[BrainInAJar]

> 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)

[javajosh]

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.

[lordnacho]

This is beside the point, but how can you see when someone is down-voted? I don't see any scores for other people's comments.

[rurp]

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.

[dfxm12]

Comment text gets lighter and lighter the more downvotes it gets.

[s17n]

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.

[tmpz22]

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.

[hhs]

Some people frame this as ‘earning to give’:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give

[TeMPOraL]

"Earning to give" doesn't mean you have to earn in dishonest fashion.

[Miraste]

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.

[CrazyStat]

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.

[Miraste]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

'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.

[yters]

if morality is just public approval, theirs is the optimal strategy

but, if that's all morality is, pretty pointless

[wombatmobile]

> 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.

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.

[dfxm12]

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".

[viscanti]

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).

[bashallah]

You have to rationalize; if their endowment is that large, they aren’t prioritizing enabling more students to attend with reduced or no tuition.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

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.

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...)

[brightball]

There’s millions of people in this country that donate anonymously.

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.

[throwaway2048]

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.

[zozbot234]

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.

[throwaway2048]

The government is however a democracy, Bill Gates isn't.

[zozbot234]

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?

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

Strictly speaking, the US is both a republic and a democracy, and this stupid meme needs to die.

[throwaway2048]

I have more faith in democracy than I do in the dictates of random, unaccountable billionaires yes.

[throwaway0a5e]

Bill Gates can't send thugs with guns to shoot my dog because I refuse to humor some predatory attempt at revenue extraction by Microsoft.

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.

[brightball]

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.

[grugagag]

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.

[zozbot234]

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.

[dylan604]

>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

[potta_coffee]

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.

[Cederfjard]

>And with the added bonus that the negative effects of they got to be billionaires don't cause more problems

Sorry, I’m not able to parse this sentence. Could you please rephrase?

[frenchy]

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.

[csharptwdec19]

Comcast is my favorite example of this.

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.)

[winston_smith]

> 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.

[lucideer]

I think there's just a "how" missing between "effects of" and "they got"

[heimatau]

I'm not sure why people are down voting. Adam Smith would agree with you BrainInAJar.

Maybe HackerNews needs to read some Adam Smith.

[winston_smith]

> 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.

(*edit: assuming 1 Feeney = $1.5B)

[emiliobumachar]

A few counterpoints:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...

[lucideer]

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 spend as the operating metric, rather than the actual resources at their disposal. Total net worth of US billionaires rivals the federal budget, and exceeds the mandatory spend. The wealth of just one of those billionaires is almost 1/16th of the federal budget and fast increasing.

---

At this point the list of bullet points verges off into the land of vague discussion and is no longer a set of "counterpoints" and just a rambling conversation.

This author sure can write a lot, but none of the points seem to land.

[winston_smith]

> 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?

[lucideer]

> 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)

[zpeti]

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?

[aidenn0]

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"

[winston_smith]

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.

[Baeocystin]

Not the person you asked, but I think Singapore does a good job of things. Their civil servant class is exceptionally skilled.

[aidenn0]

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].

1: https://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore

[throwaway0a5e]

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.