Subject: Re: Biden's billionaire tax rate fact checked
Just playing Devil's Advocate: The Gates Foundation does some amazing work.

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That's actally why I used Gates as an example because I agree that he is trying to optimize the impact of his contributions in a somewhat scientific, results-oriented way and has some big successes. But for every rich Bill Gates, there's a Koch brother type counterpart, spending vast sums of money through "charitable contributions" to actualy support more of what they want for their business. For example, David H. Koch is one of the biggest backers of science programming on PBS. According to sources on the Internet, he's donated $18 million to support WGBH and Nova over 30 years. Impressive. Less impressive that he spent $68 million over the last 10-20 years spreading disinformation about climate change. Both Koch brothers were donating nearly $20 million per year in the 2010s to universities across the country to promote their educational agenda regarding economics and (de)regulation.

Here's another stab at my lottery metaphor about fostering ideas and creativity to advance society.

In my view, the combination of the world's current knowledge, scientific understanding and culture will always result in some imperfect state reflecting a combination of harms stemming from a range of factors... The totally unforseeable, the judgment calls and the totally forseeable. As technology advances and science and engineering combine to create some new technogy that EXPONTIALLY improves productivity and/or living conditions, any actors working in that "space" at that time in a capitalist society will likely enjoy EXPONENTIAL accumulation of wealth. We've seen it with every era of industrial advancement. Vanderbilt with railroads. Rockefeller with oil. Carnegie with steel. Ford with automobiles. Gates with computer operating systems. Page/Brin with search engine technology.

In each of those examples, those founders were extremely smart, insightful people who essentially held a lottery ticket in a larger economy that "paid off" and netted them a billion dollar jackpot. Great. Good for them. Good for the rest of us to be able to use what they invented or perfected. I have no problem with that. The problem is that once that actor wins that lottery, much of the operation of our political, judicial and social systems becomes HEAVILY weighted in their favor. That's bad enough if it helps them get away with crime or fraud that would normally put someone with less means in jail. The bigger problem is that that lottery winner's OPINIONS suddenly seem to count for many times more than average members of society. Even in areas not directly related to the areas of expertise in which they won their fortune. It's as though we suddenly allowed PowerBall winners to control the local news media in twenty cities. Why? Just because they have a billion dollars.

Bill Gates is a perfect good / bad example of this. He has tens of billions of dollars. He's technically a college dropout with an intense background in 1970s / 1980s era operating system design and 1990s era software business strategy. But he has no degree in medicine. The fact that he's devoted countless hours boning up on the topic and talking to people who DO know something about vaccines and vaccine delivery systems is a credit to his choice on how to spend his retirement. However, it seems dangerous to allow such continued concentration of wealth and influence on so few people and rely upon their best intentions when it is clear MANY in those positions not only won an economic lottery but extended their win through corrupt practices.

It's similar to the debate about "effective altruism," a concept of career management in which a person makes decisions about what jobs to take based upon a goal of maximizing their ultimate wealth that of course will be (eventually) given away for charitable purposes. The classic example would be posing a choice to a software engineer interested in "solving hunger" in Africa. Suppose that software engineer could choose between

a) working for $180,000 per year at Google for 20 years and accumulating $3.6 million, some of which could be given to a charity aiding hunger in Africa, or

b) getting on a plane and spending the next 20 years personally digging irrigation ditches across the African continent

Given that person's skills, (a) might be the better choice. The problem is that some who believe in EA believe it justifies nearly any action in the short term that creates more wealth, even actions whose short term harm can compound exponentially faster than the "good" that might eventually result when the EA converts a lifetime fortune into good deeds at the end of a career.

As I mentioned before, allowing the uber-rich to maintain their outsized influence on the rest of the "civic idea space" seems antithetical to the goals of a pluralistic democracy. Rather than Bill Gates trying to manage a process for funding five different efforts to perfect the delivery of polio vaccines, might a larger net benefit on worldwide health been achieved by spending $5 billion dollars to rebuild the 50 worst public high schools in the country and pay their teachers $100,000 salaries to attract people back into teaching, improve graduation rates and boost medical school enrollments by 1000 students?

It's impossible to know what's best for every possible billionaire but history seems to imply these concentrations of wealth are NOT good for society.


WTH