This entire story is just so heart warming and I don't know if the title/discussions right now are doing it justice.
1. The fact that this donation is 100% going towards tuition. My university has a few B's in endowment, but those money are most definitely not going towards making the tuition fees lower lol. Hopefully this will allow them to select some candidate that are struggling the most financially...
2. The donor being a 93 year old doctor/alumni of that school that studied "learning disabilities and developed screening protocols".
3. The money was from her late husband's "whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock". And before he passed, he told her to "do whatever you think is right with it" and the article ends with her saying "I hope he's smiling and not frowning". Makes me cry a little.
I grew up and did my education in Denmark. Here we have another sentiment on philanthropy than the anglo world has. Generally I don't like when a single person decide the destiny for many people, as in this case. It as anti democratic and concentrates power.
Stories like these are heartwarming indeed, but they also help keep status quo. In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this way is anti-meritocratic.
Stories like this highlight an interesting paradox of the anglo world: The relationsship between democracy and large scale individual impact and the relationsship between allowing people to make their own wealth while the really rich people are merely early, passive, investors.
(It is hard to write critical comments like this when "The donor being a 93 year old doctor/alumni of that school that studied "learning disabilities and developed screening protocols"." - I hope you can forgive me.)
It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market?
How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?
I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no.
Apparently they can by giving it to the right entity at the right time.
What we could do (besides taxing it away) is configure a limit to what they are allowed to do with it.
I also see room for special titles with cosmetic privileges if someone accomplishes to pay the enormous tax.
It will be hard to find the right privileges. Something like a medal or an outfit is obviously doable. An annual fancy dinner for the group doesn't seem over the top. A daily 30 min slot on the TV for them to bid on exclusively, or each their own slot annually. Can grant 3 lectures in any university. It gets slightly dubious if we add special construction permits for locations no one else may build in.
The funniest I could think of, at 10 bl+ we seize all of your money and assets, you are forbidden to participate in the financial system. You get a robe and a cloak and a card with which you can eat any place, stay at any hotel, buy cloths, do shopping, take a taxi and take any flight with a maximum of 3 guests + partner and kids.
I want to understand this. If I buy a Novo Nordisk share on the market I never gave novo nordisk a single krone. My counter part is the seller (who rarely would be the company itself).
Generally I would say that investors provide liquidity to the market. Ie. the action of buying and selling are the ones that provide the value. Not holding.
You can conclude that a person holding onto a share for 30 years did not provide any value. That person was merely a rent seeker based on other people providing value by doing the asset allocation – In Denmark these people would be punished by the progressive capital gains tax, while the people trading ones in a while would benefit from a lower tax bill.
Or am I wrong?
If I give Novo directly $125 for a share of their stock, sell it 30 seconds later to you, who gives me $125.01, and you hold those shares for 30 years, which one of us really invested in Novo? Does your opinion change if we've agreed the night before that you'll buy the share from me?
I believe the long-term holders of equity investment are the true investors, regardless of whether they bought the shares in an initial offering or a secondary offering.
The initial offering market doesn't exist without the secondary market.
I am talking about the value you provide as an investor - regardless of where you got the share. I agree that it is indifferent whether you buy it from the company (in an IPO or in later emissions) or on the secondary market.
My point is that the value provide is liquidity. Ie. the property that owners of a stock con transfer that stock into money to use on other ventures. People that merely hold a stock does not provide liquidity. You need to have an open order on your stock to do that.
Now, please oppose me! My question is: What value to does term holder provide in virtue of them being long term holders?
They have (transitively) provided the company the original $125 to use in their operations.
In that example, you provided the money; I was just a middle-man.
Except as it pertains to employee/executive comp and future fund-raising, the company doesn't care about the secondary market liquidity. They care about the money they used over that 30 years to grow.
But that value already existed as an intrinsic property of the company (eg. NAV). What the market did was to unlock these money for the company to use - Ie. they provided liquidity.
Example: I have a company that is worth $1000, but I need to spend $200 in R&D. I sell 20% of the company in the market for 200$. No value way produced, but the market transformed my 200$ from company to money - ie. liquidity.
Value that only happens when people trade, and not when people hold. So back to my initial point: Long term investors does not provide value.
Upon what is this based in a world where no long-term investors exist?
Even in the "DCF of dividends plus NPV of terminal enterprise value" model, the last is dependent on long-term investors. (For the high number of tech and high-growth companies who pay no dividends, the first term in the valuation is $0.)
All of your questions can easily be understood by a few minutes of investopedia. Start by reading about "Capital Markets" and then risk transfer.
You start the thread saying what people ought to do with their money and presumably having it forcefully taken with little understanding of financial markets. This is [one reason] why nobody takes these suggestions seriously about personally wealth.
