alt Hacker News> it's easy to give away money if you have it.
You'd think that, and yet so few of them give anything significant away (unless you count political donations).
For every one Newmark or MacKenzie Scott who does give there are hundreds who only use charitable trusts as a tax haven, if at all.
So when one of them manages to avoid the extreme-wealth-to-meanness pipeline theorized by Paul Piff (et al) I'm happy to recognize the good they are doing in the world when so many of their peers are going so hard in the other direction.
> MacKenzie Scott
What exactly has been achieved with the billions MacKenzie Scott has given away? She seems to do very little vetting of the organizations she donates to. And upon a cursory inspection, they mostly seem like the kinds of organizations where most of the donor dollars go to white collar non-profit employees that produce little in the way of results, with very little going to needy people.
I feel like the billions might be better used to piggyback on government programs that have already identified need. For example, we could offer universal school lunch for an incremental $11 billion a year (on top of the $18 billion the government already spends). I bet a few of these “giving pledge” billionaires could just fund such a program in perpetuity.