Can a rich person be a good person?
minnieo@kbin.social to 
Moving to: m/AskMbin!@kbin.social – 38 points – I don't mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.
I think many will say yes, they can be, though it may be rare. I was tempted to. I thought more about it and I wondered, are you really a good person if you're hoarding enough money you and your family couldn't spend in 10 lifetimes?
I thought, if you're a good person, you wouldn't be rich. And if you're properly rich you're probably not a good person.
I don't know if it's fair or naive to say, but that's what I thought. Whether it's what I believe requires more thought.
There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.
And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?
Very curious about people's thoughts on this.
People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.
Agreed.
For me personally it's more a question of does your money hoarding system exploit people or is it family money that's been made unethically. I think keeping that kind of money to yourself is unethical. And I don't mean you should go living from riches to rags but recognize that you own something to society and do something about it.
Another way to describe individuals who hoard enormous amounts of wealth to the detriment of society and other humans is ... pathologically unsound and incapable of compassion or empathy for others around them
Soros attempted to gain wealth to use it as a tool to fight for the oppressed. Didn't work out too well for him.
Can you at least try to explain this take... I think we are having hard time seeing where you are coming from?
How is some rich clown trying to influence political process for his own benefiting helping the homeless or the working poors?
What about middle class?
I find this take so hypocritical.
I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?
You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?
You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?
Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.
I think you're missing the points about scale and marginal utility. If you have more food than 3 generations of your family will ever eat, and continue to take more while others are starving, you can make a moral argument that maybe you shouldn't have so much food. Much less continue to try and get more. It becomes more egregious when you, say, take food from your employees who don't always have enough.
Missing the point and misconstruing the argument to protect the wealthy is the point.
Agree with this. We should remember that doctor-making-150k is far closer to being homeless than they are to a billionaire, with their individual wealth rivaling small countries.
Most doctors are one of us as many other well compensated professionals.
You better save that money while you can because if you are not able to trade your labour for money you are back where you started among the peasants.
Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)
I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.
And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?
Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the too of my head lol.
Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?
I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.
It's important to recognize just how much more billionaires make than millionaires, but at the same time, no, neither of them are good or can be while maintaining that amount of wealth, and the reason is because you cannot make that much money by working. The ONLY way to make that much money is by making profit off of others.
Idk man in some areas a house costs a million. If two people go into debt their whole life and work their butts off to pay for a house that now costs a million, I still think of them as normal people somehow yaknow
This is a good point.
I remember often being confused why I was being treated weirdly when I was teaching in a east-central African country.
The disparity of wealth, in absoulte terms, was not that high - I got a middle salary for that country, because I lived on what my country gives for a volunteer. Back home that would be way below substance limit bit there it was a medium salary at that time. But the perception that was prevalent made it so that most people thought that I was, in some abstract order, richer than them. It wasn't really clear by how much or what order - factor 1, factor 10, factor 1000?
I noticed how people who didn't know me or how I lived would always treat me weird and I came to the conclusion that them thinking about this - what order of magnitude is it? - made people treat me weird
Now for the bezos of the world and me, I know exactly what order of magnitude it is. But from which order would I start to see it as obscene?
I could live with someone earning double from me. 10x would start to feel unfair. But that is far far far removed from the reality of the global super rich. That factor is way higher, and it's easy to focus on this really really high factor, but finding the low border up until which it is ok might be hard.
And I remember how people looked at me, trying to figure out exactly this
I hop I explain myself, it's late here. If not I will retry tomorrow
Have you looked up how much a Billion dollars really is? Billionaires are not living paycheck to paycheck. They could do so fucking much with their money and resources, but they choose to invest in shitty submarines and privatized space travel. I am all for pursuing advances in tech and life, but let's solve the issues with earth first like world hunger, homelessness, and climate change.
For context: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Fantastic fucking visual.
Holy shit somehow this struck harder than the Tom Scot video where he drives the length of the thickness of a billion dollar bills.
I suggest to scroll the entire page. Including the 3.2 trillion of the richest 400 americans. And remember that the tiniest scroll you can make would lead to you becoming a multi-multi millionaire that never has to look at their bank account ever again.
WOW!!
Everyone please see this!!
