Wielding that amount of money/power is most often used for evil. Even if it were only used for good, it should be democratically controlled.

It's nice that Bill Gates uses his billions for tackling diseases, but he shouldn't be able to decide the fates of millions of people unilaterally. He's an individual wielding nation-scale power, and that's dangerous for everyone else.

The same is true for Musk, and it's especially true for the billionaires who are distorting our democracy (Thiel, Bankman-Fried, Bloomberg, Koch, Hastings, etc.)

Both Gates and Buffet promised to give away all their money, but they have only become richer. Gates uses his philanthropic trust to influence decisions that enrich his investments while convincing people he is doing it for good. How long are we supposed to wait for these guys to actually give away that money, or was it just a lie?

Giving away money is a form of undemocratic power, too. A billionaire recently gave away all of his money to the Republican Party in the US, for example.

Even if Gates gives his money to ostensibly non-political organizations, he's still deciding how an enormous amount of power is transferred.

Even Steve Jobs' widow, who is giving small amounts of hundreds of organizations, is reshaping society according to her own design. While I'm aligned with her values for the most part, it is still terrifying to think about all the Powell-Jobs' who have billions that they are spending on things that harm us all.

I don’t know the way around this, but I do think it’s good that power is not centralized in one governmental structure, even if that structure is Democratic, and I also think it’s good that there are a diverse set of philosophies determining how philanthropy should happen.

I don’t know that I love the idea of billionaires being the solution to those two problems, but I do think that some part of our resiliency as a nation is because the government doesn’t have total control over those things.

Not to mention the obvious conundrum that this may be great when the party you support is in power but not so great when they’re not.

> I don’t know the way around this, but I do think it’s good that power is not centralized in one governmental structure, even if that structure is Democratic

If your assertion is that nobody should wield nation-scale power, then I agree, and welcome to anarchism!

If your assertion is that billionaires are an effective check on governmental power, I'm... not seeing it. Particularly given how much power billionaires have to influence the government itself.

They are not a “solution” they are private citizens engaging in activities that are not if your business.

Did you mean to say that are none of my business? I’m not sure what you are getting at here.

Nation-scale power is power to brutalize and kill with impunity. The individuals who wield it are called "politicians". They are dangerous for everyone else

Not all power is violent, and not all avoidable death is caused by violence.

For example, pharmaceutical companies in the US have killed millions of people through marketing and regulatory manipulation.

More to your point: as long as politicians are democratically elected, they can't brutalize and kill with impunity.

What is the alternative here? The majority of the governments discretionary money is allocated toward the military. Should Bill Gates and Elon Musk being putting half their money to developing better jets and missiles? I think it is much better than their money goes to curing diseases, environmental causes, electric cars, and space. A few billionaires choosing to do nothing over than passing it down to children is a small price to pay.

No, we should have billionaires like in my comment above but it shouldn’t be easy to pass all of that to the next generation. Inheritance should be reasonably taxed and if the next generation has the chops to become a billionaire again then they are worthy of it and will actually probably contribute to rapid progress.

So your suggestion is to have governments collect more inheritance taxes on a billionaire's estate. Then those taxes will be used for military purposes, no?

Ironically, some of that military money would go back to Patagonia, through their discretely-held control of the current PCU contract, under which they provide a government-spec'd 7-layer uniform system to special operations units. They haven't always held the contract, and may not hold it in the future, but I always found that fact about Patagonia's business somewhat interesting, mainly due to the public obfuscation, and the perceived distance between the particular product, and Patagonia's "brand identity".

Now I need to go wash the fact that I just used "brand identity" in a sentence off my hands.

And other things but yes. You’ve contributed a lot in life, you still get to keep say 700 million but the next generation needs to prove themselves again (not that they need to with 700 million but it’s a start)

Maybe needing to be vastly rich to to cool things is the actual problem? Suppose there were higher levels of general financial security such that people could take more risks. Open source software generates huge positive externalities without fairy godparents.

No amount of general financial security would get me what I need to start a company that can land rockets.

Even if I can get the group of people I need for free (because all their expenses are paid) I still need land, materials, etc.

No, we still need land, materials, etc.

Accomplishing things becomes a problem of cooperation instead of acquisition. Instead of "Can I buy the things and pay people to do work" we have "Can we agree to allocate resources and work together".

