I dunno. I think a $2bn endowment that hands out $200mm/yr to those who are most in need is pretty damned cool.
Hopefully it's the beginning of what's to come.
The thing to keep in mind is that the guy has $infinity and his company has infinity success. Neither have to continue as they have already won. What will define the legacy is what is done with the accumulated wealth, this seems to be a good first step.
... and yes, the PR is important. Maybe it will encourage more wealthy people to give back, in substantial ways even.
I don't see the value in sneering at philanthropy... ever.
> I think a $2bn endowment that hands out $200mm/yr to those who are most in need is pretty damned cool.
Tax is a superior way of doing this. Tax and where to spend it is in principle decided by all the people, democratically, whereas this method is decided at the whims of one man who got lucky.
If by "military" you also mean Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, space exploration, K-12 education, and scientific research sure.
I was using 'democratic' sarcastically (but I didn't do a good job conveying that). What I was trying to convey is that due to lobbying and corruption money eventually gets routed away from what the politician you voted for said they'd put money towards.
Wealth redistribution is not a goal. Goal is to avoid stratification of nation. And the most effective way to avoid stratification is progressive tax system.
Efficiency can be calculated as (dollars spent on primary goal)/(total dollar spent).
I find way too easy to be cynical and use the old tired arguments like "with all the money he makes these are just breadcrumbs" or "it is really just for tax purposes/PR stunt".
This money will be used to help people in need, and it's all that should matter.
I think the "robber barons" of our generation are more ambitious than the previously known. Amazon could keep increasing its size for decades attacking the global market.
I have been thinking about this. If a business pays their employees well they don't look good on the stock market and they don't get PR points for philanthropy. On the other hand if you squeeze out every bit of profit, you look good in the stock market and you get big PR points if you do a little philanthropy. The decision seems pretty clear.
Maybe. I would argue that long term it isn't. Businesses and the people who control them are only that wealthy because society lets them be that wealthy. Damaging society (e.g. via increasingly obscene wealth inequality making people more unhappy) means, long-term, risking massive societal upheaval, and thus your position.
"Damaging society (e.g. via increasingly obscene wealth inequality making people more unhappy) means, long-term, risking massive societal upheaval, and thus your position."
Do you think that current businesses think about this a lot?
Charity exists on a scale from very considered to not at all considered, same scale with not very effective/$ to very effective/$. There are meta-charities that try to evaluate the effectiveness of other charities. The point is that this is at the "not considered/effective" end of the scale. The really pressing problems of the world aren't American homelessness, and homelessness is not a cost effective problem to try and solve (compared to eg. people dying of water-borne diseases in the third world). So he either hasn't thought about it, or doesn't really care (and the two are connected one implies the other).
It's like a normal person giving $100 to charity. Wouldn't it be cool if you could move the needle on vulnerable children with pocket change? (I'm not downplaying his charity, just putting it in perspective)
And if everybody donated 100 USD to charity that it would have huge impact :)
In related news: extreme poverty is likely disappearing over the next 10 years, if you want earn some karma points by saving people in need, now is the time to act.
> A tax break on future hypothetical tax revenues does not cost the taxpayer anything.
By the definition of cost I think your comment refers to, it doesn't. But be aware that adding a company that size and all the employees that will follow will cost the city money.
> Especially when Amazon could have easily placed their new offices in lower tax or tax free zones.
By the definition of cost I think your comment refers to, this also wouldn't have costed the taxpayer anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What's the problem with most projections though? How do they arrive at this number? It seems to me that this is similar to a startup offering 5 year growth projections.
I mean, one problem in this whole assumption to me seems whether Amazon even can more than double in size. If Amazon plans on growing its white collar workforce from 40k to 100k, presumably it needs to double its revenue. We are also assuming that they double revenue/headcount without increasing Seattle headcount, wage growth, or that automation reduces the need to increase headcount. All of this is possible, but it isn't necessarily a shoe in that Amazon even pulls this off.
Another thing that seems to be overlooked is at what price would have Amazon still made the same decision? Could NYC offer $1B in incentives, and Amazon makes the same choice? By helping Amazon artificially lower costs, how does this impact New York businesses like IBM and the many fashion retail brands?
That isn't a very in depth analysis of the situation. Those tax dollars pay for things like infrastructure and services, that all those new employees will be consuming. I would be interested in seeing a more detailed analysis than what's provided in that post.