There's a huge difference between having food to eat
And having millions of dollars doing nothing
Or me living in an apartment
And someone living in a building that could take up a whole city block
It's not the fact that they have money. It's how they get it and what they do with it.
I have money, but I don't have enough to save. I don't make enough to do much outside of maybe buy a small amount of food for a homeless person. I'm not solving shit. However, living in the city I have had people ask for some change, and I've done it. But I can't do shit.
However, there are people who can actually help that won't. They get more money than they need and then just sit on it. Many of them get it through exploiting others.
But if we want to ignore things scaling and just reach, if I give a homeless person a dollar, should he not share that?
I'll add on here that there's a major difference between
And
Even for Americans who are living a little better than paycheck to paycheck, I have read something like 30% of them are one personal disaster away from homelessness, themselves.
I have nothing new to reply to this with because others who have replied to you have already said what I would have said perfectly. I do want to say I find your reply incredibly ignorant and I hope the other replies have opened your eyes a bit.
My 'excess' that doesn't go to bills and food is like 15 bucks, while theirs is several hundred million. Great comparison 👍🏼
I'm sorry, but being able to feed yourself and dedicate decades of your life saving for a home, is not comparable to having multiple homes, and going on holidays for half of the year.
Yeah this is missing magnitudes of scale here. Someone with 100,000 and someone with 1,000,000,000 are wildly different scales of magnitude. It's like people who look at a mag-4, mag-5, and mag-6 earthquake. Each of those is on a log scale, so while you're just going form 4 to 5, the scaling means that's a massive amount of change.
Same diff here. The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change. So going from 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a pretty big change in the amount of security one has. So going from 1e5 to 1e9, that's a change of 1000 on the scale. The level of change between those two is absolutely astronomical.
I get this facet of mathematics eludes folks. All the while the whole "double the number of grains per square on a chessboard" thing we all like to play with because it's interesting. But this is that IRL. The average person and the average billionaire are on two totally different scales. It's like saying, "why a beetle doesn't glow when the sun does?" Like you can't reasonably compare those two things. Yeah, both contain hydrogen at some level but in massively, massively different quantities. It's like saying, your computer is just an overgrown abacus. It's just ignoring scale so much that it veers into very wrong.
I get what you're trying to say. But you've got to acknowledge the vast difference of scale here and that your point is not just oversimplification of an issue, but a gross by planetary magnitudes oversimplification of an issue. Just mathematically speaking, the average person and the average billionaire are not even close to the same kind of person in economic terms. It's just completely unreasonable to even remotely think they are. The numbers are just too far apart, to even attempt this argument in good faith.
This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who's destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000. The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn't ruin their life, but we don't. We're all less guilty of ignoring the suffering of others that a billionaire is, but not without blame.
Maybe the average person in YOUR social circle lol
I love when people say something highly specific to their social class but frame it as "everyone". Bubbles, man.
If the average American gave away half their net worth they would be giving away any hope of retirement. If the average billionaire gave away half their net worth they would still be a billionaire.
See this is where you failed logarithms. Let's talk domestic and then we'll move on to developing world. To explain it a bit better here's a breakdown. Let's say I take all my net worth and sell it. Lock, stock, and barrel. Convert it to cash and then take 50% of that dollar amount and hand it to someone. That value will allow a single person to have an apartment, furnish it, and pay rent for about 48 months. Now take the same billionaire and put it towards that same person. That 50% of that dollar amount is 43 times more money than if you completely liquidated the entire town of 12,000 in middle of nowhere Tennessee I live in. The billionaire could purchase forty-three of my towns. I can grant someone an apartment for maybe four years.
It's all the same 50%, but because of MATH, it's wildly different in what is possible with that same 50%. That's the "great point" you should be walking away with. Logarithms and orders of magnitude are wild things!
Now let's move to international. Minus the whole point I just made, one would think, oh if I give some money overseas, they'll be able to go to Walmart and grab some rice. Well they don't have Walmart. If I gave them $50k it is about as worth $0 because there's nowhere for the money to go that'll directly help them. It's not till I give them enough money to actually build the Walmart (or whatever shopping center, or you can call the Walmart farming equipment, or access to seed and fertilizer, or whatever basically enough money to grant them access to a resource that is just removed completely from them).