Then you should be able to make a well informed comment on the matter, as you clearly understand it.
What suggestions? Capital gains tax? I only know of very few industrialised countries not enforcing capital gains tax. So that idea is most certainly taken serious.
Can you expand on this? Having money "forcefully taken" is a core feature of modern efficient markets whether you like it or not.
I certainly don't understand but there is no need. The mechanism (provided it is legal) isn't really important.
We need work, to earn enough to survive and have some quality of life. It must feel like you've contributed something useful and society rewarded you reasonably for it. Others will have to do work for you or it wont work. If there is no money for that it cant work.
I think 100 years before things get truly silly.
This reminds me of ancient Athens. The rich would all compete to pay taxes, because your social status was based on your taxes, and you had special perks if you paid enough. It became a bragging opportunity to showcase your wealthy.
If you funded something with your taxes, you could hire the artist that made the sculptures. Say you build a new civic center with a theater. You have an incentive to hire a good artist to make the place in your preference, with your image, which means the city has more art. If it was an ugly building, it’d be an ugly building with your name on it. The rich during times of war would be separated into those that could fund a whole battleship and those that didn’t. If you shirked your responsibilities during war, you were viewed as a traitor who was so greedy they’d let the city fall.
Maybe we need to stop chastising the rich for building things in their names, but instead give them more opportunities to do so. Additionally maybe we should make all tax payments public, so you can see if your friends and family avoid taxes. Maybe people would become embarrassed to pay less taxes than their employees if everyone could look it up.
”... he didn't pay any federal income tax.”
“That makes me smart.” - Donald Trump
That is just, on the face of it, false. Did Stephen King not produce millions and almost a billion in value? Despite writing books that have been read by millions of people, have turned into super successful movies, including some movies considered some of our best art?
JK Rowling surely produced $1B of value. Much more in fact.
It's about putting an upper limit to the amount of resources a single person is allowed to amass and thus control.
We agree that we don't want a dictator. A single person with too much wealth can be almost as powerful, hence there are good arguments in favor of setting such limits.
And yet many people have far more actual power over people's lives, for example many elected and/or appointed officials.
If a cop in my city wants to ruin your life, there's a chance it'll be easier for them to do so than it is for a rich individual, not to mention the mayor of the city.
And unlike a billionaire, who'd have to spend money to actually "control people's lives" and is therefore limited by some constraint , an elected official gets to control people's lives with no constraint at all.
What if the cop wants to ruin the lives of a large group of people? How about if it's a group people living in the next town over, can he get away with it? If he does manage to ruin the lives of people, will he get voted out or dismissed?
Bill Gates improved the lives of countless people around the world. He could as easily made the lives of countless worse if he wanted to or as an unintended consequence of his projects.
As an unintended consequence, sure, but that's more true of scientific/technological progress specifically than what Bill Gates did, which was closer to business and tech popularization. If a scientist invents a super-virus that kills everyone, then yes, obviously, they've made the world worse, but that's not really tied to money.
As for "as easily" making countless lives worse in other ways - I kind of disagree there. He made countless lives better because people voluntarily bought his products. He didn't coerce people, they chose to do it. There's no analagously easy way to spend money to ruin people's lives, and especially not if you consider the kind of scrutiny and backlash he'd receive.
This is a straw man: A police man can only ruin so many lives. He would have to be Santa Claus in order to harres the entire population of the US.
A policeman does not have the same impact over peoples lives as, eg., Jeff Bezos.
A policeman in my city could arguably have more impact on my life than Jeff Bezos does. What kind of impact do you think Jeff Bezos has exactly?
And obviously, a policeman is the lowest-power individual in this scenario - my city councilman probably has more impact than that.
Michel Jordan or Bill Gates are almost as powerful as Putin?
I like how you threw in the word "intelligently" like this investments was planned and thought out from the beginning ;)
Thresholds are are not that hard to decide: It is about taxation that takes macro-economic behaviour and targets into account.
We have a political party that wants to reduce capital gains tax in Denmark (currently 27%/42%). However, analysis shows that this would benefit only the wealthiest 2% so the consensus is that this is a bad idea from a macro economic perspective.
The value of money is relative. Your 1 million dollars are worthless if everyone else has 10 million dollars. The second people act upon and realise that, we can start to build good economic systems.
Macro-economy shows that EU is doing wrong as US companies outperform EU companies. Wealth/power concentration isn't due to capitalism but due to human nature and society scale.
Even if success greatest factor is luck it still requires merit. By punishing success you're punishing people that put money into savings, that attempt to innovate and improve human society, that invest in promising areas. In the long term society will be stagnant. And I doubt that in the short term society will be more equal because forced distribution of wealth historically increases inequality.