That's a non sequitur; Amazon would still have built its HQ2s somewhere if not NY and VA. My point is the tax subsidies are roughly equal to $2B, so they effectively cancel out the fund.
- Paying this small tax would help the homeless, but Jeff/Amazon would see no direct benefit from this.
- Donating money has the direct benefit of positive PR. The last wealthiest guy in the world did it too-- so arguably not doing it is in fact not a neutral stance but negative PR.
Hence it's in Jeff Bezos' interest to pay less taxes and donate the money it takes to make the headlines.
It's also important to remember that while $100M sounds like a lot of money (and it is) it is only 0.1% of Bezos's net worth. It's the equivalent of someone whose net worth is $1M giving away $1000.00. And actually, it's not even equivalent to that because if you have $1M and you give away $1000 you can no longer afford to buy something that costs $1M. But when your net worth is $100B and you give away $100M your net worth is still $99.9B. You are still the richest man in the world by a wide margin, and there is essentially nothing you can't buy.
Really excellent perspective on this. However, I don't think we should downplay anyone giving away that amount of money. I'd rather someone give away $100M compared to $0 even if its peanuts for them based on their personal finance.
It seems odd that society feels entitled to decide what the richest person in the world should and shouldn't do with their money. I don't disagree with premise that he can hand away $5B and still not bat an eye but why is it out decision to make?
>I'd rather someone give away $100M compared to $0 even if its peanuts for them based on their personal finance.
Yes, it's good that he has given away some money, and this money will do real good, it's important not to let this blur the focus on the real issue:
There are desperate, homeless people in this country. There are people who are refusing necessary medical treatment because they cannot "afford" healthcare. There are people who will go into crippling debt for attending higher education. Most people I know say they will never be able to afford a home because the price of rent doesn't leave any room for savings.
All of these problems can be remedied by a society deciding collectively not to allow single people to accumulate exorbitant amounts of wealth, and instead, collectively spread that money among the population who need it, democratically. There is no social benefit in padding out a Mossack-Fonseca tax-free account of dubious offshore legality so one man can attain massive political and social power. There is value, however, in using those resources to employ people in the project of tackling real, fixable social problems that other countries have figured out already. Green energy, healthcare for all, free education, job guarantees, infrastructure upgrades. It's all within the fiscal budget so long as there aren't single people, or small groups of shareholders becoming unnecessarily rich just because we've stacked an economic system in their favor.
The idea that these are "his savings" just because he amassed them under our current system is missing the perspective that this system is not immutable. It can, and has, been changed before, and can change again. It is in the process of changing in other parts of the world right now, and with good results at that.
Where do you propose drawing the line on too much versus just enough fortune? Is $1M enough but $1B isn't? There will always be one person that is the most wealthy person in the world unless you want to go the opposite route and turn the free market into a socialist society. I don't disagree with the problems of the world and healthcare and basic human needs are hard to come by for a large group of people. That problem need not be conflated with the disagreement that there is a single person who has more wealth than anyone else.
How was the system stacked in Jeff's favor exactly? He started a company and grew it to become what it is today. I really don't understand how the system is stacked in his or any one persons favor. I agree the rich get more wealthy and the poor less but that problem isn't systemic of Jeff Bezos' personal wealth accumulation.
> I'd rather someone give away $100M compared to $0 even if its peanuts for them based on their personal finance.
I guess that's part of the point of the thread's original comment. I'd rather he give money too, but he's actively avoiding giving money he should be giving on other fronts which would've been used for positive means also. Hence, is he really doing it to see people be helped, or for the PR that comes when you're the one "voluntarily" doing the helping.
> It seems odd that society feels entitled to decide what the richest person in the world should and shouldn't do with their money. I don't disagree with premise that he can hand away $5B and still not bat an eye but why is it out decision to make?
Jack Ma put it in some interesting terms when he mentioned that if you have a million dollars, it's your money. When you have a billion dollars, that's not your money, that's the trust society put on you [1].
And that's the thing, this money means huge amounts of power, so what he does with it really matters to everyone.
> It seems odd that society feels entitled to decide what the richest person in the world should and shouldn't do with their money.