That's the thing people forget about abject destitution. They are so poor and exist in an environment that is so resource poor, handing them $100,000 might help keep them warm at night by burning the cash. But they are SO poor, you need a massive injection of funds to literally kick start their economy, and surprise $100,000, a quarter million, or half a million ain't going to cut it. You need nine figures to even get started and that massively ignores the complexities of the geopolitics and the fun details of despotism. But I side step all of that for simple fact that we just need to keep this to math and what I had previously indicated.
A developing nation's economy is in 1e-n territory for the median buying power relative to the US dollar. So for large n, you need large positive exponents to compensate. If some economy relative to the US dollar is 1e-6 for purchase power, then me sending 1e5 in funds is still fractional buying power on the order of like 0.1 relative to the dollar.
The feeding you have to remember is someone here in the US buying the food and then sending the food. We buy the food at US prices, so it'll feed at the same rate it feeds a US mouth, because we didn't buy it at developing world nation price, we bought it at US price. We buy the food in the US because those nations are so poor, they do not even have food to buy for them to eat, you have to bring all the money required to invent all of that there.
So like I said, that whole 50% means vastly different things in terms of different log base. It's all the same 50%, yes, but it's wildly different values.
I don't think everyone should be forced to give away everything they don't need to survive, I just think (in America's case) if you have enough wealth for several generations to live in luxury while our people are dying from inaccessible medicine and healthcare and more than half of our country has no savings living paycheck to paycheck, we've massively failed as a society to provide basic needs for our people. You could fund universal healthcare with just a tax on billionaires and they wouldn't have to change their lifestyle at all. If I had enough money that I lost 90% of it and I literally couldn't notice the difference, I'd be full of guilt every night watching people die because they rationed their insulin.
Even without a tax in place (and I seriously and truly support putting a tax in place), millionaires and billionaires could take relatively small steps to improve life for a lot of people.
Do you remember last year that news story where a church used the donations from the collection plate to buy up the medical debt for some people? If I'm recalling correctly, the church bought up the debt, pennies on the dollar, and with like $50k were able to help over 100 people. I may have wrong figures for the money value and the number of people impacted, but I think the point remains that a lot of people's lives got better without the medical debt, both financially and emotionally.
Billionaires have the capacity to do this same type of thing. Just pick any city and throw money at a major problem that directly impacts citizens. You don't even need to work with the city or state government there! Get together with your other billionaire friends and strategize to pick a variety of cities. Make a game out of it about who can afford to pay off the problems in Los Angeles or Chicago, and who can only afford to pay off the problems in Sacramento or Springfield.
How is the take hypocritical? Having a roof over your head and money to spend on nice things isn't the same as having enough money to live 10 lives and never run out. You've drawn parallels that quite literally don't exist.
Why aren’t you giving yours away? Same reason as the rest of us. Pretty disingenuous and hypocritical to call people out on that.
The majority of people of adequate means have more than the vast number of people below that status. Most of them are probably hedging their bets against misfortune or retirement, and the former can wipe out most of the advantages they had, and the ability to actually attain the latter is pipe dream for most people.
Point being, there’s a huge difference between someone with multiple lifetime’s worth of money hoarded that would afford food and shelter to tens of thousands of people and still not hurt their ability to enjoy life vs the person who is trying to shore up the minimum barrier between themselves and poverty and prepare for the day they can’t work anymore. For a lot of us that’s a pretty tough goal to reach.
I have all these things because of subsidies and welfare, or I'd be out on the street because I'm a disabled older person on SSDI. And even these things are a pittance, barely allow me to make ends meet, and are always in danger of being cut or completely gutted by the rich fucks hoarding all the money. So yeah, I think multi millionaires and billionaires are bad people by default.
there’s a difference here
Might want to be a little less ignorant.
Can there be good billionaires? Maybe. Are there any? Not that I know of. It is conceivable that somebody inherited their wealth and elect to invest it altruistically- in a manner that at least sees it not degrade but still beneficial to everyone else.
I do not see any billionaire acting in such a manner, and “hoarding” is would seem to be an accurate description
I firmly believe there are no ways to become "properly" rich that don't require you to be a bad person.
To get out of that "doctor-making-150k-a-year" category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.
idk, you probably have a small number of artists and genuinely lucky-sons-of-bitches who get proper rich without being bad people. Or at least with their wealth not coming from being a bad person.
