The Gates Foundation only has $48 billion (as of 2019), and it is the largest private philanthropic foundation in the world. I don’t expect 100% of that money to be donated to causes. It has 1,600 employees, all of whom get paid to work there.
I’m not trying to make it seem bigger and more significant than it is, but I don’t see anybody else donating nearly as much to promoting good causes as they and Warren Buffett are.
As far as Bill and Melinda making any money personally from the Foundation, according to this…
Do Bill and Melina Personally Profit from the Foundation’s Work?
No. The foundation’s private inurement prohibition prohibits the foundation from being operated in a way that personally benefits Bill and Melinda. This includes any earnings by the Trust and where the foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund liquidate charitable holdings and realize a profit – that all must be used for charitable purposes. Under this structure, Bill and Melinda have given away $36.8 billion so far to cure disease, save lives, and help the world’s neediest.
Bill and Melinda joined Warren Buffett in starting and signing the Giving Pledge in 2010, promising to donate a majority of their wealth to charity during their lifetime or in their will.
A lot of people (myself included) simply want enough money to be comfortable to varying degrees. We call it “fuck you” money - enough that we don’t have to work.
Musk, Trump and those like them want “fuck it” money: enough money to wake up in a strange hotel room with a dead underaged hooker, covered in coke and holding a smoking gun, and their only thought is “Huh. Where’d I park?”
Here is something I don’t get, Warren Buffett and the railway strike.
According to this article, railroad profits have skyrocketed because railroad companies are intentionally understaffing their workforce. Warren Buffett’s company owns one of the major rail lines. Railroads are making huge profits and could easily hire more people if they wanted. But they don’t want to. So instead of hiring more people and giving their workers a better work/life balance (which is what the workers wanted) congress is now trying to take away the rail workers ability to strike. The democratic congress and democratic president.
Buffett is 92 years old and is already worth 108 billion dollars. He will probably be dead in 5 years, and he has already said he is going to donate his money to charity. So why does he want to extract more wealth from railway workers? What does he stand to gain? Slightly more money to donate to charity by extracting more wealth and using it for dividends and stock buybacks? I don’t get it. I mean, I ‘get it’ that to them its all a game. Business is their hobby. But they’re playing with people’s lives.
I’m starting to think people who say ‘there are no good billionaires’ really aren’t bullshitting. I thought that was just a saying, but who knows honestly. I used to consider Buffett and Musk to be good billionaires but Musk’s behavior over the last 5-10 years has reshapen that, and now Buffett’s behavior on the railway strike makes me feel sad that I misjudged him. Maybe they just have the money to afford better PR to manipulate suckers like myself.
That isn’t a point. If I donate $1 today to a foundation fighting ignorance, there’s nothing weird about them using that dollar to make sure the effort is sustained vs just spending it today.
It’s not just Buffett’s money. He only owns about 31% of Berkshire Hathaway. The remaining 69% is owned by a thousands of individual shareholders. He has a fiduciary duty to act in the economic interest of all shareholders, not just his personal moral feelings.
But the rich say you can have all your cuddles, but I’m not only taking your extra piece. I want you to have no more than the minimal amount of pie it takes to live. Its been called minimum wage.
Wages aren’t set by mustache-twirling rich guys determining how they can best screw workers.
Labor is a market. And if you’re making minimum wage, that basically implies that ANYONE can do your job with minimal to no training or experience. You’re utterly fungible if you’re making minimum wage, and that’s why they’re paid so low- if someone doesn’t like it, they can get someone else (anyone else really) who can do it just the same for that pay.
And it’s also why they have no leverage over employers; being fungible like that means that employers just don’t give a crap; if you mouth off, they’ll find some other person to do that no-experience, no-training job who’s willing to shut up and work for minimum wage.
That’s also why people like say… Jose Altuve make 26 million. There are a VERY small set of people who can play second base like him, and in order to secure his services, Houston has to pay him accordingly.
There’s no fuzzy nonsense about how ‘worthy’ a job or a person is; it’s all about how easily you are replaced, ultimately. And someone making minimum wage is very easily replaced.
And FWIW, minimum wage is a legislated floor value; many of these jobs wouldn’t even command that in today’s economy without a minimum wage.
Well, no. All it implies, as you note later on, is that there’s a sufficiently large pool of people able and willing to do your job that employers don’t have to pay more than that to attract applicants.
