize the House.
That is a a great idea. One idea along those lines, is maybe make the House entirely online with the representatives being in the district 100% of the time. It would do a couple of things. It would make lobbying harder since instead of getting a bunch of people together in Washington at a fancy dinner, the lobbyists would have to travel and meet 1:1. In addition, it might decrease partisan ship by decreasing the power of the party whips. When people are all in a single location, tremendous social pressure can be brought to bear to convince a representative to vote along the party lines, even if it would be going against the wishes of their constituents. With the representatives dispersed and remote, the social pressure would be diminished, and maybe representatives would vote more in line with their constituents’ wishes.
Welfare states run from taxpayer money and overseen by democratically elected officials, while they have their downsides that are often commented on, at least tend to assist groups that would be marginalized otherwise, and there are no religious strings attached.
Why should the single billionaire get to chose?
He has built one of the largest charities in the UK, and I believe it is top 10 in the world. He has given away his net worth multiple times. His general story is also totally remarkable for the UK, he came from literally nowhere.
Somewhat inevitably these days, he is regarded negatively in the media (most recently, he came up because the UK's finance minister used to work at his fund, so Hohn was the "vulture" capitalist with his beak in govt...funnily enough, their view didn't change when they found he is the main funding for Extinction Rebellion...2020 is amazing).
Two million is, like, the opposite of broke for the vast majority of Americans. But this is Forbes.
If he's broke, then at least 90% of retirees are broke.
Maybe that should tell you something about the state of retirement savings in this country.
Chuck is human like all of us. Most people have to spend some amount of time solving for generating enough capital to meet their (and their family’s) needs - whatever they may be. The fabulously wealthy / successful did too once upon a time but at some point crossed a threshold the vast vast majority of people - which I will refer to as “typical” - will never, and that is having enough to do and buy literally anything they could possibly desire indefinitely.
Thus the motivation to keep on going professionally (ie to earn more and more, something that drives typical people who are solving to meet needs), I suspect, changes to things money can’t buy which are nevertheless “typical”: The desire for impact.
Some want it in their life times, others want it for generations (legacy). Some want it in their church or on their job. Others seek and have the means to achieve it on a global scale.
I don't know about everyone else on HN, but having 2mil in the bank is not my definition of "Broke". I want to see what trusts have been setup. What life estates has he retained? I credit him for giving most all of it away, but "broke" doesn't mean you are worth 0.0001% of some huge number. Broke means you might not cover next month's rent and are parking your car at a friend's to hide it from the repo guy.
If anything, having enough money to take care of his needs I think is good. If he was hiding his car from the repo man, it's probably because he's not paying payments on it, and therefore all the people that rely on those payments for their jobs you're kind of "stealing" from, in that you aren't fulfilling the legal and financial obligation. And that doesn't seem very charitable either?
Stealing requires conscious choice. Not being able to pay a debt isn't a choice and therefore shouldn't be described as stealing.
Chuck Feeney was a major force in stopping the Troubles, and financed the reuilding of Ireland into a tech capital.
Especially knowing that for having such a career behind him, he must probably have spent a lot of time working and not being there for his family.
Still, mad respect for what he/they did.
Consider giving at least 10% of your income to cost-effective charities -- because cost-effective charities can do thousands of times more good than merely regular charities. So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well.
Join others: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
But how would you go about verifying any stated claims?
If an organization cures blindness for $20 through cataract surgeries in developing nations, and another spends $40,000 to train a seeing eye dog for a single individual, we are looking at ratios of 1:1000 in terms of effectiveness. The amount spent on 'overhead' is irrelevant!
It's very plausible to disagree with some of their choices. For instance, you might be interested in efficient charitable giving within your country, and bite the bullet of "this means I value starving africans a lot less." The important part is to prompt charities to document costs and outcomes in general (preferably to a scientific standard), so that people can make more informed choices about their donations no matter their values.
Umm, no
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
If you're very frugal, you'd end up giving away a very small amount of money, saving all the rest... Saving is super important, but giving money to effective charities is also a great way to use your money.
To take a typical example of someone that might be reading HN, any software engineer working in NY or the Bay Area can easily give away $10K a year while saving enough money to get a very cozy retirement.