Yeah, fair enough, I'm not too arrogant to admit there are exceptions to every rule.
And more power to artists and exotic chefs and others, who are able to get sociopath billionaires to fork out crazy amounts of money for their work.
I don't think I can 100% get behind the direct link that being an artist makes you a virtuous person, though I understand your bigger point.
I think we are overlooking tremendously how the art world is often a method in which the ultra wealthy wash their money. I don't think that artists that rise to the level of success of becoming a household name are blind to this.
They still benefit from regime in place to maintain their wealth and many are by default daddy's lap dogs.
People love putting up singers or athletes as they earned their money "fair" etc but these people end shilling for the benefit of the same rich daddies
Their art literally supports the status quo.
For example NBA players and China, rappers shilling "prosperity rap" and many singers putting out generic catchy music. Wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds them, ay?
They mostly never take a stand but to be fair those that do get punished and removed from public eye.
George Carlin was an OG about it, said shit that was so true when most of us were still shitting diapers.
You can turn any of his content on today. 100% on point and relavent. It is a bit uncanny.
I am sure he made good money but at least he didn't lie about how it works. Most celebs are more worried about other celebs accepting them into rich daddy club... Not their audiences
You can be born into it.
I’d say you’re a bad person if you’re born into it and don’t actively try to get rid of it.
I think the point of being a rich asshole is 1 billion dollars usd. Even 999mm is too much, but over 1 bil is an easy demarcation of excessive wealth.
1 billion? I think rich asshole starts much lower than that or 999 million, thats a fuck ton of money. Rich asshole begins at 1-3 million and up.
1-3mm doesn’t get you far in many places in the US though.
999 million what? 999 million net worth? What happens when the market goes on a 15% hike like in 2020? Do you become the bad guy? Or is that 999 million in liquid assets (spoiler alert billionaires don't have 1 billion in the bank). Thinking you have a point shows how ignorant you are about wealth except the fact you hate people who have more than you
Dang dude pretty hardcore response.
I think 999 net worth or 999 gold coins doesn’t matter. It’s a level that everyone can say is too much. You have to draw a line somewhere to start. Once it’s drawn you can go back and adjust but it seems people get hung up on where to start really easily.
That was going to be my response. If you're obscenely wealthy but you're in the process of trying to get rid of that wealth via philanthropy, I think you get a pass.
And not just "pledges". Actual donations.
So like, almost no multimillionaires.
I agree totally, which is why I made that distinction. And my last point about participating in the system that oppresses the poor just to maintain your own wealth. I can't see how someone like that could be considered good.
We're all arguably participating in that same system.
Not like we have a choice, especially those of us in poverty. You're dealt your hand and thats that. Born poor, die poor. Born rich, enjoy life. Shouldn't be that way but it is
Not much choice but no doubt we are both victims and enablers of the regime.
People first need to accept this dichotomy before we can move forward. Daddies spend good money on PR to keep us bickering among our selves while they cashing in on our labour and taxes
Beyond the already presented arguments from the utilitarian perspectives and the perspective of active wealth accumulation that requires a lack of morals, I want to offer a perspective on the control that this much money gives you. Since a billion dollars, or even further, the billions of dollars that billionaires have are hard to imagine/visualize, here is a handy visualization which i urge you to scroll through. (you have to scroll to the right)
Now, beyond being simply astonishingly awful because of the amount of good those people choose not to do, it's evil (I dont like the word in this context but I lack a better one) because of the control these people gain. Having billions of dollars is not just money in the sense you and I think about it. Its control, its capital. Simply through its absurd quantities it gains the emergent property of influencing millions and billions of peoples lifes, often in subtle ways like where factories are built or how resources are allocated, decisions that should by all means have democratic legitimization but are controlled by individuals like feudal lords.
And beyond that, this power influences elections through voters or through plain and simple corruption. But not the kind of small level nepotism we think of where a company wins a bid for some building, but corrpution on a level that influences state legislature and millions of people for decades to come.
If you're a billionaire, you didn't get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There's not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you're a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn't getting their fair share.
Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".
And then rich Christians made up some shit about an "eye of the needle gate" to justify keeping their wealth.
Precisely two, who meet the standard of "not completely evil".
The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.
Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he's cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn't pretend to be nice.
