For a concrete example, a tremendous amount of money has recently flowed into sex education advocacy, some of which doesn’t have donor names attached to it.
Organizations that aim to provide resources around things like consent and healthy sexual behavior find that courting this new money involves adopting an abstinence-only approach as a mandate. As a result, it’s hard to know if the organization you’re donating to is actually doing the advocacy work they used to advertise, and they’re not always inclined to be transparent around who calls the shots from a donor perspective.
We like to think that political money lives only in super PACs and lobbying efforts, but this isn’t the case, and in some ways this makes the non-profit situation even more insidious. To be clear, I’m not denigrating all non-profit work, there are just some major transparency issues that need to be addressed.
But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?
"Money talks, wealth whispers."
George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.
These problems sound like they have nothing to do with wealthy people standing up for one cause or another. The issue is that the wealth is so often created or amplified by greedily outsourcing these problems to the powerless. The wealth begets more power, and institutions that launder the story of that wealth into a whitewashed canvas of do goodery.
Look at how much more political activism there is in the US during the COVID crisis. People have more time since they're working from home, and they're able to actually participate for the first time in a long while. Imagine how many more people would be able to vote if election day was a national holiday. It's honestly criminal that it's not.
And a lot of those other issues have immediate, near-term impacts on the immediate prospects for families outside of the elites, (and without regard to divisions like race), so even from a narrow short-term self-interest standpoint don't make a lot of sense tongues as one-percenter problems even as much as political messaging from the Right paints them as elite distractions from immediate economic concerns.
Any of these problems, can directly affect your children.
Let me tell you one example, my parents generation suffered much higher cancer rate than normal. That's caused by 40 years of rapid industrialization in China.
Think about it, these issues let limbo, will very likely make your retirement miserable in 20-30 years...
I have no time to virtue signal by participating in meaningless social activism. I will help individuals where I can because that is somewhere where I can meaningfully affect change with my actions.
Maybe it's my age. Maybe I'm cynical, I don't know. I used to care about these things. I bought a crappy house in a crappy neighborhood to save gas. I wasted money on a solar panel system. I planted native plants, composted and grew my own fruits and vegetables. I was worse off for it, and no change came from it. If I managed to save any resources, they were quickly consumed by some other wasteful excess of society.
Unless your activism is effective, it is useless. It is basically religion at that point.
You are also constantly bombarded by messaging telling you not to and to focus narrowly on short-term self-interest, from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
The one you view as “pestering” is just the one you haven’t internalized.
Jeff owns approx $166,500,000,000 in Amazon stock, at $3000/share, and 11.5% of the company (55,500,000 million shares). Lets assume that this is where ALL his wealth is (its not).
That 5% tax on that would be $8,275,000,000. Were Jeff to sell shares to cover this, it would cost 2,758,333 shares. That would reduce his ownership of Amazon from 11.5% to 10.75%. Hardly the loss of a controlling interest.
So by what moral justification can there be for the morality of having and holding $166,500,000,000 in wealth? That government is inefficient? That he can make better investments? Who do those investments benefit? Even assuming supply-side economics works to lift all boats (it doesn't, mostly), is it more moral to lift a middle-class person into the upper-middle class, a poor person into the middle-class, both, or neither?
What I think is more likely is they just don't have to ever deal with people who are suffering, and have justified it in their minds as themselves being greater and this is the way of things. Certainly those that end up with billions of dollars at their disposal don't hold the same moral compass. And constant reminders of abject poverty haven't helped billionaires in developing countries do more to help the poor.
Of course, the reason that fallacy exists is because it works. Every argument against increased progressive taxation has been extensively focus-group tested, of course it works. But the need to consciously counter that messaging doesn't render the policy impractical.
Because when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it also was a small percentage of income only for the super rich (7% with the first 500K exempt, 1913's 500K was a bit more than 2020's 10M you suggested).
2) Framing things as a one-off tax is probably not a great idea. Once it's done once, there will be demands to go back to the trough, and it would be better for everyone to have the certainty around when and how that will work, so a proposal to have an indefinite 0.5%/year wealth tax I think makes a lot more sense than a one-time 5%. (Imagine how lucky you'd be if you become an overnight billionaire in 2021 and dodged the bullet!) Furthermore, the real net needs to help our society thrive long-term are far more than a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax could capture. It reminds me a little of the meme that Mike Bloomberg could afford to give every American a million dollars. https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/123584359225130188...
