I tried looking for similar grants to religious services organizations from other religions, but my search came up empty. Very happy to stand corrected on this.
They've also given over $150 million to the Islamic Development Bank to support their vaccine efforts and smaller amounts to dozens of other Muslim-based groups for different initiatives. Likewise for Jewish organizations.
B&MG Foundation are incredibly results driven, all of their grants come with direction for measuring impact and reporting on it. They aren't giving to religious organizations to further religion, but because those organizations are best suited to reach the most people or best suited to responsibly steward enormous amounts of money and resources.
*He should improve contraception instead*
Given 1000 donors donating a million vs 1 donor with a billion (as somebody else points out below) you could imagine such biases being averaged out ...
For example political campaign donations are obviously zero-sum, as is lobbying for mutually exclusive well-intentioned causes.
For example suppose that we want to do a cost-benefit analysis to see if convincing people to use contraception is a more effective charitable intervention than whatever Gates is doing.
If the Catholic Church really hates contraception, they would oppose that. They might tell Catholic charities to refuse to work with Gates. They might spend a little money and a lot of cheap labor on convincing people to not use contraception. Generally they will spend resources on doing the opposite thing and Gates would have to spend more resources just to cancel out the Catholic influence.
Since we know beforehand that this is very likely to happen, we should include that in the cost part of our cost-benefit analysis. It's possible Gates did just that and concluded that working with Catholics instead of against them is better.
Buffett took tremendous flack and there was very public outcry before he started donating. His rationale was that I'll just stack it up, and his late ex-wife Susie would distribute it after he died. However, when Susie passed away unexpectedly, Warren decided to make the move.
Currently, our geo-economic systems are structured such that the world's underclasses rely on the emotions of the wealthiest 0.0001% of homo sapiens in America to continually fund triage operations to ameliorate problems that societies have developed institutionalized solutions to.
I think this argument misses, or even reinforces a core criticism about the concentration of wealth. The criticism is that so much and such disproportionate power should not be concentrated in the hands of one individual.
It's fundamentally undemocratic and a danger to society. In a democracy a broad-based group of citizens should be deciding where charitable resources are allocated. It's in aristocracies were a few wealthy control all the assets and make the decisions. Democracies were formed as a rejection of aristocracy, the U.S. in particular.
It's self-reinforcing: If the local 'aristocrat' funds a park, people are grateful because there were no other funds and now we have a park. But there are no other funds because we have a system that creates aristocrats and by concentrating wealth also creates the need for their charity, and instead of the citizens deciding democratically about their parks, the aristocrat decides.
Gates might be an enlightened despot but he's still a despot (in an exaggerated, metaphorical sense). We know what happens to nations and political systems that fall in love with enlightened despots.
> Somebody who donates a million (while a great contribution), will never have the impact that a billionaire can.
1,000 people who donate a million will have exactly the same impact as one who donates a billion and will be far more democratic. Far better: Each person makes an equal sacrifice (via a progressive taxation system) and we vote on how to spend the money.
Except if they don't. Or they do to a variety of causes, each with duplicate administrative overhead.
I'm not a fan of wealth concentration, but it does afford patronage opportunities that simply aren't taken on average in the alternative "more people with less money" world.
Except when the billionaire doesn't. Is there evidence that billionaires donate a greater proportion of their wealth or more effectively than millionaires? Is a market of 1 more efficient than a market of 1,000?
I'd bet that the law of large numbers applies here, and the 1,000 people are overall more consistent than 1 person, and less prone to extreme swings.
It sounds like the trickle-down economics version of philanthropy.
In an alternative universe we tax people more and ensure malaria eradication _whether or not Bill Gates personally decides to do so_.
There are obviously coordination problems (not saying that "government can solve everything!", there are difficulties there too). But having huge organizations ask for donations from people is a really ineffective way of solving most societal problems.
Government theoretically could solve everything but it requires good government to do so. The first step is what I stated above, respect for private property rights. If people cannot be assured their product of their work is theirs to use you cannot improve the society they live in. They must be able to trust their government.
Just because the Soviet Union fell over doesn't mean that capitalism has somehow been proven to be "the best solution".
>Just because the Soviet Union fell over doesn't mean that capitalism has somehow been proven to be "the best solution".