Ah yes, words that go so well together... cutthroat, ruthless, and good.
Based on the very consistent behavior of the ultra wealthy, I feel forced to assume that Gates main motivation is to shift the public conscious from hate to respect, so has been diligently working on PR since the early 00's. I find myself being extremely wary of charities that are so well known. Makes me think of Susan G. Komen, and their shitty behavior. I'm not saying that fighting malaria is not a good cause, just that it seems there are ulterior motives.
In the case of Gates, as others have pointed out, donating millions (also worth noting the nature of tax breaks), when you have hundreds of billions, sounds amazing but means almost nothing.
I think if a good person were to amass half a billion dollars they would spent enough of it on charity that they could never become a billionaire. So there are no good billionaires, but perhaps a few good millionaires moving to ex-millionaire.
Moving to ex-millionaire? A million isn't even enough to retire in the US.
Yeah that math is a little outdated. I think the "you have too much money" range has gone up to around $3-5 million now.
My thoughts as well, pretty much exactly what I meant in my post.
Hardly any millionaires become ex-millionaires by choice, it's that difference that can help distinguish the 'good ones' from the 'not good ones'. If they chose that route through donation, charity, whatever it may be, they are good. If it had to be ripped away from them through just natural shitty circumstances, and otherwise would keep being hoarded, not so much.
I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.
In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.
Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.
This is likely why Elon Musk can't afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he's likely extremely cash poor and doesn't have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It's unlikely he'll ever admit this however.
Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.
The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don't exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It's all fake.
I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other "money" purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from "the rich."
Okay, this accounts for Musk and Trump - two "ultra wealthy" people who can't seem to pay their bills and keep soliciting donations - but says nothing of the Waltons, the Mercks, the Carnegies, and other ultra wealthy people who aren't total idiots and grifters (easy money come, easy money go).
Don't turn a blind eye just because you haven't heard of them.
It's impossible to become a billionaire without extreme exploitation. You can't exploit people or the planet to this degree and be a good person.
I think a mistake in thought you might be making is that people are not simply "good" or "bad." I 100% agree with @UziBobuzi that hoarding more wealth than you or your descendants could ever reasonably spend is a "bad thing." And maybe that's a "very bad thing," that would tend to cast a dark shadow on other "good" things the person might do. Still, those good things are not erased; they still exist, and should not be subtracted.
Another important concept is that, while there is a lot of overlap, a person's actions are not the entirety of who they are. We all have bad habits, and regrets, and other shortcomings that we are fully aware of and have difficulty rising above. That doesn't make us bad people, it just makes us people.
I disagree. Sometimes, due to your particular circumstances, life forces duties and responsibilities on you. If you choose to become a police officer, but you're too cowardly to protect children from getting shot, that is a bad act and you are a bad person for doing it. If you are born into wealth, you are obligated to help the less fortunate. If you don't do it, that is a bad act and makes you a bad person. It would take a LOT of other good acts to atone for that.
Thank you for disagreeing, and I will further disagree!
I don't think that it's correct to do basic addition and subtraction (as in The Good Place) to determine whether someone is a "bad person." People are complicated, and people can change, for better or worse. Of course, we need to make judgments about who people are, including ourselves, but my judgment about whether a given person is "good" or "bad" is not necessarily objective truth.
In fact, I don't think it ever can be objective truth, because I don't think there is a universal arbiter of such things. The farther away from the center line you get, the more general agreement you'll find: Fred Rogers was good, Hitler was bad. But as you get closer to the middle ground, things get fuzzier. Thomas Jefferson was ... complicated. He was clearly brilliant, and held some very progressive positions in his time. And he owned slaves. Was he good? Bad? I don't think you can boil Jefferson down quite like that. Looking at people in black and white abandons important nuances, and causes us to discard important concepts or embrace dangerous ones.
forget the rich, YOU are not a good person
It goes so much further than just having a surplus of goods and services while so many go without. We've organized society into one that decides ownership through money, and that includes things that make more money. It's a real life broken gameplay bug, it's why there are people maxed out in everything they could ever want without making the slightest dent in their wealth. It's also the cause of a lot of problems stemming from the people making the biggest decisions in the world not being in those positions from merit, intelligence, hard work, or credibility. It's just money, an amount of money that can only come from the feedback loop bug of money making more money. Insurance companies deciding medical treatment, people not even living in the same state owning all the homes and only allowing for renting so they get paid indefinitely with no loss of equity. People with no passion for cooking deciding what the largest restaurants in the world can sell, people owning water itself. Owning creative rights, there are people who created original works that arent even allowed to use worlds and characters they created. Just every industry in the world, ownership by wealth has made worse.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned Chuck Feeney.