Maybe companies, but they are not what should matter. As far as know the amount of poor people in the usa is also way higher than in Europe. If we take that into account i'd say that Europe is doing just fine.
If things are so good why Europe is being dominated by authoritarian populists?
Citation needed. No, Europe is not doing just fine. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
Wasn't it just last year that the richest man and the richest woman in the world were both French? A statement at "Europe" level is far too generic, especially when it comes to economic policies or quality of life. Europe includes both Norway and Moldova and the variance in the quality of life is much higher than Massachusetts vs Mississippi.
Absolutely. To achieve such results you need so much luck and such a headstart that any merits you might additionally have are drowned in everything else that contributes to "your" "success".
Rule of thumb. About $10 million.
But it's not about who deserves what. It's about how much influence can society safely let a single random primate have.
The actual number will be determined by the political process. It's a number that seems sufficiently unachievable for 51% of people so that they feel safe to vote to heavily tax those who hace that much.
Current barriers to that is that the very wealthy own the culture and they are selling poor people the illusion that everybody can be the rich and what they are doing is actually building value not extracting it despite the fact that trillions of dollars have been extracted from the control of democracy and market and placed exclusively in their hands.
It's difficult to quantify but many government bureaucrats hold much more power than that.
Your "solution" replaces one problem with a worse problem while punishing sucess.
You are severely overrating how much influence $10m buys you, and very severely underrating how much influence you can have without personally having $10m dollars.
"It's anti-meritocratic?" Yes.
"How do you determine the threshold?" Somehow.
It doesn't matter how you determine it or what you end up determing nearly as much as doing it at all by any means, and working out good procedures and results over time.
Currently, we have nothing at all. A sub-optimal limit, a downright wrong limit, derived from sub-optimal, downright wrong methods is better than none at all.
The Bezoss and the Musks of the world are not doing anything we need done badly enough to be worth what we give them.
Those people who like to run big projects will still be full of themselves and still seek to be in charge of everyone else and will still command the same resources even in a world where that isn't expressed as personal private ownership of the resources.
If the change in incentives changes anything, if there are people who currently became billionairs and produced Amazon and Facebook, who would not have bothered if they couldn't own it all, I am prepared to call that only a win.
We'd still get anything that was actually valuable to us rather than just valuable to the owner.
The only problem is needing to incorporate enough ownership and capitalism so that there is any motivation for excellence. If everything is purely communist and no one owns anything, then all products and services suck. There does need to be some sort of reward for making the electric car and the charging network actually good, and some anti-reward for not making it available to everyone. Patents and copyright need to be somehow quite different. Maybe they still exist and confer some sort of benefit, but nothing like now. Rewarding people for inventing or improving things only to let them keep it for themselves, and even retain ownership control through drm and software over products that were sold more than nullifies the value of getting them to invent the thing in the first place. More than merely negates. Their existence suppresses everyone else who might have done it differently.
Where is the line and how do you determine it is no conundrum at all. It's nothing but some boring policy grunt work to hash that out.
In a fair world i can keep what is mine and can do with it, what i want. If its well earned, so be it.
In an unfair world it is taken away from me.
It is just numbers.
"Fair" has many meanings. If there are 2 brothers, one super intelligent and the other retarded, should the smart one keep all his money for himself and the dumb one die from starvation since he is not capable of sustaining himself? The smart one got his gift for free and although maybe he didn't waste it while he could have, the retarded one didn't have equal starting ground.
The difference I see between US/EU worldview is that in US the biggest emphasis is in what "YOU" did, disregarding luck, chance, environment factors etc. "Bill Gates created the wealth himself". People like feeling like there is a chance for them to become super powerful and important and that there is no system holding you back, even though they never actually do it but the hope/idea is very important for you. I can see this in Eastern Europe where large percentage of people dream of winning the lottery; I guess that is something from which people here draw hope of power and influence, while the same people are ok with strong social measures, high taxes, free healthcare etc. while I feel in US all these social benefits are perceived to prevent people from achieving astronomical results and hence shouldn't be.
Good is, if brothers help each other. In general, if humans help each other. But it is the brother's decision to help. Fair.
Unfair is, if someone else grabs the stuff of the one brother and gives it to the other.
Well some of us think the smart brother got lucky and so he HAS to give
This is unfortunately an uninformed opinion that pollutes the debate.
An example you probably should should think about: Who owns money and their value? What happens when the central banks decide to raise the interest rates to 20% and you loose everything? Just a shame? On the contrary, what happens when the central banks employ quantitative easing and that makes you rich? How does this interact with large-scale projects the government starts to create employment.
Not always are fiscal and monetary policies aligned. This creates either severe depressions or economic bubbles.