Let's assume you're a junior SWE in the Bay Area, making $130K. Annual take home is ~$85,753 according to [1] You pay $3K in rent (nice 1 bedroom apt in South Bay, or just a decent one in SF), $2K for various expenses, that's $60K and you're left with $25K.
This is for a junior engineer, and granted they might want to save $25K vs $15K (arguable; I would consider those savings don't matter much in the long run, the goal being to quickly increase your salary by advancing your career), but an engineer in a large tech company is making closer to $250 - $300K total comp, and you'll see that the $10K donation isn't making much of a dent in your savings at that point.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
Those charities aren't going to help you when you're retired and subsiding on a meagre state pension. Or if there's a resurgent global pandemic and you lose your job and home.
Save first, always.
Absolutely for saving to be able to survive ~1 year as life is very unpredictable, but we're talking about altruism here... Let's for a second assume we all want to have the largest positive impact on other people, is that $1M really the best way to spend your money to both improve your and other people's life? Could you instead buy a house/work elsewhere, pay $400K, and invest $600K in saving a hole bunch of people from certain death / extreme poverty?
You didn't get here by yourself. You know some of the people who have generously contributed to you. There are more than you know. The ones who stick out are relatively wealthy. Do you think they are generous because they are wealthy? I submit to you that normal wealth does not make it easier to be generous. A person rich enough to buy a boat has just created more demands on their wealth. A big house usually involves more ongoing financial obligations than a small house.
For most people, generosity is not a function of net worth. It is a matter of character. You can make it part of your character beginning today. You are about to leave my house and face the world on your own. There will be challenges. Money will be tight. "Starving college students" isn't always an amusing tagline. I encourage you to make a point of doing something generous. Maybe commit to giving $1 to a random person on the street every week. Maybe donate plasma. Maybe volunteer to be a Salvation Army bell ringer. But make a point to do something frequent. At least once a month. Even when tuition is due, or rent. Even if just an hour of your time. It's up to you. But do it regularly and relentlessly. If you ever get to where it is easy, it is probably because your circumstances have improved but your generosity has not kept pace.
Making a commitment up front to donate 10% just creates a situation in which its not any sort of conscious decision to give $X to charity. You just operate as if your taxes were 10% higher or your income is 10% lower and go from there.
WRT income, I am thankfully able to afford my lifestyle, but I currently earn 5 digits a year and always have (I am still young). I don't regret a penny I gave.
I remember watching a documentary on him some time ago. There was some issue he was interested in. I think it involved a community in Ireland. He put his money into the issue, but it didn't have the desired outcome. He looked closely at what they were doing and decided the strategy wasn't a failure, so he committed some astounding amount more with specific strings attached. His strings forced others to put skin in the game with him. Then they worked together towards their desired outcome.
How do you make sure that your donation to the blind center will get that roof repaired? Grab a hammer.
I think this could be a convenient excuse that keeps some from donating more money (I'll wait until I can spend time creating my own charity / doing some hands-on vetting on who gets my money). There are already plenty of organizations (GiveWell, OpenPhil, etc.) that have very good research on the impact different charities have, often with RCTs on those interventions proving how much each $ buys (in terms of quality-adjusted life years or else).
Donate $100 to a literacy campaign, then volunteer for 30 minutes each week at a beneficiary elementary school to have a struggling reader read to you from one of the books your money purchased. You don't have to buy the book. You don't have to decide which books are purchased. You don't have to decide which student gets to read the books. But you can be involved enough to know that books were purchased and the students are benefiting. And your extra effort makes the $100 so much more fulfilling.
A $3 donation (via Against Malaria Foudation) buys a bednet that protects about 2 people from malaria for 3-4 years. As a donor you don't get the satisfaction of meeting the individuals you help (though you can look at some photos). But is the fulfillment you seek important enough to donate to a charity that is a thousand times less efficient at converting dollars to benefits-for-others?
A good suggestion here is to "purchase your fuzzies separately". That is, give to the most cost-effective charities you can find, regardless of how fulfilling it feels. And then find the most fulfilling activity you can, and maximize that until you had your fill.
Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.
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 distorts markets and causes its own problems.