He's prettymuch the answer to the OP's question: Can you be super rich and a good person? Yes, but you prettymuch have to make it your life's work to not be super rich any more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/
To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.
I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that's a good point
I'm probably more on the extreme than most people here but I don't completely agree with some of the things others say on here. I do see that in our system, the kind of person and the things that you have to do to attain that kind of money requires that you be a sociopath. There are certain points on the path to that kind of wealth where you consciously make decisions that are unethical.
What that looks like is making the conscious decision to fire thousands of people, real people who have families to feed, health insurance they may depend on their employment which in the end which ultimately simply boils down to wanting to have a bigger profit margin.
I mean even just thinking about it—when you have
much more money than anything for one single person to do with, why hoard it when there's so much you can do in the world with it? The moment you begin to care for things beyond yourself is the moment you realize that no matter how much money in the world you attain, there still would never be enough left over for you to be able to be wealthy.
Funny, I was just watching this 'Some More News' video about what excessive wealth does to one's behaviors and morals. It's a bit of a watch but it's worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.
At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos' Ex, can't give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.
No.
Can? Yeah, absolutely. Trouble is, most rich people use exploitative measures and fuck the Everyman over just to get as much money as possible.
TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.
I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.
And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.
And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.
Many rich people fall into the trap of legitimizing their wealth to themselves the wrong way. Everyone, not just super rich people, had some help during their career. Everyone got lucky at some point too. Connections, inheritances, family friends and so on.
But the wrong way to go about it is to just say, if I can do it and so many others cant, it must be their fault. They must be lazy or stupid or both…
Even people who just won the lottery, so actually really just got lucky, can fall into that trap. And then they start to treat others according to their net worth.
To a certain degree they can but there has been a fair number of times they have not been.
Good people don't become super wealthy because once they get enough to live comfortably they start sharing it with people around them or people that need help.
You said it friend.
I think the rich can be good, for a given value of “good”. If good is defined as a lack of self-centeredness, then improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people can be considered good.
Good can be complicated. If one uses their wealth to cure disease in the jungle, but in the process upsets the ecosystem to the point where the people are now starving to death, was good actually done?
Are any of us good people? I think there is a level of selfishness in wealth that all of us engage in, and so I'm not willing to condemn people for having wealth that seems disproportionate to us. Is John Famousactor a bad person because he lives in a mansion worth ten times the average American's? Is Jake Factoryworker a bad person because he lives in a house worth ten times the world average? What matter of suffering can be alleviated in developing countries by our sacrifices in developed countries? At what level are our sins equal? Is it a matter of principle? Proportion?
The vast majority of people who 'make' millions do so by exploiting others, or by exploiting society to keep it, though, so fuck 'em.
Your scale is off by several orders of magnitude. We're not talking about someone with ten times the average wealth, we're talking about someone with hundreds of thousands, or millions, times.
Someone who has 100,000 times the average (median) wealth of a US resident would have more than 12 billion dollars. There are only a few people in the world with that kind of money. Even the richest person alive doesn't have a million times the average wealth (120 billion).
By and large, if you're talking about 'millionaires', you're talking about people who have 100-200 times the average wealth. Which, not irrelevantly, is comparable to the average wealth of an American to the average wealth of someone from South Sudan.
I'm not playing apologist for the ultra-wealthy. It's pretty clear that, as a class, they're fucking our society. But ownership of 100-200 times the wealth of the average American is no more wrong than ownership of 100-200 times the wealth of the average South Sudanese. What makes wealth exceptionally wrong is the way one acquires and maintains it, not its existence/possession.
fyi, no one in here is entitled to the wealth of wealthy people. wealthy people are people just like you and I. don't pretend you wouldn't change your tune if you became wealthy
imagine if someone less fortunate than you thought you were a bad person just because you have more than they do
"More money" doesn't quite grasp the absurd amount of capital really, really, really, really rich people control
you're still not entitled to it, that's not your money, are you for real?
