Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
forbes.com
forbes.com
This is not to dismiss the likes of Bill Gates: he has been very public with his donations, but in some cases (notably celebrity) notoriety in your donations may create a multiplier effect as it encourages others to do likewise. Even so, I think this is still on a lower-rung, philanthropy-wise, than Feeney's approach.
Nonetheless, we're sitting here praising someone who reduced himself from billions to $2M, but we must remind ourselves that this is unimpressive compared to the poor person who donates $25 to others while starving herself. The value of money is nonlinear. I'm sure that Feeney would say this as well: he no doubt sees himself as saddled with the burden of billions of dollars rather than someone doing something amazing.
I wonder if I ever will have the strength to do what he has done.
On an ascending level, they are as follows:
8. When donations are given grudgingly.
7. When one gives less than he should, but does so cheerfully.
6. When one gives directly to the poor upon being asked.
5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked.
4. Donations when the recipient is aware of the donor's identity, but the donor still doesn't know the specific identity of the recipient.
3. Donations when the donor is aware to whom the charity is being given, but the recipient is unaware of the source.
2. Giving assistance in such a way that the giver and recipient are unknown to each other. Communal funds, administered by responsible people are also in this category.
1. The highest form of charity is to help sustain a person before they become impoverished by offering a substantial gift in a dignified manner, or by extending a suitable loan, or by helping them find employment or establish themselves in business so as to make it unnecessary for them to become dependent on others.
[0] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/eight-levels-of-charita...
Now come on, downvote me to hell.
This is also pretty much one of the ways a certain Shi'a Islam community, Dawoodi Bohra, administers loans which they call Qardan Hasana (the diginifed loan).
[0] https://www.thedawoodibohras.com/2020/07/16/qardan-hasana-th...
a) teaching a man to fish is better than giving a man a fish
b) the former is also more dignified for the person receiving help
This applies whether a person is going to become impoverished or is currently poor. And this idea of dignity is strong enough that it outweighs other considerations, such as anonymity on either side (of course, there's the question of whether giving someone a job anonymously is better than doing it with one or both parties' knowledge... and I don't know what Maimonides would have said).
It is like results matter most (less than the process; big corps will disagree on that)
5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked.
Why would anything following that actually be better?
Actually the Prophet Muhammad said a similar thing to what Feeney has said here about wanting to give charity while alive rather than after his death:
> A man came to the Prophet and asked, "O Allah's Apostle! Which charity is the most superior in reward?" He replied, "The charity which you practice while you are healthy, niggardly and afraid of poverty and wish to become wealthy. Do not delay it to the time of approaching death and then say, 'Give so much to such and such, and so much to such and such.' And it has already belonged to such and such (as it is too late)."
Is it? This is a very Christian way of looking at donations: personal sacrifice / self-deprivation is what matters. [1]
However, utilitarians – notably Effective Altruists [2] – would make the opposite argument: what matters is the impact that you make with the dollars you donate (both in amount and allocation).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite
It is great that money is going to charity, it is great that money previously belonging to Gates' is going to charity, but I would be far more impressed by you if you donated $100/year to the Internet Archive than I am if Bill Gates donated $100 million.
In other words, I don't think anyone claims that $100 will help more than $100 million, but there is no great personal moral achievement in giving away something you don't need and can't use.
I don't think it's what matters necessarily, but I do think that this is why he is receiving praise here and elsewhere. That's a problem, because if we're going to praise him for his sacrifice, we should remind ourselves that his sacrifice is minor compared to other donations due to the nonlinear effect of money.
Now Feeney certainly has had more of an impact, and that's great, but he had that impact because he was fortunate enough to have billions of dollars to give away in the first place. Being lucky is not a valid reason to be praised, I think.
Indeed I don't think Feeney wants to be praised: he just wants to be rid of his wealth in a meaningful way.
But it says a whole lot about Forbes that having at least $2M -- and I'm betting maybe a small apartment and a modest car and possibly even health insurance -- counts as "officially broke" in America.
As long as you convince yourself that the returns to compound interest are higher than the returns to charity at any one point, it's easy to justify just pushing off your donation time to sometime arbitrarily far in the future, and high luxuries can be justified as "self-care" that enhance your own productivity or whatever. Utilitarianism can too easily become perverted to just being self-serving.
Tamas - given at wrong place/time, to wrong (unworthy) person, without respect/decency, with contempt.
Rajas - given with reluctance, expecting return (either from recipient, or praise)
Sattva - given at right time/place, to right (worthy) person, with humility, without expectation of return.
Note that while others religions mainly dwell on not expecting return and anonymity, Hinduism stresses not expecting return but does not stress anonymity as much as it stresses finding the right patra (bowl) i.e. right recipient.