IMHO society is entitled to decide whether or not the concept of "private property" should be part of the rules of the game at all. And it is certainly entitled to decide whether or not a vast amount of wealth and power should vest in the hands of a single individual who is accountable to no one. It may be that the answer to both of those question is "yes", but that is not a straightforward consequence of the laws of physics.
Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets? The wealth accumulated by founding Amazon is due to millions of people's purchases on the retail site. It is further enhanced by the amount of money being spent on AWS cloud services.
This is how a free market works, the market dictates where wealth concentrates and disseminates. I don't disagree that in theory we shouldn't have it so lop sided but I don't see how we have a free market without the possibility of a Jeff Bezos rising to the top.
>I don't see how we have a free market without the possibility of a Jeff Bezos rising to the top.
Abolish the concept of a CEO.
If the company is run democratically, as a cooperative, where every worker has a say in how the company is run and how much everyone gets paid, there is nobody to sit at the top of the hill with the whip telling you to break your hands working for $7.50 an hour so they can scrape off and take the 30 dollars an hour of surplus value that your labor generates.
It looks like your comments for the last six months have all been in political arguments. Regardless of your politics, that's the sort of thing we HN users here not to do. The guidelines say: "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it."
Occasional political comments are fine, as I've explained many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... But using HN primarily for that purpose degrades the main mandate of the site. If you'd please not do that, we'd appreciate it.
Interesting idea though I think you are blending two problems into one. Let's entertain a hypothetical Amazon where its democratically run. Majority of employees are low wage fulfillment workers. So they vote to increase their wages because they are majority. Now amazon isn't able to sustain profitability because low wage work is by very definition low wage work.
Would Amazon be as successful in this scenario? I doubt it because their prices would be higher to cover larger employee costs. I don't think democracy in a free market works because a business would self consume.
> Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets?
Only when consumers actually have a choice. That's why monopolies are bad.
This is something many people miss about capitalism. The way it is supposed to work is that if Bob starts to make a ton of money, Alice notices this and enters the market herself so that she can capture some of the market currently being served by Bob. The resulting competition drives prices down so that eventually goods and services become available at the lowest possible price. If one person or company is getting fabulously wealthy, that means that the market has failed.
Society has a lot of mechanisms for preventing this from happening. Progressive taxation. Anti-trust laws. The laws of physics do not lead inexorably to laissez-faire capitalism.
I think that's a very unique definition of market failure you're going by there. It seems hard to argue that Amazon hasn't driven prices down for consumers.
You're making the wrong comparison. There is no question that Amazon has improved the retail experience and driven down prices. I love Amazon. I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor. In that world, prices would be even lower. And there would be other benefits as well. There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon.
> I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor.
No you don't have to imagine a world where every successful company has a competitor that is completely equal. That isn't how free markets work, that is how things work in theory but never in practice. There is always someone at the top.
> There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon.
You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"? It seems you want it both ways and want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person.
I can imagine a world where there is a free market and the most successful become the most wealthy.
Who said anything about "completely equal"? Of course every market has a leader. But in a healthy market there is at least one other player of comparable size: Coke & Pepsi. Hertz & Avis. Boeing and Airbus.
> You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"?
No, not quite. I love Amazon, but they are not a panacea. One of the problem with them is that a lot of the things they sell are counterfeits, and when you order something there is no way to insure that you're not going to get a counterfeit. Hence: crap shoot. A retailer with real competition could never get away with that.
> want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person.
No. The reason I want Amazon to have competition is not because I want Jeff Bezos to have less money, it's because I want him to have less power. And not so much as a potential buyer, but as a potential seller or potential employee. Amazon is generally pretty good to its customers (unlike, say, Comcast), not so much to its merchants and employees.
And I also want to be clear: I am not saying that I would necessarily use government power to change how Amazon does business. But I do think that this is a legitimate thing for a society to do. Even if Amazon is not the worst example of a monopoly run amok, there is no question that monopolies can be harmful, and that society has a legitimate interest in defending itself against them.
Hopefully it's the beginning of what's to come.
The thing to keep in mind is that the guy has $infinity and his company has infinity success. Neither have to continue as they have already won. What will define the legacy is what is done with the accumulated wealth, this seems to be a good first step.
... and yes, the PR is important. Maybe it will encourage more wealthy people to give back, in substantial ways even.
I don't see the value in sneering at philanthropy... ever.