Name one country implemented socialism (and by that I mean the government owns the means of production) and didn't end up worse off than when it started. Even the Northern European welfare states are capitalist.
edit: My above interpretation isn't quite right. It should be "its state as of the latest known point in time the predicate was true."
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...
He should improve contraception instead. Would be better for the Africans AND Europeans.
Yeah. Perhaps he should imitate this charitable foundation run by a billionaire tech guy that's doing exactly that: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Developmen...
Be happy he's trying to do something at all. That's more than what most wealthy families do.
Malaria was effectively eradicated in all but the poorest areas in the 1950s and 60s through vector management: indoor residual spraying, building better houses, eradicating still water near population centers.
The same can be done in sub-Saharan Africa (the main place it remains). In fact, in the richer areas of these countries, Malaria has a very low prevalence.
It's a disease of poverty. Drugs help, but it's mostly about the vector.
Yes this is a tangent. But I think its an important point to make. On top of that, even if it were true that most of the 0.1% are very wasteful spenders, there are some who's donations are irreplaceable with government charity. Irradiating the worlds malaria is an example of this. Getting rid of the wealth in the 0.1% would be a huge loss for important donations.
Seems to have been a successful petit bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, family. In traditional understanding of class relationships in capitalist society, the middle class isn't mostly middle income but well above; the majority of society is the working class dependent on wage-labor. The upper (capitalist or haut borgeoisie) class is a very thin layer.
The modern American media generally uses a different model which where “class” would more accurately be called “income group”, rather than focussing on relation to the economic system; this gets confusing in conversation when people could be using either model. In that model, Gates family was clearly upper class.
https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/taha-meli-arvas/2017/05/0...
It's not a mobility distinction,it's the classical distinction of classes in the capitalist economy (the bourgeoisie is a class in the preceding feudal economy, but there the whole bourgeoisie is the middle class, and the upper class is the nobility, not the haut bourgeoisie.)
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=petit+bourgeoisie&oq=petit...
I think "lower middle-class" is a reasonable apropos of this. That said, I don't think the Gateses would fit this definition either ...
The petit bourgeoisie is the middle class of the three. (The lower and upper middle class are both part of it.)
Bill Gates (the Microsoft one) parents appear to have derived wealth largely from his father's successful law practice, dependent on his own labor essentially alongside other rented labor, which would them petit borgeoisie, middle class. They were certainly at the quite high end of prosperity for that class, so upper middle class. (It's not impossible that they at some point crossed into the haut bourgeoisie, but the descriptions I've seen suggest mostly very successful petit borgeoisie.)
Bill Gates himself rapidly moved into the haut bourgeoisie with Microsoft's success.
Historically, the medieval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie", they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production
I was incorrectly equating "upper class" with these "landlords", but I guess as of the French revolution, with the Aristocracy overthrown the semantics shifted and "haute bourgeois" became the term for the ruling class.
Contemporarily, the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" (noun) identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum
I would contend that the modern phenomenon of "the 1%" more closely resembles the aristocracy of old than Haute Bourgeois but I would be at odds with accepted terminology.
So yeah Bill Gates is from a Bourgeois background (particular grade is unclear) but arguably now occupies a distant Aristocratic stratum beyond Haute Bourgeois.
Not really; I mean, both sides of the log ideological struggle over capitalism and left alternatives has centered around both sides understanding and basing action around pretty much precisely the divisions in class interest reflected by those categories; they're quite actionable.
> I mean, a lady owns a beauty shop, spends 10 hours a day ordering supplies, doing payroll, managing advertising, hiring and fireing, somehow she's not working class because other people are involved and paid by her?
Right. As a business owner, she has distinct differences of interest from those living by wage labor (including an interest in minimizing the cost of wage labor); as someone who most apply their own labor as well as capital, she has economic interests distinct from those of pure capitalists. Hence, she's in the middle class of capitalism.
> A guy like Bill Gate's Dad is categorized middle class because he works alone, sort of, despite essentially bossing around his clients with autocratic decisions made in the quiet of his office?