Donating $100 to a poor person, who also happens to be wicked, and/or will definitely spend it on vices, is actually a bad donation, because it causes more harm to the recipient and society, than good.
Also, timing - a litre of blood donated to a save a life in urgent time, is worth more than a litre of blood spilled in war to gain territory.
Also, place - a donation done in holy land or temple is worth more than a donation from a local philanthropy club.
Also, the reward for donation is gaining goodwill in the heart of Bhagavan (God). And He dishes out goodwill proportional to the 'effort' rather than 'amount' - a $100 wage earner donating $10 is judged the same as $100 million donated by a billionaire.
Source : Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 17, verses 20,21,22
Try imagining Larry Ellison doing this.
an 80% loss of that $2M cash leaves him with a paltry $400K which, assuming a rate of return == inflation, is 10 years of $40K/yr spending, to say nothing of 2x SS income.
people's idea of "being broke" is just ridiculous.
There are other perspectives on this. Often, the very poor person does not hope he will ever get out of poverty, and that makes it much easier to have a sharing/charitable mindset. Keeping the $25 will help him for a few days, after which he'll be broke again and no better off. Giving it away will have the same end result, albeit a few days earlier - but it will be a charitable act he'll feel good about for life, and may also make a friend.
The person for whom it is most difficult to give is usually the one at the edge of poverty. If he keeps the money, he has a chance he'll escape the cycle of poverty. If he gives it away, he'll never change his station in life. For this somewhat wealthier person, that $25 has a lot more value (As an aside, I'm not sure I would respect him much if he gave it away).
To paraphrase from a popular movie: Put people in a pit with no hope of escape and what you get is fairly boring. But give them a glimmer of hope that they can escape, and then watch how they will destroy one another in their attempts to get out. Charity is generally cheap for those who have nothing: They know they are not losing much when they give it away.
>this is unimpressive compared to the poor person who donates $25 to others while starving herself
I absolutely agree and think of this often when I see the philanthropy figures published each year when the top Billionaires have donated <0.2% of their wealth where as there are individuals like this gentleman[1] who donates 80% of his earnings from road side tea stall to educate underprivileged children[1].
[1]https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2019/11/tea-seller-kanpur-...
I'm not trying to downplay him in anyway. I'm just saying that $2M in the bank is still an extremely comfortable life so there is not much hardship to be had in giving up everything over that.
Also, as for donating anonymously vs non-anonymously I do it non-anonymously as trying to add social proof that you should donate. The more it appears normal to donate the more people will donate, or so I believe. If I could do that anonymously I would but people read me (my blog or other things), they don't read anon's blog/tweets, whatever.
And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So He said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.”
Luke 21:1-4
If we had taxed him at the rate we have taxed people in the 40's and 50's maybe there would not be such a need for all these "philanthropists" to give "their" money away.
And give me a break, he is NOT broke. I live on 20K a year and I do not even think I am broke. When he is living like St. Francis of Assisi let me know.
While it is truly selfless, I'm not sure what is __really__ harder; for a person living a multi-billion-dollar lifestyle to change to a million-dollar lifestyle, or someone who is used to living on the penny, to give away most of what they have....
"This is an anglicized form of an Olde Gaelic name O Fiannaidh - composed of the elements 'O' meaning a 'grandson (of)' or 'male descendant' and 'Fianna' - a 'soldier'. The main O Fiannaidh clan was located in the parish of Easkey, Co. Sligo."
On the idea of sacrifice as virtuous.
Sacrifice is only compatible with selfishness. This is because for an action to be a sacrifice, there is two criteria in which it must meet.
The first criteria are that the individual must love themselves.
She who has no value of her own life, cannot sacrifice it, just as she could not sacrifice a rock found in a cave. Vice versa, an individual which holds her own life as immensely valuable, is able to sacrifice it for an ideal, however this leads to the second criterion.
The second criteria are that the individual must hold no value in the ideal or cause in which they contribute towards.
This is because if you hold something as valuable, and you give it up for something of equal or greater value, you are not sacrificing, but rather trading.
Each trade has its own currency, and what that is I leave to the reader to investigate, but sacrifice is only possible for the woman that loves herself and does not hold any value in the ideal in which she sacrifices herself for.
Thus, if you do see virtue in sacrifice, it is only possible because of selfishness, and this is problematic.
Every rational choice is made based on some personal values. A person with unselfish personal values can take action on those values. Do you think their action occurs because of their selfishness?
Are all rational actions selfish?
I think that is not a useful way to think.
To whom it may concern:
Spend your money on riotous living – no tax; leave your money to your children – the tax collector gets paid first. That is the message sent by the estate tax. It is a bad message and the estate tax is a bad tax.
The basic argument against the estate tax is moral. It taxes virtue – living frugally and accumulating wealth. It discourages saving and asset accumulation and encourages wasteful spending. It wastes the talent of able people, both those engaged in enforcing the tax and the probably even greater number engaged in devising arrangements to escape the tax.
