[protomok]

Bill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.'

[barrkel]

Charity is problematic too, though. It's subject to the whims of the wealthy, and worse it's damaging to the dignity of recipients - it denies them agency in their own well-being. I say this having been the beneficiary of charity myself: needing to be grateful to someone else is a kind of psychological servitude.

We'd be better off with an economic system that values agency and lives worth living a little more than efficiency and profit, that ends up bio-hacking people to buy more food and mind-hacking people to control their attention.

I don't know how to help make that happen, but I'm pretty sure basic income isn't the right answer either.

[Pyxl101]

The charities that Gates tends to invest in don't just distribute goods to needy people. His charities try to tackle core societal problems like fighting malaria in Africa:

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal...

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Dis...

> Working closely with other global programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Discovery & Translational Sciences program aims to create and improve preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for infectious diseases as well as other conditions that affect mothers, infants, and children. We do this by identifying and filling gaps in scientific knowledge, creating or implementing new technology platforms that can accelerate research in support of our goals, and investing in potentially transformative ideas.

> All of our investments advance the goal of creating solutions that can be deployed, accepted, and sustained in the developing world. To speed the translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming late-stage clinical trials.

There's nothing about fighting malaria that denies people agency in their well-being as far as I'm concerned.

[barrkel]

The problems are not just agency, but also whimsy.

Charity is basically a combination of guilt assuaging, ego food and social proofing. I think we'd be better off with democratically controlled funding, or economically allocated funding, from a self-sufficient demos, for things like the battle against malaria.

Charities like Gates's typically turn into long-lived foundations which acquire politics and agency of their own, not entirely benign. They need to be connected to their benefactors by some structure of control, like democracy or economics. A big pile of cash and investments isn't that; it's independence from control.

Yes, democracy also has problems, it would be great to figure out something better. But democracy is still better than oligopoly, even if they're benign today.

[edanm]

I think you're wrong. Democracy is also subject to whims, but with the government, you basically have one player. With charity, at least you have "competition".

E.g. look at groups helping promote minority rights (civil rights movement, LGBTQ movement, etc). These were political no-goes, but small groups cared a lot about these issues, so they helped push them through, via charity and other means. If you were only OK with charity being done democratically, i.e. via majority rule, then these movements couldn't exist.

[barrkel]

The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American public to believe otherwise.

Yes, bureaucracy isn't efficient. But ultimately its decisions reflects the demos. If the people don't believe in positive government, it will be poor, like the US. But it isn't always that way (but it is usually still inefficient).

Lobby groups for minority interests are orthogonal to charity, or should be, otherwise money will buy more political influence than the demos warrants. That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not money spent.

[edanm]

"The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American public to believe otherwise."

1. I'm not sure it's a great move to decide that people who disagree with you are wrong, or "diseased". (Obviously you're using the word disease metaphorically. Still, I think it's a bad attitude).

2. I'm not American.

As for the rest of your comment, I didn't say anything about the efficiency of bureaucracy. I'm not sure anything you said refutes anything I said.

"That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not money spent."

I'm not sure that's a great measure. Minorities are by definition smaller groups of people than the majority. If the minority wants something the majority disagrees with (e.g. civil rights movement), then if we're weighting simply by the size of groups, then the civil rights movement probably wouldn't work. We should be also weighting by how much each group "cares", and money is, to some extent, a measure of that. Not that it's a perfect system, but is there a better one?

Btw, this is why democracy isn't just about majority rule - it's considered fundamental to democracy to also have minority protection and similar. Otherwise minorities would always lose.

[cirgue]

> Charity is problematic too, though. It's subject to the whims of the wealthy, and worse it's damaging to the dignity of recipients - it denies them agency in their own well-being.

What would you have the ultra-wealthy do? Give their wealth to the government? Distribute their wealth evenly to everyone? What is a non-problematic way to use concentrated wealth to help people, in your view?

[barrkel]

Structure the economy so that ultra-wealthy don't exist.

I didn't say I knew how to do that. That's the hard problem.

[cirgue]

You misunderstood my question: What should the ultra-wealthy, who exist in the here and now and will not be evaporating overnight, do if they feel like helping other people?

[barrkel]

And I keep saying I don't know how. If I knew how to fix these problems, I'd consider becoming a politician or philosopher or finding some other way to influence the debate.

This would be a start: how about ultra-wealthy advocate and lobby for a wealth tax, and stop feeding their gains through tax avoidance schemes?

All I know is that today, there's too much levering power in capitalist structures, that feeds too much surplus to owners of capital. I know all the arguments against alternatives; I want to preserve economic incentives, innovation and investment. But by the same token innovation is definitely reducing the utility of labour, and that's a problem that needs solving too. If every want and need in life could be produced automatically with no labour (the end result of innovation, where innovation has itself been automated), who would want to live? What meaning would there be in life?

At the end of the day the human animal is a tribal, social creature who wants to be useful to his or her neighbours, to make his or her way in the world with his or her head held high, knowing they make a positive contribution. That drive is ultimately not compatible with capitalist economics, which seeks efficiency and encourages consumption (the two, ironically, being in opposition to one another, ensuring that we'll never feel like we have enough, even if we didn't live on a hedonic treadmill).

[smokeyj]

> We'd be better off with an economic system that values agency and lives worth living a little more than efficiency and profit

So, charity. Any economic system rooted in the altruistic nature of man is doomed to fail. Only rational self interest in sustainable.

It comes back to teaching a man to fish. I don't think UBI solves the problem of how do you learn a marketable skill.

Maybe a program where investors can pay to train workers in exchange for a percentage of their income. This would create an incentive to train a highly skilled/paid work force. But it also has a modern slavery feel so idk.

[thesagan]

Charities that may not have been as necessary under a less concentrated wealth scenario. And he still gets to call the shots with a charity.

[jandrese]

For what it is worth, Bill spends a lot in the third world, where a more equitable US would have minimal impact on the standard of living.

[clubmg]

Meanwhile America looks more and more like a third world country thanks to the billionairs like Besoz and Gates that hog much of the wealth and resources of our country. By hey Amazon Prime and Microsoft 10 are worth it right?

[comboy]

It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos.

I'm really surprised by all the hate in this thread towards wealthy individuals who worked hard to attain it. Especially in this environment, where people try to figure out ways to be one of them. It's HN FFs.

Also, maybe UBI just seems reasonable to Jeff, like it does to many people. He really doesn't need it for anything which he couldn't have many other simpler ways.

[joering2]

> It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos.

Not it wouldn't. Operating a Windows OS and being able to buy stuff online with one click does not magically make your country a first-world country. Just like country that runs on Linux and operate offline with brick&mortal stores is not automatically a third world nation.

[joering2]

America (North/USA) IS a third world country; it just happened to be very rich third world country; although most of that wealth is borrowed from future (assumptions of earnings aka robbing our children).