Look how many gig-dependent freelance artists, writers, musicians, etc., for example, make what works out to even less than minimum wage. It’s not that the work they do requires no training or experience or skills; it’s that there are a lot of people willing to do it for little money.
On the other hand, look at how many white-collar jobs or (rare) unionized blue-collar jobs actually need minimal to no training or experience to perform them, but get paid considerably above minimum wage. Artificial entry barriers (degree requirements, etc.) restrict the size of the applicant pool and inflate the perceived prestige, and hence value, of the job. The correlation between necessary skill or training and pay level is not as strong as we like to think.
Probably not as small as we imagine, in terms of natural talent and ability. But since the number of pro-baseball-player jobs available is artificially limited by the rules of the sports leagues that control them, only a small subset of the small subset who even consider that potential career path get a chance at the expensive training and coaching that the teams provide. Among that very small and to some extent randomly selected set, I agree that someone like Altuve is clearly a standout.
Yes but doesn’t the CEO of costco get away with offering good wages and benefits by discussing how it is good for business?
The behavior of the rail industry is probably going to lead to a (wildcat) strike which is going to seriously damage the industry. They can’t just hire people off the street to do those jobs.
Exploitation of your workers leads to higher turnover, lower morale, more sick days, less retention, more people avoiding entering the industry. The healthcare industry, like the rail industry, is on the brink of collapse due to understaffing. Collapse of an industry is not good for business.
However we slice that in detail, labor is still a market, and wages by and large, are set by market forces, whether those are barriers to entry, availability of substitutes, training requirements, or other things.
Ultimately it doesn’t really matter if a person making minimum wage is doing so because there’s a huge amount of supply for a skilled position, or if the excess of supply is because anyone can do the job. What counts here is that it’s a market force that’s causing wages to be low, not some plutocrat cackling about how he can screw the little guy by reducing his meager wages even lower.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Some employers, as Wesley_Clark noted, choose to pay low-tier/low-skill workers better wages and benefits, even though they could probably fill their positions at minimum wage. They can justify it to shareholders on the grounds of paying off better in the long run.
That’s sort of the opposite, in that employers always have the option to pay more, if they feel like they get something from it.
But the default would be that employers want to pay no more than the market price for labor, which isn’t the same thing at all as deliberately screwing workers. These companies don’t owe workers anything, which is a misconception that people have.
Except that “the market price for labor” and “deliberately screwing workers” are not totally separate phenomena.
In the imperfect real world as opposed to theoretical ideal markets, “the market price for labor” is never a completely automatic outcome of completely impersonal forces. There are always many arbitrary choices influencing it. And sometimes those choices involve choosing to grab a quick profit by shaving empoyee wages rather than figuring out more difficult and sustainable ways to increase profits. That puts downward pressure on the “market price” of labor.
None of this requires any employers to do any actual cackling or have any deliberate evil oppressive intentions, of course. But employers are also not mere helpless cogs in a perfectly impersonal machine called “the market”.
I understand that sometimes employers’ choices are more limited than they’d like. Sometimes they can’t figure out a viable way to be socially responsible and also stay in business. I’ve sometimes invested some money in a company that tried to be socially responsible and failed because they couldn’t make it work, at which point I lost my money. I don’t consider that a good outcome. So it’s not that I don’t understand what’s at stake here.
But we aren’t going to make a fundamentally complex and difficult system simpler and easier by just agreeing to pretend that market forces are totally objective and impersonal, and that “the market price for labor” is just a spontaneous natural phenomenon for which nobody bears any responsibility.
I suppose there is also an argument to be made that a grown man making tens of millions for playing a children’s game while millions of people can’t afford basic health care or housing is a sign of a flawed system.
For small business, I think that’s definitely the case. It’s a tough world out there. But for corporations raking in billions of dollars there is absolutely no excuse for not doing better. To use a recent example, a huge chunk of the inflation we’re experiencing is adding massive profit to major corporations, who are hiking up prices just because they can. This is evil. To profit off the suffering of so many people is inexcusable, and it’s typical these days. So yeah excuse me if I don’t stan for billionaires.
Probably, but what’s being reported is they’re increasing their prices far beyond their increases in cost. There was a line used by someone on BPR I liked: blaming price hikes on greed is like blaming plane crashes on gravity - it was always there, waiting for an opportunity.
Companies like Nestle and P&G have seen 7.5% rises in cost, but raised prices ~14%, but there have been a bunch of reports in the past few weeks.