You, I mean you personally, cannot generate a billion dollars. Nobody can. I dare you to try. Try to think of a way to make a billion dollars, without already having several hundred million dollars via generational wealth.
You can't generate a billion dollars, but you can find people to generate a billion dollars for you, and then instead of allowing them to share in that billion dollars, you just underpay them. You convince them (by deceit) that $100,000 is a pretty good salary, while you pocket $999,900,000. You tell the government that paying taxes would "significantly harm your business opportunities," so you pay $0 in taxes.
That's how you make a billion dollars. Cheating. Lying. And hoarding. Think twice before you say "not your money" again.
I disagree. I think any wealth over a certain amount should be redistributed.
How are they entitled to it?
I am entitled to have agency over my life, so do the people around the world from which this agency has been robbed much much more severely than mine. The capital billionaires have is not just "some money", its control over me and those billions of disenfranchised people. If you actually go through the linked visualization, you can see how. 800 kids die every day through easily preventable malaria. All of these rich people could easily pay for the necessary treatment and wouldn't even notice the most minute possible impact on their life. That is control. Thats the agency those 800 children a day do not have ovef their own lifes.
I can't imagine I would ever amass several billion and not help a single soul, just hoard it and have 99% of it unused like so many of them are doing right now. Or for stupid little conveniences or ventures. As an individual I cannot spend a billion dollars and I would go from billionaire to several-hundred-thousandaire really quick in helping others.
Wealthy people are nothing like "you and I". They live on an entirely different planet with entirely different systems, laws, conveniences, healthcare, quality of life, experiences, and more. They step on the poor to reach their golden throne. They do not relate to us nor us to them (assuming you're not wildly rich). Don't delude yourself.
A billionaire isn't merely "more fortunate". Do you understand how much a billion dollars is?
In theory, it's defenitely possible. Let's imagine a person who inherited 1 billion dollars. How their parents made that wealth has no impact on the morality of the person who inherited it. The only thing that matters is what they do with the wealth afterward.
While your argument is that a good person would give it away, that's a rather short-sighted approach. If instead, they invest that wealth at a 10% return and donate 99% of the returns to charity after 11 years, they have contributed more than if they would have immediately given away their entire wealth. But they are still considered a billionaire. And they are still making 1 million a year for themselves.
So just because someone has a high net worth doesn’t prevent them from being good. And you don’t have to play any “games” or exploit anyone to stay rich. Obviously, the exact numbers might not match the oversimplified version I presented. So instead of 11 years, it might take 15-20 years to give more than donating everything at once. But if set up correctly this could pay out money to people in need forever. Adjust the payments so that the initial sum keeps up with inflation and you could in theory pay out around 70 million in today's money a year for eternity.
I think the hazard of temptation that comes from not immediately giving away as much as possible makes this strategy a failure. The longer you have money, the more you get used to having money and acquiring more. How many billionaires have pledged to give away all their wealth, and then surprise! Their kids inherit everything.
Just give it all away ASAP. Get it the fuck out of your hands.
I don't understand the obsession with rich people and their not spending/giving money in ways that please others. Also, the notion that wealth can ONLY be achieved through exploitation of others is silly. Has SOME wealth been acquired through exploitation? Of course. But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement. There is no benefit focusing on what others have, focus on what you are doing. This is straight grown-up advice, if you disagree, you don't have enough life experience yet.
Rofl you try saving your way out of poverty on $27,000 a year, you entitled twat
Nope. You wanna know what actual grown-up advice looks like? Go read Nougat's comment in this thread. Or read OP's post. Again.
Thank you.
It's incredibly sad that if you're not filthy rich, you have to dedicate your life to living "beneath your means", being incredibly frugal, giving up the chance to have experiences because you must save money, working yourself to death all to have somewhere decent to die in the last few years of your life. Not sure what your point was.
I think there is a line, and it's different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children's inheritance.
I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don't know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying "there I've done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor" and that really wouldn't accomplish anything.
But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there's overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it's likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn't do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.
Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don't think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don't think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.
Studies have shown it to be around $150k/yr for a single person. Any more money than that does not really improve individual happiness. Obviously that varies but for a ballpark idea that's the number.