Strictly speaking, the foundation discourages individuals from donating directly to them, mostly because the tax treatment of giving that way isn't necessarily favorable. They've set up Gates Philanthropy Partners as a 501(c)(3) charity which is aligned to the same philanthropic goals.

(Of course there's also many other worthwhile players in the broader EA space.)

It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.

Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.

If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.

Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.

When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.

You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.

The government's tax income is allocated by the masses (in theory anyway). It is fair and dispassionate.

Philanthropy / charity is picking winners and losers based on your personal whims, and for many it is about gaining social capital.

In order to improve global health or address other issues that impact countries beyond where you live, the government (even an idealized version without waste, corruption, or political games) might not be the most effective way to accomplish this.

What I find kind of interesting is that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet argue that they should be taxed more, but they don't do anything to further that goal aside from media soundbites and headlines. They could fund an incredible war chest for a lobbying apparatus who's sole purpose would be to create a more fair tax system. But no such thing happens.

It seems fortunate that some charitable funds isn't subject to that risk. There are other risks, but they seem lower.

In an imperfect world, government funding alone seems insufficiency diversified. That's too much power in one place.

This is only ever true if you assume that government tax spending is 100% efficient, with nary a fraction of a cent being wasted. I don't think that's a safe assumption.

People with lots of money and power get their representatives to pass laws that reduce their taxes.

Of course, you wouldn't expect them to be the ideal charity; they are explicitly not a charity. Anyone who is actually trying to be a charity should have little trouble using funds more charitably than any government in the world.

But guess what? If you give too much power to a position, people who want to abuse the power will try to get themselves there.

I wasn't upset that Obama was consolidating power because I thought Obama would abuse it. I'm upset that he consolidated power and then left it to whoever would come next, and then has the gall to be surprised that consolidating power under the Executive would undermine the power of the Legislature the moment a President who was willing to abuse said power was sworn in.

We're cooked because of the fucking team sports. Both parties have had the chance to reign in the Executive and neither has the balls to use it against their own guy

Even in qualitative terms, the "consolidation" was incorrect. Congress abdicated its responsibilities, and the Federal agencies picked up the slack. They're not controlled _centrally_, it's not like Obama was ordering agencies to write particular rules.

We now see what the central consolidated control actually looks like.

We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.

It's a gross comparison.

How they spend their oil resources is also quite different. :)

Or a school admin system built for 100 million dollars and crap. They even spent a lot of money trying to prevent a open source client that solved a lot of the issues they had.

Maybe in absolute money it is less than the US. But remember US also have a lot more people.

The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.

The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are. The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do. You should be a lot more worried about wealthy folks who don't donate to charity and just spend the money on big luxury yachts and the like, because these folks are essentially free-riding on everyone else.

I also agree that wealthy folks spending their wealth on luxury yachts while the public suffers is also something to worry about. Who knew? Gargantuan wealth inequalities are mostly downside for everyone but the wealthy!

Is there some data that shows that?

> The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do.

We can find public goods in common for many groups, but that's actually a bad example. Wealthy people care about clean air in their neighborhood; pollution is therefore concentrated in poor areas. They don't site the new incerator (or drug treatment facility) on the Upper East Side of Manhatten.

Many needs are specific to poverty. For example, wealthy people are not subject to malaria; they are no illiterate; they don't need toilets or labor rights; they can afford college for their kids regardless of tuition; they have unlimited access to safe, fresh, healthy food. They don't need more available and less expensive health care, so they donate to cancer research and high-tech therapy and not to the medical clinic in the poor neighborhood.

It is problematic even with good intentions.

People don't have time, expertise or usually even the motive to systematically examine ROI. They or someone they know has a 'good cause' and they support it. For example, endowments at their alma mater - likely a school for wealthy kids, new buildings for the hospital (that serves wealthy people), new research in diseases that are problems for the wealthy, etc.

They can't know without talking to people who have experience with poverty, for example, and those aren't the people coming to dinner tonight.

Supporting government programs at the same time as you insist money could be better used elsewhere (at charities) is somewhat amusing.

Of course not. It's quite literally just the people. If you cannot trust the people with your charitable donations, but still wish to donate to a person, then you're going to have to narrow that down to the specific person you can trust (i.e. your friends). There is no in-between.

If it is authoritarian, perhaps, but even that is still a matter of a group of people. Most seem to believe that government should be democratic. You may not find yourself in a democratic state, but that would only continue to contribute to what makes the day funny. Perhaps you didn't read the entire thread and are posting this without understanding the full context under which it is taking place?

But, again, that government is the very people we're talking about, at least as far as a democracy goes. Although even in the case of an authoritarian government, the individual authority is only as strong as the people are willing to go along with recognizing it, so it is not really that much different. No magic here, just people.