3) Overall, a system more focused on taking wealth than creating it will itself crater. There's been a lot of dialogue roughly summed up as "eat the rich" that lays out all kinds of very exciting ways to spend money but just assumes that lots of wealth will magically get created, or that there's a fixed pie of wealth out there so we should just take it from those that have it. No, I'm not a Randian Objectivist (and yes, I've read Atlas Shrugged), I believe that society should intelligently invest in its human capital with a goal of maximizing everyone's human potential. A society that does well at that will generate lots of wealth and will have lots of good answers possible for how to share and spread that wealth. And the US is demonstrably not doing a good job at economic mobility, which is to say our branding of "anyone can make it" doesn't seem to be lining up with people's lived realities very well. So I find it less helpful to talk about "are you a bad person if you are a billionaire" and more helpful to talk about what factors are keeping portions of our society from achieving as much as they could and how we could collectively tackle these factors (or more to the OP's point, find effective ways to get out of these people's way instead of assuming we know how to fix their problems!).
4) A lot of the overall discussion about inequality decenters from the very real and tangible global progress that has been made on eliminating poverty. The data is staggering in its velocity, and wildly unreported since good news is nowhere near as exciting to link to and discuss as bad news. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin... - but the story in the US is much more grim, with poverty on the rise, stagnation in wages, and the hollowing out of the middle class. So we can say that the world (and China in particular) is trending in the right direction toward elimination of poverty and equitable wealth generation, and the US's policies and environment are trending the wrong way. There's some data to suggest that 90's era welfare reform is to blame, see https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/12/3/jg5hvxe1e4qpf... for more on that angle.
In short - I agree suffering doesn't need to be the way of things, we should halt policies that stifle opportunity to increase social mobility, and I don't think a one-time wealth tax is a good idea or gets us to where we want to go.
I think it's unfortunate that this part of the debate gets the focus.
What I think is problematic in the Gates approach and those like it, is that they view the world through so many institutional and market filters that they don't notice various problems bubbling up that can't be measured in these terms.
The most obvious thing is Gates' line "the world is getting better" which hinges on the fact the more people are moving from outside the money economy to inside the money economy (less people "living on pennies a day"). The problem is Gates can't see that people insider the money economy are in desperate circumstances.
The recent interview with Gates was distinctly sad. In one area where he sort-of has things right, he doesn't understand that the flood of irrational here is very pushed by other monied interests which have become used to fending off all spending on longer-term social interests since these serve as threats to their short term profits. See this article describing the similarity of climate denialist and covid denialists: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...
maybe both?
On an individual basis there are multiple portions of the economy for which wealth could be modeled or interpreted as a zero-sum game. Examples include landlord/renter relationships in high rent burden environments, or other segments where an individual is unlikely to ever be able to afford a "share of future economic growth" in order to fund retirement etc.
Lots of markets (most markets?) aren't growing at any particular moment. We should really figure out how to fix our system in the low-growth zero-sum regime because it's common and important.
In the United States, it's a different story. The tide is rising, but most boats have not been rising with the tides for about 40 years, and that's troubling.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/
The figure you linked does not indicate adjustment for inflation and does not segment expenditures by wealth, which is important, because the US economy as a whole is growing, but more than 100% of the growth is flowing to the top. The rich get richer, the poor (and middle class) get poorer. You have to segment by income to see this trend.
Inflation adjustments are tricky because it’s not really obvious how to measure inflation. But even adjusted for CPI inflation personal consumption expenditures have been steadily increasing in the 20th century: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA
Tangent 1: Placeholder: I don't agree that consumption metrics are better.
Tangent 2: Rich people do consume (colloquially speaking) proportionally to their increased wealth, but after sating their material desires they turn to financial assets: dibs on passive income and future growth. More for them does mean less for everyone else. Both in the first-order sense of owning more shares and in the second-order sense of being on the winning side of prevailing trends in globalization, automation, tax law, and corruption.
Jeff Bezos owning 10% of amazon does not place prohibitions on the amount of dollars you can spend.
Also, if Jeff's workers have more wealth, they don't have to spend a lot of their disposable income on paying student loans or mortgages, and they will have more money to buy more stuff.
There seems to be little correlation, much less causation, between the amount he pays his employees and the value of the firm in which he holds interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/business/the-economics-of...
It's the same with everything. When you're not at your limits of your ecosystem - things aren't zero sum. However once you do hit your limits, things become zero sum.
You even see this with businesses. Industries go through a growth phase. In the startup-growth-adoption phase, all businesses in that industry can grow. However, once market matures and reaches saturation, businesses struggle to grow or change. The only significant way mature businesses can grow larger at that point, is via mergers and acquisitions of other businesses.