Sure (though the founder of successful law firm probably is a working employer, not working alone.) Again, a similar alignment of interest is at play. There is an important distinction orthogonal to class, aside from just the degree of success, though: the lawyer is also part of the intelligentsia as well as the petit borgeoisie, while the beauty store owner is not. The intelligentsia cuts across classes, and have distinct interests.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/10/where-...
...You don't see the problem in relying on the charatibility of a tiny few to work towards the well-being of billions?
IMO, the balance point is setting things up so the default is wealth is not maintained across several generations (3+), even though it can be passed down 1 or 2 generations and can be maintained with care past that point.
PS: I say this with many wealthy friends and family. It's surprisingly destructive and I don't want to setup multi generational wealth for my great grand children.
If we don't tax people when they pass away, the money goes straight to their kids, and then a permanent upper class forms and we know what happened to France...
The US has been about meritocracy, and not an aristocracy. But people want to change that, to the detriment of the country, IMO.
But back to inheritance:
> not maintained across several generations (3+)
You're inventing problems. Inheritance decreases exponentially. Multi 3+ generational wealth is already divided by 64 times (assuming 2 children + spouses). It is not possible without the children putting in significant work themselves. You're inventing problems.
At least we have common ground. Being able to pass on our successes to our children is a large and important motivator in life - one that would be incredibly unwise to remove.
"That’s according to a recent study by two Italian economists, Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti, who compared Florentine taxpayers way back in 1427 to those in 2011. Comparing the family wealth to those with the same surname today, they suggest the richest families in Florence 600 years ago remain the same now."
England has also had wealth maintained for 28 generations and other old money examples are not hard to find.
I recall that study. They were still a multiple orders of magnitudes less wealthy, and that ignores any wealth/money/work children added themselves since that time. If anything, this study proves my point.
>Europe has family's that have maintained wealth over the past 500+ years.
>England has also had wealth maintained for 28 generations and other old money examples are not hard to find.
That's an excellent example of survivorship bias. Again also not acknowledging any work the kids have put in to maintain that wealth.
For every example of a rich family whose money has been kept for 3+ generations, I could find you 100 examples that dont (not actually, I should probably be getting back to work).
This is a non-issue.
88% of the very wealthy ($30+ million) in the USA made their wealth themselves.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/10/where-...
...the best source I could find.
The US has been stagnating with lower GDP growth rate over time which will likely change these numbers. Because the low % of inhered wealth is mostly due to large numbers of new wealthy not children of the wealthy losing their money. http://www.lagunabeachbikini.com/images/2014/economy/RGDPgro...
The bar to become a charity could be a lot higher but it's not exactly a rubber stamp.
Donations are really a 3 way tax break, I don't pay taxes on the gift, you don't pay taxes on the gift, and I don't pay income taxes on the money I use as a gift. (The arguable forth deduction is I don't need to realize capital gains before giving a gift.)
PS: The only way to actually lower taxes is to lower spending. Anything else is just shifting the burden to someone else.
That doesn't make sense given the sums we're talking about. If I give someone $100 million (non-charitable), I don't have to pay an extra tax on the giving, I only pay taxes on the income. You're referring to a very specific gift tax scenario.
The majority of the Gates Foundation giving is not within the US. The people on the end receiving should not pay taxes on that as it pertains to the US. Further, the Gates Foundation giving within the US will frequently end up taxed after the gift via income taxes on salaries (whether we're talking about scientists, secretaries or in the field workers receiving foundation dollars to operate as part of a charitable organization).
The scope to the triple tax premise is, in reality, dramatically more narrow.
Here is the actual form: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f709.pdf
19 If line 18 is less than line 17, enter balance due
If people with blue eyes suddenly did not have to pay taxes then that would be a massive subsidy. If you get a pay check and the taxes are already taken it it's just as much 'your money' as if you got the full paycheck then had to pay taxes after the fact. The point is more money goes out of your paycheck because the US government subsidizes other and often very rich people.
I wouldn't be surprised if private donations will eventually be responsible for the eradication of Malaria (1000 deaths daily, much more suffering and cost to society).
If you're in tech you're likely to be in a great position to create value beyond your company. For example, donating equity from your startup or a fraction of your income to the charities that can prove they are having the most cost effective impact on the world: https://founderspledge.com/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge/