alt Hacker NewsYeah agreed. You basically see small time donations, or boomers once they have their $50B+ pile of money pledging to give it away at death. Not a lot of big incremental giving in between by $100M-$1B class.
I mean Gates is doing good work on poverty & global health for sure, but hes quite the exception.
You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if its a tax code thing or what.
One thought I've had, living in NYC, is that there are just businesses structured to take every incremental dollar out of you whether you are worth $0/$100K/$100M/$100B now. $100M condos in 5 different cities, $1M supercars, private jets, blade chopper from Manhattan to the jet, just so many ways to part fools from their cash.
For context, David Rockefeller's old NYC townhouse, which he lived in for 70 years, was for sale, post-renovation, for $50M or so. Rockefeller name synonymous with old money wealth.
These days though, a $50M apartment might not even crack the top 10 sales annually in 2020s NYC. New money is also hot money by comparison.. I really do think our vintage of wealthy are that much more rapacious.
Replies
> You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if it’s a tax code thing or what.
For a while, America was much more aware that you could just kill the rich like you killed kings. The rich gave away more and did more for society as a way of washing their reputation and proving they shouldn’t be killed in an uprising. Today, global society has become much more legally certain around perceptions of property rights and entitlement of the rich to their wealth.
If we saw genuine movements in America to (for example) tax wealth above 1B at like a 99% tax rate, I bet you’d suddenly see a few new well endowed universities and concert halls and similar.
Instead today, the wealthy are much more interested in showing off their reputation by buying media companies (WashPo, twitter, etc) with influence or by building their vision of the future in a commercial context - look at Elon musk and bezos going to space or Bryan Johnson trying to live forever and selling vitamins along the way.
When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.
In absolute value this is a fantastic contribution to support a very valuable project, and anybody who donates to Zig should be commended. It's one of a handful of projects that has a real chance of meaningfully pushing back against software bloat.
I do find it sobering to look at relative contribution, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the scales of money some are working with, and the out sized impact of having wealth. A $300k donation from a billionaire is loosely equivalent to somebody with $100k donating $30 (and likely has even less impact on quality of life!). We wouldn't have a hacker news article about such an event.
I should probably just shut up and go donate to Zig.