It's nothing to be proud of.

What you can be proud of is in REDUCING dictatorship, by removing power in centralised entities and giving it back to the individuals.

It is not - that would be some theoretical pure democracy, also called 'mob rule'. Democracy, as the word is actually used, requires universal human rights which protect the minority. For example, freedom of speech means the majority can't control the minority's speech, whether they like it or not.

Democracy also includes separation of powers, usually between legislature, executive, and judicial, which prevents the concentration of power.

> It's nothing to be proud of.

It's only something to be proud of if we make it that way.

Another, much larger aspect of government, especially democratic, is people getting together and doing things as a community that can't be done individually.

People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government. We can and should do that of our own free will. That's not to say governments aren't needed. But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.

That may be true, but government (at least a democratic one) is just people getting together and doing things, so if you already have one you can save the effort of the community trying to organize a second community on top of the community they already have for no good reason.

> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.

That literally tells of people getting together and doing things. These are not magical powers. They are simply community action. I suppose it highlights that people getting together and doing things isn't all sunshine and rainbows, despite your apparent dream for a world where there is only happiness, but such is reality.

I expect the aversion is that those who wish to donate to charity only want their friends, not entire communities, to benefit. The "trouble" with a community at large is that everyone is able to participate, whether you like them or not. That's not to say that a community cannot see a charitable benefit indirectly, but the key point is that they want to keep the primary benefit away from strangers.

The government is the only one with a legal monopoly on violence; it redistributes resources in the society and it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.

It's a recipe for disaster.

Government is a recipe for disaster? Democratic government has worked for centuries without disaster.

> it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.

Yes, that is the trick of every human endeavor, the great ones and the failures. It depends on you and me - let's make it happen.

That may be logical, but it doesn't happen. I've had unpaid parking tickets for long periods and nobody showed up at all, much less with guns. Where do you live that they jail you for it, much less go out and find you? Your local government must be very well-funded to have resources for that, not to mention having a fascist attitude - how popular is that with constituents?

> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.

It depends - many times it is the most or only effective way. It has decision-making mechanisms - including elected representatives, hearings, experts - and executive mechanisms including employees, equipment, contract managers, processes, institutional information such as maps of infrastructure, and loads of experience. Imagine some neighbors in NYC trying to put in just a new streetlight.

> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.

It doesn't ignore it, but your prior comment repeats the Internet trope that that's what goverment is - a coercive mechanism with guns. That's only one narrow aspect - the great majority of what government does, and how society works, has nothing to do with that. It's for the outlaws, not for the great majority.

The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.

Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe; but it could do far more with substantially less.

I don't know that it's worse than any other institution? At least voters can remove the corrupt, and they are prosecuted. Are you saying these uber-wealthy and CEOs aren't just as corrupt or worse?

More often than not, corruption in government does not result in the perpetrator being prosecuted or even removed from office.

I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass. As if the same types of people don't run both.

Its probably not so much that government gets a pass as much as government is the organization that, by virtue of being a citizen, they own and control, so when things go wrong it is their own fault, and they really don't want to accept blame for their own faults. They would have to ask "How did I manage to fuck this up?", which is a hard question for most people to ask themselves.

When it is distinctly someone else's organization it's much easier to throw pointless shade to make one feel better about their own failings.

Where do you find these people? I've never met them. It seems like everyone complains about government waste and corruption - even when it's not happening!

If we're talking specifically about the U.S. government, I suspect its decisions cause more suffering globally than they alleviate, though of course there are open philosophical questions inherent in any attempt to quantify suffering.

I think there is value to letting people allocate some percentage of their income directly to causes they are passionate about. Even if you assume the government is efficient and not bloated, and benevolent, this lets people contribute to causes without waiting for political consensus, or to smaller causes that would not be on the government's radar (yet) or ever. It's more pluralistic. It lets smaller causes bloom. It keeps me civically engaged.

On a personal note, I do take issue with the amounts spent on "defense" (which is often bombing people or threatening to directly or indirectly), and would rather help folks than bomb other folks.

But your rage is valid, I think it is just misplaced. The above commenter to you could perhaps be more effective in their decision making regarding filling their existential void. But family planning is a rash and presumptuous 'solution' to filling that need.

He’s of course within his rights to ignore this but I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.

Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the greatest chances of developing to not be as acute of problems anymore and indeed to offer value to the overall world community through trade.

Indeed, the extreme version of what you're saying is why so many only give to their church communities which are insular and isolated. Or to just retain everything.

70% of my giving is domestic, but I think it's nuts to ignore the rest of the world. Yes, things improved in distant lands maybe are harder for me to see and have less of a direct impact on those around me; so discount their benefit some, but that marginal benefit is so much larger...