You're assuming that one lone visionary is essential to success, and that a level of coercion is necessary so he can make people do the work. We're software people here. We should know to reject "visionaries". They're just idea guys, the same guys we laugh at when they say "Here's my app idea, you build it and we can split the profits 50/50".

Software is one thing. Getting people to build ships that can transport tons and tons of materials around the world, dig lithium from a mine, send things into space, or clean the office buildings, or dig the fiber trenches, or run the power plants is a another. If money was too diffuse, then economic decision making would be too diffuse to be an organizing principal. Whether the people who end up with the capital required to make those decisions actually deserve it or are especially good at it vs anyone else is a whole different matter.

You just can’t achieve really big things with a medium amount of money. You can have the government do it but you never really see that much innovation. There’s a reason you don’t see a huge amount of innovation coming out of Europe.

But in return, everyone has a decent quality of life. In America, the innovation comes at the cost of grinding everyone not wealthy till death.

Just be upfront that’s the trade off for “innovation.” The economic environment that allows for such enormous wealth aggregation comes at a cost.

That’s a false dichotomy. The percentage of people with bad quality of life is about the same in both places (for westernized Europe) and much worse for eastern Europe.

Officially the poverty rate is actually somewhat lower in the US than most countries in Europe. But it seems unlikely it's measured the same way, or that it necessarily translates to more people being unable to access basic services (health, housing, power etc.).

Yeah I’m in the camp where I want to see rapid progress above a decent quality of life for everyone. I feel like we’re rapidly approaching a point where technology can realistically solve all of our basic problems and want to get there as quickly as possible even if it means pain in the short term (probably our lifetimes). Obviously not everyone will agree with me but in the US even a grinding life isn’t all that bad relatively. You won’t go hungry, if you’re not drug addled you’ll rarely be on the streets for very long, if you have a mental condition or disability you get money from the government, minimum wage jobs are very, very easy to get, we have a problem with cops but on the whole our justice system actually lets anyone get justice etc.

I am really confused. Could you provide some data to back up your position that basically nothing is a big problem unless you are “drug addled”? How does one become “drug addled” if nothing is a problem?

I would be more convinced if you could also link to studies showing how early family life and local history have no impact on developmental brain processes and don’t create culture traps.

> How does one become “drug addled” if nothing is a problem?

Prescription drugs, used according to the bottle/doctor. Hard drugs mixed in with softer ones. Intentional drugging. Many ways.

We would also need studies showing how additional government intervention in the family helps prevent the culture trap. What can the government do to make people value education and delayed gratification, which are perhaps the two traits best shown to enhance individual outcomes?

Most of the work on delayed gratification has been shown to not be measuring capacity for that but instead trust in potential future gains and personal security.

What the government could do to enable what you’ve called out is help ensure more people meet the necessary lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy so that when kids show up to stuff marshmallows in their mouths they can feel secure enough in the probable truth of the statements and even simply the return of the researcher to assign any probability to the appearance of a second marshmallow.

Step one is something like don’t let babies be raised in abandoned projects where everything they have gets stolen regularly from before they can remember.

Funny you say this on the internet, an innovative (at the time, now it's just taken for granted) communications network funded by the US government for it's first decade. On that network you are using a technology (http/html) that was inveted at CERN (a large government funded research institute) in Europe.

These two things together have widely been credited with changing the world.

I couldn't help thinking about the space race, myself. That was a puzzling assertion.

Inventing a technology and building a profitable business on top of it are very different things that require very different skill-sets. Besides, there is no evidence to suggest that private money cannot fund basic research of the type that the government does.

> there is no evidence to suggest that private money cannot fund basic research of the type that the government does.

The evidence is that it doesn't. Pharma companies rake in the money a ton but they're not the ones discovering new drugs, they're just the ones who ferry it to market.

Current machine learning state of the art would like to disagree.

We have no idea what innovation might have come because it was overrun by earlier deliberately monopolistic efforts driven by the aggressive and arguably unnecessary consumption of marginal human lives.

Just because the fastest way of building something can win doesn’t mean we should do it that way. In fact, we almost always shouldn’t do it that way, upon inspection.

People generally like the idea of democracies. Why shouldn't we let democratically elected representatives decide what cool things we want to do instead of leaving those decisions to individuals that happen to be very rich.