This is a big problem, we all should ease their burden and take their
billions off their hands since it’s such a curse. Nobody will call them
billionaires any more.
Linguistic objectification is often a preliminary step toward making
others seem less human or less deserving of respect.
Then let me be clear, the fact that billionaires are exactly as human
as we are, have the same capacity for moral reasoning, judgement, and
action, but choose to use their vast sums of wealth to accrue further
wealth or for personal consumption is exactly how we know they’re immoral.
Billionaires are not less worthy of respect just because
they have billions of dollars. They are less worthy of respect because
they could alleviate the suffering of millions of people and choose
not to.
More than passively choosing not to, as a class they pay millions to the political class to actively capture regulatory agencies, threaten (usually emptily) to damage economies by taking business elsewhere should we increase their taxes-- an attempt at hostage-taking class warfare-- and fund think tanks who think up and gauge the effectiveness of terms like "deserving poor" and "welfare queens" in order to dehumanize people who earn less so they can continue hoarding wealth unabated.
Won't someone please think of the billionaires.
(Extremely Charles Murray voice) Class stratification is the result of assortative mating, which produces the cognitive elite. Billionaires are thus the most g-loaded population and, because g is heritable with little environmental influence, billionaires qualify as a protected class.
Little John tied a towel around his neck. He told me it was a cape, and he was going to jump off the roof.
I saw him fall to the ground --- suggesting he not jump would have been *dehumanization*.
Counterpoint: [Craig Newmark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark) is worth $1.6 billion due to his partial ownership of Craigslist, hasn't turned the site into a pile of shit/surveillance apparatus (except for some optional use of Google Maps). For a while, sex workers could conduct their business much more safely using the site. When appearing publicly, he hasn't tried pushing some sort of American dream bullshit or self-important success stories, he admits the success of Craigslist was largely based on luck. His politics are slightly to the left of most democrats, pushing for transparency, investigative journalism, and electoral/campaign finance reform.
He seems alright as the ultra-wealthy go, but he's not a counterpoint. If he's worth $1.6B, he could do an enormous amount of good by putting 15/16s of that in an endowment, while keeping enough behind that his great grandchildren would never want for anything. He's still hoarding wealth like Smaug. And it's hard to come up with a system of ethics whereby that's justified.
Having a net worth of $1.6B is not the same as having it all as a liquid asset. Most of that is from his partial ownership of Craigslist.
I'm not trying to justify capitalism here, just pointing out that becoming a billionaire under capitalism doesn't make you inherently greedy (though in 99.8% of circumstances, it does). He's tried to minimize the extent that he's monetized the site, only in overly-saturated markets like San Francisco Jobs and New York Housing, does Craigslist charge money to post a listing. And despite all that, he still became a billionaire, despite a maxim of "knowing when enough is enough".
In a better world with public housing and a balanced jobs market, craigslist would not have been able to make money the way they did, but in a better world, they wouldn't need to.
> Having a net worth of $1.6B is not the same as having it all as a liquid asset.
This is a key point most people here are missing. Billionaires don't have giant buildings filled with cash that they swim around in like Scrooge McDuck. Most of their assets are tied up in investments, typically the corporation that allowed them to gain that much wealth. And there's reasons to hold onto that wealth that don't involve them simply being amoral sociopaths.
Bill Gates could've cashed out 25 years ago with his single digit billions, but that would've fucked Microsoft (and all the arguable 'good' it's done by spurring on the PC revolution) and put a halt to the additional tens of billions those assets grew into that he plans on giving away.
You can rail against the very idea of billionaires as despicable as communists wont to do, but given the way the system currently works its a bit silly to say that anyone who doesn't instantaneously give away the majority of their wealth right after they've earned it (especially people like Gates who *do* plan to) are the spawns of satan.
Uh, there is zero need to cash out in order to fund an endowment. You just hand over your shares to the nonprofit. The endowment then sells a percentage point here, a percentage point there, both to fund current philanthropic endeavors, and to diversify its asset base, so that it can continue to earn returns and further its mission into the future.
So, to respond to your example:
> Bill Gates could've cashed out 25 years ago with his single digit billions, but that would've fucked Microsoft (and all the arguable 'good' it's done by spurring on the PC revolution) and put a halt to the additional tens of billions those assets grew into that he plans on giving away.
There's no need to immediately liquidate and crash the price, and there's nothing to stop the money from earning more money over time. It's a complete non-issue.
Ok - then I don't understand how that's fundamentally different from keeping the shares yourself and periodically contributing large amounts to philanthropic efforts you care about, which Craig Newmark (who this thread was initially about) [already does](https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/about-us/). I guess if you do pre-emptively fork over the bulk of your shares to a nonprofit then you are making a commitment that would be difficult to renege on later, but that just seems like \*cough\* virtue signalling.