More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.

At this point, I spend substantially my entire life in local service (I am a schoolteacher and I give away 6 figures locally annually). I still don't think it would maximize my effective impact to ignore the rest of my country or the rest of the world.

Many of my friends and family don't live on my neighborhood, town, state or country. They live in the world. Consider broadening up your social circle a little bit. Our lives don't have to be limited to where a horse can travel to any more.

You are assuming that I don't have friends or family in Zimbabwe. Which is true in this particular case. But it might as well not. As I said I have friends and family in several countries.

I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism makes no sense to me. Borderline absurdist.

If your position is "it's his money so none of us should comment", I'd expect equal pushback on people saying "wow I really agree with how he's spending it."

And Gates is investing in Alzheimer's research FYI.

You seem to think this phrase implies a prescription that people ought to donate first to their adjacents (unambiguously enough to be worth including without a definition).

I'll note that, given how many sources seem to contravene that interpretation, the probability that your use of this term did not come downstream from Vice President Vance has dropped precipitously. Which might be useful information for anyone looking to diversify their information diet.

I'm unsure what Vance has to do with this. My belief comes from my religious upbringing and (in this case) Saints Augustine and Aquinas. Vance is not a spiritual leader or theologian of any sort.

I think I absorbed much of this when I was pretty young - I had sort of settled on this way of thinking before ever picking up Civitas Dei - but reading and writing on it during my schooling helped me understand why.

The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.

Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.

We all act as we think best. I can try to change how others think. That's about the start and end of it.

This is very directly contradicted in the parable of the Good Samaritan, though. When Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, and Peter asked “but who is my neighbor”, Jesus pulled up the Samaritans - a group that the Jews had ethnic and religious conflicts with. (A modern equivalent for modern Jews might be the Palestinians). And he pointed and told a whole story that basically said “these guys. Love these enemies as if they were your family”.

So, yeah, I’m gonna hard disagree that Christianity supports treating your own townspeople as more worthy of help, versus helping the poorer people in other countries.

Moreover, insisting on going all-in on medical research before doing any immediate lifesaving sounds to me like a gross perversion of what should be, in its most simple case, an urging to make sure your kids are clothed and fed before donating to the food bank. Surely ordo does not make it unvirtuous to save a drowning foreigner even if your kids would miss a meal for it.

I’m under the impression that Aquinas says outright that it makes sense to make exceptions to the general ordering to aid those in grave need that are “low” in the order, and stuff like mosquito nets are a prototypical example of this imo. Lives saved, families preserved, terribly unjust suffering averted, etc for literal pennies on the dollar.

I would much rather give to charities focusing on countries that don’t have the economy/ability to fix their basic issues.

Get a life dawg.

You’re only sharing one opinion (America should isolate), and you’re presenting it as a fact (you refer to being „correct”).

I think you’re projecting the dislike towards your opinion. If I see American electoral politics seep into HN, I’ll call it out, as dictated by my intellectual curiosity.

This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.

Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.

People don't change much.

But everything you could possibly want to know is a Google search away.

This took me about three clicks to find:

https://cagj.org/2020/04/the-nation-bill-gatess-charity-para...

Which sounds more like the BG I know from back in the days.

It's not like it takes a lot of effort to find out the truth about that scumbag.

Wow. Just wow. Where the heck do you get this garbage from?

Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.

But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.

We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.

If you stop vaccinating, cVDPV will spread person to person. Some people carry virus for decades and it can become infectious at any time, many years after they were first vaccinated or infected. There will sparse but significant episodes until all humans who were vaccinated with OPV (or infected with the wild virus) have died.

but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it! It's ok if we don't eradicate the virus. The point is to prevent children from being paralyzed, and it works for that.

Also, Gates's pet project of a novel OPV has been shown to have caused a few confirmed cases of VAPP now, so it seems that project won't save OPV.

Essentially the best hope for eradicating polio within 20 years seems to be giving out a lot of OPV to places like Afghanistan and the DRC and forcing the local warlord to give it to the kids who need it (the latter has generally been a total failure of the Gates project). Once OPV gets wild-type and cVDPV outbreaks under control, a global switch to IPV seems safe to prevent future outbreaks. But, to get there, it seems a very aggressive OPV campaign is necessary compared to where we are now. It may take a militarized organization to do this, also, given the fact that you necessarily have to deal with tribal warlords. Shame we don't have USAID any more...

We aren't going to do that because it seems we generally aren't capable of doing that. So we're likely stuck with a decent amount of polio for a long time.

People also don't carry the virus for decades. That's a myth. People with a weakened immune system can get infected with polio even after a childhood vaccination, so that's probably where this myth comes from.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022663/

Immunocompromised hosts can shed infectious polio for their entire lives.