A limit is a limit, doesn't matter if that's a demand limit, or a production limit, or a resource limit. The effect is still the same. Being under limits, makes things zero sum. If those limits were suddenly removed or increased temporarily, things would return to not being zero sum - at least until you hit another limit.
>It is rare that it means that not more can be produced.
In practicality sure. I'm sure we could make more basketballs than we do now. But physically speaking, you'd eventually hit limits. The earth is not infinite... we certainly could not make more basketballs than there is mass of earth itself. At which point we would either have to make new basketballs out of old basketballs, (zero sum), or raise our limits (mine matter out of other celestial bodies).
Why do you think so?
> In practicality sure.
And that is what matters? Why is it interesting that there is a theoretical limit on how many basketballs that is possible to produce with the resources available on Earth when no conceivable situation exists when that limit ever becomes relevant?
As a result of the above, the value of a natural resource changes over time. For example, natural resources used in electronics and batteries are relatively more expensive now than they were 100 years ago.
So, you can be technically correct by saying that wealth is zero-sum, but that's pretty much the same thing as saying "the world's 'wealth' traded for natural resources sums up to 100% of all natural resources"
Someone should tell the record companies who say when you pirate a song, you're stealing from the artist who will not be properly compensated for the time they labored to write and record that song. I see corporate spokesmen expounding the labor theory of value all the time.
As far as LTV is concerned, we know it to be a flawed theory today because we understand the time value of money. LTV will hold in the long run with constant returns to scale. Without constant returns to scale, only the marginal consumer matters. In simpler terms, demand will affect price, not just supply. Now, if we make the errant assumption that the supply curve is completely flat in the long run, then LTV does in fact hold. That is, the LTV is not a terrible description of economic reality, as long as you note that a) an isomorphic argument can be made for “the land theory of value” or “capital theory of value”, so labor is in no way special, and b) LTV can only apply for goods with flat long-run supply curves. In any case, there’s a reason the early great economists used it! Smith, Ricardo, and others were not all idiots. However, today, we know better and it flies in the face of modern science and understanding to promote its use.
gdp (national wealth) is a made-up metric, it's aggregate, it's dynamic, incomplete relative to its stated rationale for existence, inapplicable to the discussion, and a whole host of other irrelevances to a real understanding of wealth and its distortions.
Look around where you live, at the things that you value. How many of them were created with human effort, versus just existed in nature? Look at everything from computer you're typing on to the chair that you're sitting in to the roof over your head. EVERYTHING that was created with human effort is an example of wealth creation.
Without dismissing your point, I would strongly push back against effort being synonymous with wealth creation. Having grown up in post-Communist Eastern Europe, there was no virtually correlation between the two.
The title "président des très riches" wasn't born out of nowhere, was it?
P.S. He owns 11.1% and had more before his divorce.
If he owned 9% instead of 10% and I owned the difference of 1%, then I would be better off.
¿Por qué no los dos?
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-...
But let's say he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. Is that more helpful? I think sometimes big problems take resources. My biggest complaint is that he has shown the ability to execute at scale and most of the companies they invest in don't. Spending even three months operationalizing one of these companies could be like a 100x on the money in.
A counterargument is that "nothing happens in a vacuum" and their lack of economic fulfillment is due to this wealth gap. But I think we owe billionaires this same level of uncertainty. They only exist because society doesn't want to know what would happen if they were forced to give their wealth away.
Side note, in my experience living in California many of my "broke" friends are actually terrible with money. I was talking to a guy the other day who spends $800/month on rent and $1500 on food. I'm sure it doesn't represent the whole, but in general I look at California liberals with a critical eye when talking about the wealth gap.
No one is asking for such naive approach to redistribute wealth.
It's to find better ways to utilize the wealth, which Bill himself would also agree in principle.
What exactly the format requires discussion. But the first step is to allow such discussion to happen. And we are sure that a lot of the world people are not believing the meaningfulness of such discussion...
And that's a big problem.
Only if the country is corrupt, a well functioning democracy can't be bought.
Worth billions, wanted to run for President, spent hundreds of millions on ads and got nowhere.
Bloomberg couldn’t even get his parties nomination.
I guess billions doesn’t get you that much power.
If they were just printing money for themselves, and using inflation to lower the value of your money, you would see it and be upset.
They're doing the same thing with power.
If Amazon or McDonalds paid their workers more and their CEO's less, the lives of many millions of people would improve.
Examples: Look at how people argue over fictional characters or franchises.
It's all one in the same problem. Philanthropy comes from wealth accumulation.
The difference is the out-in-the-open, stark, startling, and seemingly completely baked in income inequality. I think people outside of academia are finally talking about the morality of a billionaire's mere existence.