Besides the hardest part of the whole process is choosing where that money is going to go, which remains a difficult problem regardless of whether or not it's in an endowment. [Charity isn't easy](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/11/18129580/gates-buffet-charity-billionaire-philanthropy) and people who've accumulated vast amounts of wealth by exploiting opportunities and inefficiencies in market economies would understandably be wary of giving away that wealth to causes whose impact they do not fully understand. These are people who've spent their careers obsessing about getting the most bang for their buck.
To be clear, I don't want to sound like I'm defending the billionaire class here. A vast majority of them are probably greedy scumbags who wouldn't think twice about charitable donations if not for optics - there's a reason CEO-types have similar rates of sociopathy as literal criminals. I just want to underline that giving away billions is not as cut and dry as some leftists seem to think.
>I just want to underline that giving away billions is not as cut and dry as some leftists seem to think.
To be fair, we're offering them government assistance.
Oh for sure. I definitely agree that we shouldn't leave it up to the billionaires to decide whether or not they want to give away their wealth. There is already a massive bureaucracy in place whose sole purpose is to extract wealth from the populace and redistribute it according to society's needs. Tax the shit outta them. The Gates and Buffets who want to play around with 'venture philanthropy' will have more than enough to do so anyway.
>There is already a massive bureaucracy in place whose sole purpose is to extract wealth from the populace and redistribute it according to society's needs.
I'm more of a MMT kind of guy.
It wasn't the worlds most serious comment, but what irked me is that you're both more or less baselessly speculating over the way a purely fictional person has structured their finances
You might be right, but barging into a discussion with non-experts talking about [subject] and saying 'christ this is all \/r/bad[subject]' is pretty low hanging fruit.
I'm also aware that I am posting on a subreddit dedicated to making fun of people for pontificating on topics they don't understand so the irony here is not lost on me. But if talking about things requires that you first be a sufficient enough authority on them then you may as well never say say anything about most things. That's pretty boring.
And as for "barging into a discussion", I'm a regular and moderator of this subreddit, so how does interjecting to point out that you guys know shite-all about finance (a subject in which I am not an expert!) count as "barging in"?
And what the fuck is "low hanging fruit" supposed to imply?
Well you implied that I (and presumably other people in this thread) are dumb and your 'clarification' was to say that I didn't think about what I posted (further implying I'm dumb).
For what its worth, I didn't imply you were boring (just that I'd find not talking about things I don't understand fully boring) but if I did it'd be a lot tamer than whatever you're doing here.
I think what's going on with some of them is not that they are consciously ignoring suffering but rather that they've built up a theory of morality from the perspective of which them having lots of money and funneling some of it to charities they like is actually the most moral thing they could be doing. This is obviously an extremely convenient belief for them.
I don't understand how Tyler Cowen both believes in the market, and social norms that hide prices (i.e. wages). I guess he's at GMU so whatevers good for corporations is good for the economy.
I don't think the moral amount to own depends on labor. Even if some fantasy atlas-shrugged person managed to earn billions purely via their own bootstraps, it still doesn't make it moral to hoard wealth while others are starving.
My counter-proposal is that the maximum moral hoarding for rich fucks (MMHRF) should be set at the point where getting more money does not meaningfully improve ones wellbeing or happiness. Jeff Bezos can lose 99% of his wealth and it would have pretty much no affect on his life, so most of his wealth should be confiscated because the money is a matter of life and death to others.
I don't think it's correct to say that extreme wealth has no additional benefit to the person possessing it than merely great wealth. The wealth of these people gives them a tremendous amount of influence in the world that they would not have if they had only 100 million or so. Losing that influence could potentially have a significant effect on Bezos' life. Obviously there's an argument, which I agree with, that they shouldn't have that kind of influence anyway, but that's a different thing.
“this thing that is widely accepted is Akchually Terrible because it
hurts some rich guy’s feelings”
“this thing that is widely condemned is Akchually Very Good because
it increases economic growth in the long term which should be the
singular goal of all of humanity”
This is a big problem, we all should ease their burden and take their billions off their hands since it’s such a curse. Nobody will call them billionaires any more.
Then let me be clear, the fact that billionaires are exactly as human as we are, have the same capacity for moral reasoning, judgement, and action, but choose to use their vast sums of wealth to accrue further wealth or for personal consumption is exactly how we know they’re immoral.
Billionaires are not less worthy of respect just because they have billions of dollars. They are less worthy of respect because they could alleviate the suffering of millions of people and choose not to.
Christ what tedious pearl-clutching. All in the name of middle class manners, too.
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Tyler’s schtick basically boils down to
“this thing that is widely accepted is Akchually Terrible because it hurts some rich guy’s feelings”
“this thing that is widely condemned is Akchually Very Good because it increases economic growth in the long term which should be the singular goal of all of humanity”
[removed]