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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Asking who else has donated anything close to this is a bit silly considering most people aren't billionaires. It might be more fair to ask how many people have donated 1.2% of their net worth to charity, and I think the answer will surprise you in that a lot of people have.

A second question is whether or not this makes up for how Bezos has gotten his money and the potential damages on society that has. If I burn down a house and then donate to the rebuilding it's still a net negative. The systems that allow people to amass this much wealth need to be looked at critically to see if they really are benefitting society or are just causing increased problems.

As a final note Bezos is getting a lot of negative attention because he's made comments before about how hard it is to get rid of his wealth while seemingly ignoring a lot of really good ways for him to do so. It took years of negative attention to get him moving on causes like this.

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I don't think using a percentage as reference is useful in this case. There are a variety of reasons why giving 2 billion (even if it's 1.2%) is much different then giving a few hundred or thousand dollars. You have to be much more concerned about the overhead, how the money is being spent, who is managing it, etc... because even a 1% waste results in a loss of 200 million dollars.

Secondly, I don't know if anyone has really quantified how much damage or potential damage Bezos has done in his lifetime, and I would be surprised if it was actually net negative. What honest to god damage has he done? Some people have rough working conditions and are underpaid ( these people are not forced to work at Amazon). I agree that is bad and think they should be paid more and treated better. What did the world benefit though? Everyone gets generally good cheap stuff reliably within a few days to their doorstep, saving millions in man hours yearly.

Have you donated more than 1.2% of your net worth to charity?

Who hasn't???

I donate more than 1.2% of my income each year to charity, and that amounts to a lot more than 1.2% of my net worth (it should be noted that people in my generation tend to have a negative net wealth due to student loans and being locked out of the housing market, which means most of them can meet this requirement by giving five dollars to a homeless person on the street if you want to use a more liberal definition for charity).

Specifically, I donate money to (and this is not in any particular order)-

* ACLU * EFF * NAMI * NAACP * BLM * NPR (local affiliate) * Between $40 and $100 a week directly to homeless people.

I also try to volunteer time as well.

What charities do you donate to, and more importantly why is that even relevant to a conversation about what responsibilities people with obscene amounts of wealth should have?

Yes, I do so every year.

1.2% is not some lofty, unrealistic amount if you are financially secure. The median net worth of Americans by age 55 peaks at $85,000 [1], which comes out to just under $20 per week. If you exclude home equity from net worth, half of Americans under 55 could donate 1.2% for less than $6 per week.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-net-worth-...

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