These outbreaks sometimes die on their own, but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't spread widely if we completely stopped vaccinating

You could pick some slightly less sci-fi measures like "number of trivially preventable deaths from diseases for which we have vaccines", for example.

Of course, he could choose to not live a super-high consumption lifestyle in addition to his climate philanthopy, but if I had to take one or the other, I'd rather him continue throwing money at climate work than take fewer private jet rides.

The way to fight climate change is to keep people at a low level of consumption, and spend his own money very slowly, very scarcely. And keep people with small cars, no Cadillac for any consultant.

This has always been the sticking point for me when it comes to supporting large charities.

And it’s not like we’re talking about some huge sacrifices here. Go from a 50K sqft house to a “modest” 10k sqft one. Don’t sail around on personal yachts. Fly commercial. Use Zoom. Simple stuff that would give them a lot more credibility. As it is, it’s a whole lot of “do as I say, not as I do.”

Helping people out of poverty is really bad for the environment too but I don't think we should be complaining when someone does that.

On a global scale his yacht(s?) and private jets are nothing, and if it helps him do good by establishing/maintaining relationships with the right people they're an "investment" into a stopping climate change.

A bit of a naive take as opposed to yours.

If anyone deserves a bit of good faith it'd be the Gates family, it's probably not all pretty and perfect but I am convinced they're doing a lot of good.

You'll have to ask someone else about proof, but I imagine someone would've leaked something within these 25 years if they were running a tax evasion scheme or something else fishy.

So without hard proof I repeat: Let Bill have his toys, it's a piss in the bucket on a global scale and the donated 100 billion dollars will have offset that in some way or another many times over.

Let's just say my "sniff test" says good, and while not always right I think I am here and that's good enough for me.

I mean, having more than one of either already seems ridiculously wasteful to me, and I don't care if that's standard billionaire lifestyle.

How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets, take down regimes, and change people's lives for generations?

We take them at their word and assume that everything they do is well-intentioned and good and has zero negative impact or secondary effects, but is that really the case?

To me it seems like the only charity that can be trusted is a small-scale one that acts locally and with lots of transparency.

Maybe my judgement or efficiency is bad when I try to help my neighbor. Okay, whoopsie. Now apply that margin of error to a foundation whose decisions impact millions of people and possibly entire societies, possibly for generations. The unintended or possibly negative effects can be enormous and long-lasting.

And even the poorest parts of the US are doing much better than a lot of poor countries in Africa and Asia.

Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.

It seems that our notion of charity has been warped in such a way that it somehow doesn't count unless it's some enormous large-scale mission carried about by Charity, Inc for the benefit of some group of people far away. It's all very abstract, and that just creates room for fraud or exploitation.

Paying off a local person's debts or putting their child through college will probably be far more impactful and meaningful than sending your money off to some giant organization.

That's just insane. Bill Gates is absolutely not a good guy but you cannot be convinced to that given how much you idealize him. Have children. I would have replied to the sibling comment saying the same but comments become unreplyable once they get enough downvotes.

It'd be smarter to see who they are giving money to (which is all public) and give directly to those orgs. The Gates foundation itself spends a lot of money on consultants, "government engagement" (aka lobbying by another name), and fancy dinners.

That's fine or maybe even noble for a family foundation, but it's probably not something individuals would want to fund.

If he was really serious about giving away his money, he could write a single check to the Red Cross || Doctors Without Borders || insert charity here and in five minutes be done with it.

The world doesn't need more vanity charities. It needs its existing charities to be better funded.

That seems like an incredibly stupid way to spend money that has been eradicating diseases and saving lives in countries where food insecurity isn’t a choice.

That’s what I mean. Like the housing shortage, food insecurity is trivially solved if voters cared about it. We don’t at almost every political level.

They can also lose or squander it. One of the Gates Foundation’s value adds is monitoring.

I’ve tried volunteering at certain orgs before, I filled out forms and literally they rejected me because they had no more staff to organise and oversee more volunteers.

If your solution is just invest it, well, the Gates Foundation may as well hang on to it (you think you can do better job than Buffet?) and setup a system to dole it out.

If the org has to find new uses for it, surely the Gates Foundation is in a better position to get that done?

You'd require those organizations to more than double in size to use the funding provided. That's not a good plan. Bluntly, his plan is better than yours.

I've got no love for Gates, but are you just trying to draw attention to yourself? What's your agenda? You're the one making a fairly outrageous unsupported claims.

Are you sure about that?

Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?

You could be massively wrong about that. Many charities are desparate for IT help. I am a developer and volunteer at a charity. I have done some IT stuff for them (mostly setting up some Airtable databases) and it has been (modesty aside) transformative for them.

Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.