When an opinion is funded an understanding of to what extend the greater society defines the value of things it will have gravity. Until then, it is just noise.
So, if someone says, billionaire is bad, that is an informed opinion, but when someone else says, billionaire is good, it is uninformed? Thanks for the fish.
You pay for stuff in the supermarket, you get a product. No strings attached. I would be surprised, if people like the idea, that if one buys a piano, that for each song being played, one has to give a dividend to the piano manufacturer. Usually the transaction is closed. Though, such deals can be made. Maybe you get the piano for free.
You pay a worker that what you think is needed to make a piano. If one worker makes a billion pianos, you pay him a lot. And if you sell pianos a billion times, you become a billionaire. And if your worker can buy stocks, he will also get dividends.
The idea that billionaires have to give a share is nice and good, definitly good for hackernews stories and their socialistic readers, but that the billionaire has already given societies wealth manyfolds, well, afterall people bought their stuff to improve their lives, that made him a billionaire, that is silently forgotten.
As usual, it is play with envy and greed, how dare someone has more than me!
Isn't it inevitable that one person will decide the fate of many ? If we get rid of billionaires through wealth tax, then politicians will have more power to decide the fate of many.
The US seem to choose their presidents not based on policies or track record but rhetoric. That doesn't seems better than capitalism.
Politicians go through a voting process. People needs to agree to be ruled by them.
To become a billionaire you just need to be lucky enough to purely mechanistically attach yourself to a market phenomenon and drain it. Noone needs to agree to that.
This market phenomenon is people voting with their wallets. It is also democratic.
The US political system is another discussion.
Again, as an EU citizen, the two party system seems to be wildly un-democratic. In Denmark we have 10 parties represented in the parliament (in a country of 5.5million people). This forces decision making to be compromise seeking and represent more real opinions.
I do agree that in a more fair world there shouldn't be billionaires, but at the same time it is curious that from all the stories posted on this website - where billionaires are making uncountable decisions that have a massive impact in our society - this is the only one where commenters would come to express their discomfort towards this fact of capitalism.
Don't conflate an in-equal system with capitalism. That would be untrue and un-wise.
Most people agree that a free market needs to exists in order to uphold a capitalistic system (what is ownership if you can not transfer it?).
You can make free markets that are regulated in a way that ensures that participants are, roughly, equal - in fact there is an argument that a market is not free unless this is the case.
When participants of a market can increase their profit margins it is usually a sign of an ineffcient market - a participant has an advantage that other participants can not compete with.
Equal opportunity, not equal outcome, right?
I'm from Switzerland / Germany, and thought exactly the same. It's like, great in this specific case that she did this, but boy, are you fucked as a country if you rely on the good will of multi-billionaires to fix your problems.
What would be your plan to limit Taylor Swift's power? Limit the number songs she can write per year?
Yes, both good and bad at the same time, neither overriding or negating the other.
Individual doing a great thing is great.
A system that depends on hoping and begging for miracles is not great.
I might agree when they donate to push their own agenda but this just eliminates tuition for medical students.
"if you decide to die poor, a great many things can be done with your life". Heard it from a friend whose thesis advisor loved to say it occassionally.
It only works when first you accumulate some resources (knowledge, money, wisdom, strength, whatever) which you can then spend on others.
Just staying poor and spending your whole days on searching for food (or a drink, or a dose) does not provide one with many opportunities to do interesting things with their life.
Giving is what makes a life great. But you have to have something to give first.
True.
I think it can also mean that you are free to do things which are not possible if you chain your actions to the goal of financial success.
But if you are poor and live in poverty - there is almost nothing you can do, only to struggle to get by another day.
Yes, not necessarily a financial success. Success or resource of any kind, taken widely. Prince Gautama did not share his inherited riches, instead he shared the information about the path to enlightenment. William Shakespeare was apparently tight with money, what he shared was his mastery of English language. Etc.
I've currently reading Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball by Alice Shroeder and "Sandy" Gottesman frequently appears. When I saw 2, I thought that sounds awfully like someone I read about in Buffett's Graham group. After 3, it was definitely someone in the Graham group I've read about.
The Graham gatherings that included Buffett and Gottesman had fine gentlemen, at least one of which has championed a similar cause in the past, whether that was Gottesman or another one of his peers, my memory fails me. While it's sad to see someone I am still reading about pass away, it's heartening to know that he ended on a high note and that he continues to leave a positive impact from beyond the grave.
As someone who studied/follows finance, but doesn't work in it, BH is about as 'The Good Guys' as it gets in the investing business. Pick stuff that matters & works, fund it, don't sell it.
BH is perfectly happy to run predatory loan businesses. It's also worth remembering Munger's nightmarish forays into architecture.
Oh that's super cool to know!
weird flex but ok