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 they get new information or insights. It's hard for me to think that their model is worse than my lack of model.
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.
At the same time, I think it is a bad systemic solution to rely on charitable giving to solve large-scale problems.
Imagine an island with 100 residents, each with $100. Their moral compass varies randomly from Mr. Rogers all the way to a few outright sociopaths. Each day, everyone decides how much to donate. The kinder people donate more because they're kinder. The selfish assholes obviously don't.
What does tomorrow look like? Well, now all the good people are a little poorer and have a little less power. The sociopaths are richer and stronger. They use their edge to secure a little more power, maybe skim a little more off the top.
Watch that island for a few years and what do you start to see? A few avaricious monsters with all the wealth and a horde of poor decent folks doing their best to distribute fewer and fewer scraps equitably amongst themselves.
This is the real magic of taxes. Because taxes are morally neutral. They don't preferentially take more money away from the most decent folks. Ultimately there are some bad selfish people out there and if you don't have some way of forcibly reducing their power, they will take it all. Taxation backed by the force of government is one of the least violent ways of doing that.
It's important to recognize that some causes are not as cost-effective as others, but are still worthy. I'll use my own donations as an example:
I don't think giving to both of these causes makes me inconsistent. After all, no number of malaria nets in Africa can take a person off the street in San Francisco. And I want both outcomes. I believe nobody should die of malaria, and nobody should be homeless. So I give to both.I think it's a productive discussion when those involved learn something new. My hope is always to share the counterintuitive finding that in today's world we are able to help people a tremendous amount with (relative-to-our-lives) very little financial involvement.
I hope that when people learn about this remarkable fact, they reflect on their goals and consider giving to more-cost-effective charities, and to give more overall.
I'm thrilled to hear you too give to one of GiveWell's top recommended charities!
Cheers!
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2013/11/should-you-only...
> Bad Reason #6: I care about multiple issues! I want to end disease so I give to an anti-disease charity, I want to end crime so I give to an anti-crime charity, and I want to end poverty so I give to an anti-poverty charity.
> Yes, we have many different values. But at any given time, one of these will be the most pressing; one of them will be easiest to make headway on. And that's the one we should concentrate on. By focusing all our resources on one cause, we have the greatest chance of accomplishing our cause.
It's not bad logic, but I don't personally buy into it. It may be easy when dividing up a pile of cash, but it's harder when you take it down to a personal level. Imagine if someone on the street says "Can you spare a dollar, I am hungry?", could you look them in the eye and say "No, I gave your dollar to end malaria in Africa. It's more effective". I certainly can't do that! And having met so many of the clients at Larkin Street and knowing how deserving they are of a better life, I can't do it to them either.
Furthermore it's a pretty slippery slope to say that every dollar I spend reveals my marginal preferences when compared to every other dollar I spend. I don't think every person who buys a new laptop for $2500 is saying they'd rather have a faster web browser than save a life from malaria. We don't expect everyone to operate that way. Spending money is a hybrid between emotion and rationality, and I think that's ok.
So there's this thing called "revealed preferences". I have a $2000 laptop, and I was very aware when I bought it that I was saying that this laptop was more important than an african life. I don't have a moral defense for this. I think it's not so much that people don't prefer a laptop to an african child surviving - they do prefer the laptop - but they don't want to perceive themselves to be the sort of people who prefer a laptop to an african child surviving. And so they don't think about it, and get angry at you when you make them think about it. But they still act in that way.
Personally, I sort of feel I'd be a lot more ready to donate a fraction of my income to worthy causes if everyone else was willing to help as well. Maybe we need to run charities like very long term kickstarters - say "we need X trillion dollars over a span of ten years to have an even shot at wiping out Malaria forever, commit yourself to a monthly payment, payment starts once we cross the threshold." I think something like that would be better at motivating me, at least - humans are inherently more sensitive to relative local standing than absolute global effects.
2) A man feels a certain responsibility to take care of his wife even when he's gone.
3) $2M only spins off $80k in income, hardly a rich lifestyle and far less than most Americans on this site could live with.
* And check your math, 2% of 8B is $160M not the $2M stated in the article.
Plus, your math is way off. 0.025%.