This is just once again a case of philanthropic green-washing of what should be actually simply heavily taxed.
Not being snarky but heavily taxed and then what? Expect the government to make the best decision on how to spend money?
Just throwing money at things does not mean it gets used to actually improve them, unfortunately... The question is when you have gotten to diminishing, or negative, returns.
In my opinion the whole “throwing money at the problem is not a solution” excuse is not enough to justify maintaining status quo. Yes, I agree, governments are the worst at efficient spending. Wasted money. Unjustified spending. Corruption. Nonetheless, we have a problem that must be solved.
If the wealthy have a better idea that involves no money being spent — great. But let’s not pretend like the human cost is going to go on pause while we debate this. Impoverished children will continue to live and grow in environments that do not help them to break out of poverty. What is worse is that the odds are getting worse for them because disparities are getting larger.
To which?
I think we should encourage/require government spending on things that are actually useful (and I acknowledge that there is wide-ranging disagreement on this criterion) and fund such spending adequately.
At the same time we need to have reasonable accountability for governments doing stupid things with money, notice when it's happening, and make it stop, redirecting those funds to something productive. Whether that happens via lower government revenues or reallocated government spending depends on whether there is something productive the government can spend the money on.
The things that you list, and many you don't (quality schools, both physical plant and teacher quality, libraries, parks, clean water, free school lunches, free preventative medical care, etc, etc ) generally pass the "is productive" smell test until proven otherwise; the burden of proof there should be on critics to prove that the investment is not being done in a useful way. That said, once that burden of proof is met, action needs to take place to remedy that.
> In my opinion the whole “throwing money at the problem is not a solution” excuse
You're putting words in my mouth here. For a lot of these things, throwing money at them is a _necessary_ but not _sufficient_ condition for having a solution. If you don't fund your schools adequately they will be bad, but if you just throw money at them and it gets misused in ways that don't advance learning they will also be bad. The whole "there's a whole warehouse of unused computers in that school district" thing is not _common_, but it's also not unknown when it happens it's really bad and needs to be fixed. Both in terms of the immediate problem and the bad incentives that led to it.
So just saying "allocate money to this" is not the end of the road. You have to then make sure the money gets used sanely.
At least there is a chance it goes somewhere good now.
When the stock award was granted, existing shareholders agreed to dilute their holdings by allowing the company to issue new shares to Cook. And when Cook sells this newly issued stock for cash, the money comes from new shareholders who want a slice of Apple (or existing shareholders buying more, thus paying cash for the shares they themselves gave to Cook).
If people have money to spend on Apple stock they clearly don’t need it to survive.
Although the question you raise is an interesting one in the sense that many buyers of Apple stock are indirectly depending on it to make a living after they’ve stopped working. For a blue chip giant like Apple, many of the buyers are index funds and pensions where the ultimate beneficiaries are retirees. They literally are buying Apple stock to survive, although through intermediaries.
You can build a regular home, get paid $5 million for it, the net act was probably negative for the system.
It's the same for companies turning profits: it's entirely possible to make profits in a system while actually shrinking the overall pie. This is common when certain activities are externalized (i.e. pollution).
Capitalism, broadly, does create a bigger pie, but it's a very uneven process and the true value creation doesn't always happen where the value is created. Value capture happens where the power is.
If he had to pay all of this on taxes, society could decide how to use that money and it would be just as much, if not more "a better place".
Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did.
Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over the billionaires, but I don't see these critics spending a significant portion of their wealth on charity.
Notice I didn't say "earned" because the entire premise of some is that one cannot morally "earn" a billion dollars - that something is fundamentally broken in our society when wealth can become so centralized.
Some people make fun of the idea that government is a decent decisionmaker for spending money on society, whenever raising taxes on the wealthy comes up. Where do you draw the line? Do you think they currently are taxed perfectly? Do you think no one should be taxed? How would the infrastructure these companies relied on get funded?
Oh, I see you committed another trope of comparing the earnings of anyone on this thread (and about 95% of the country) to a billionaire. The floor for living comfortably, or even somewhat luxuriously, is a much higher proportion of the wages of a middle class household than it is for a billionaire. I make 0.02% annually of just this bonus. Don't you think that makes a difference in the equation?
Hell the whole reason why democracy is thing is because monarchies of yesteryear have proven quite decisively that the ability to raise capital and spend well for society are not even remotely linked.
We need to consider very carefully as a society what the impact of the billionaire class has on how our society develops, and the outsized impacts they can have on democratic processes.
Personally I don’t think having such wealthy individuals is a good idea. Their wealth is so great it’s pretty much impossible for them not to get wealthier, and do it at a rate greater than than the vast majority of people. And their ability to deploy that capital to influence society is scary, effectively taking the role of government to provide social services, and placing it in the hands of a wealth few.
We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power, just a Hobbylobby and David Green’s continued vendetta against abortions and safe contraceptives.
I trust a person who has generated billions of dollars worth of value over a buerocrat who won a popularity contest.
Besides, I don't think it should matter whether or not these people spend their money optimally. They've made this money, it's theirs. Don't take other people's stuff.
> We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power.
Until we leave in a featureless dystopia where all people are perfect clones brought up in an identical environment, there will be power disparity between people. It can be based on inheritance (like in monarchies), or ability to commit violence, or charisma, or political skill, or ability to create value.
Between all these options, I'd much rather live in society where people get to keep the value they have created. It seems to me the most correlated with merit (not perfectly, but better than the alternatives), besides, it is morally right.
Politicians may not be perfect, but they’re much easier to hold to account that high net worth individuals. I personally consider that a killer feature when picking my power brokers.
We already take others people stuff for the public good. It’s called taxes. That money built the roads you use everyday and props up the society you live in by helping to ensure that everyone gets a decent quality of life.
Simple fact of the matter is that no individual has any practical use for wealth measured in billions. It’s wealth that could be better put to use help the poorest in society, and helping us navigate the next hundred years of climate change and associated social unrest.
He may go down the evangelical Christian path and fund a war of sex, abortions, gays, trans and people’s reproductive rights. That’s not even a hypothetical outcome, there’s plenty of millionaires and billionaires (like David Green) already funding that war.
But also, there's no guarantee that _anyone_ including the government will use money for "good" causes. Bridges to nowhere, military adventurism, wars on drugs, personal enrichment of politicians and government employees, vanity projects of various sorts, the list of things governments mis-spend on is vast.
And of course we don't all agree on the relative merits of different causes.
Re: the note above about Foxconn workers, Cooks money comes from the market power developed by Apple which they can leverage on everyone in the system, consumers, workers, suppliers, distributors etc..
So he can leverage against Foxconn workers and then give $1B to charity - or he could not leverage, and double Foxconn workers wages. And that's just his comp, not everything else.
Now - maybe there is a theoretical greater efficiency in his charity work, and of course it's spent on 'his interests' not others, etc..
But the notion of 'giving it away' doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless that giving is frankly more effective than otherwise.
I think Gates Foundation for example is reasonable - a lot of philanthropy is effective in ways that governments and regular private corps are not - that makes sense.
But from a purely charitable perspective, it does seem a little bit odd to accumulate in one column on the ledger in order to put it back in the other column.
Success during one's life , paying it back to make the society a better place once gone. Take a bow, Mr Cook. What more can one ask for in a lifetime :)