The income used to accumulate the assets left at death was taxed when it was received; the earnings on the assets were taxed year after year; so, the estate tax is a second or third layer of taxation on the same assets.
The tax raises little direct revenue- partly because the estate planners have been so successful in devising ways to escape the tax. Costs of collection and compliance are high, perhaps of the same order as direct tax receipts. The encouragement of spending reduces national wealth and thereby the flow of aggregate taxable income. These indirect effects mean that eliminating the tax is likely to increase rather than decrease the net revenue yield to the federal government.
The estate tax is justified as a means of reducing the concentration of wealth. However, the truly wealthy and their estate planners avoid the tax. The low yield of the tax is a testament to the ineffectiveness of the tax as a force for reshaping the distribution of wealth.
The primary defense made for the estate tax is that it encourages charity. If so, there are better and less costly ways to encourage charity. Eliminating the estate tax will lead to higher economic growth, which is the most important variable in determining the level of charitable giving.
Death should not be a taxable event. The estate tax should be repealed.
Signed,
Milton Friedman
Only insofar as you believe taxation to be a moral commentary. If one thinks taxation is punishment for a decision, then I can see why one might see it this way.
I don't agree, though. Taxation is reinvestment into the society that makes the usage of that tool–money–possible in the first place. I think it's morally wrong to sequester a social tool in the hands of a few people who never made the investment to get that return in the first place, i.e. children of wealthy parents. I think it's morally wrong for anyone to get to pick and choose who will start out having already won the race. This is different from me being a bad business owner and people choosing not to do business with me.
Should parents be able to spend their earned money on their childrens' upbringing? Of course. If a wealthy parent dies should they be able to leave money behind for their children to have a decent shot at life? Absolutely. Does that require millions or billions of dollars to be hoarded, unused, passed from hand to hand, contributing to a skewed money supply that forces the fed to print more, play with interest rates etc to try to keep the system stable? No, I think there's a reasonable amount that the government can request returned.
Now, the _amount_ of tax is certainly debatable. But to take the extremist position of repealing the tax altogether is absurd IMO.
Is there something virtuous about hoarding wealth?
With a better system, we shouldn't have to introduce one-off taxes for "special events" like death because extreme concentrations of wealth should already be heavily and unavoidably taxed--passing wealth to one's children (or anyone else... in any other country) shouldn't make a difference one way or the other.
Estate taxes stir up an irrelevant debate about the morality of inheritance, and puts the government in the role of deciding this moral question for everyone, when that debate isn't necessary and doesn't really matter.
All that really matters is 1 - how much we need to fund the prerequisites for a modern and decent civilization (which includes things like basic income, healthcare for all, housing for all, education for all, etc., imho), and 2 - what is the most progressive, efficient, and sustainable way to raise this money.
I highly doubt the answer to #2 is an estate tax.
A view toward growing the economy would prefer the riotous living, because it moves more money around. Note that in almost any other context, Friedman is concerned with impediments to economic activity. Yet here, we are led to believe that high levels of economic activity are bad or immoral for some reason?
And of course "riotous living" throws off all sorts of tax revenue in addition to revenue and profits. And since such tax revenue is realized earlier than the death tax, it is more efficient.
The irony of this letter is that Friedman gets it right--the death tax exists to encourage the expenditure of wealth during life--but somehow thinks that is a bad thing.
This wealth would be more efficiently allocated by the innovators of new generations. It is true that the economy isn't a zero sum game, but we can't pretend that so much new pie is created each generation that dynasties hogging the majority doesn't preclude new, more innovative money, from establishing the positions they might otherwise we allowed to, for the benefit of all participants in the economy. The velocity of money matters, and allowing dynasties to guard their wealth indefinitely is bad for everyone.
This also pretends that capital confers no significant power. The reality is that the inheritors of the ultra rich will also inherit their ability to influence society. While not ideal that the ultra rich themselves have this ability to the extent that they do, to be able confer it on an almost arbitrary set of individuals is additionally hazardous, as they have not set themselves apart from other individuals on any meritorious basis.
Wasteful spending should also be taxed. There is no dichotomy. Yes please, put tax on carbon, on plastic, on all the other things that are bad for society. Ideally the most wasteful spenders should be taxed the most - the ten-millionth dollar someone spends on a carbon-emitting activity should be taxed at 90%.
The letter is BS with the first line. It makes it sound like the options are giving money to your kids or getting drunk. But that makes no sense for the range of money we’re talking about.
Jeff Bezos could throw a $10 million party every night for a year and his net worth would go down 2%.
> "As a result, only about 2,000 estates per year in the US are currently liable for federal estate tax." [2]
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
Ah, yes, such a shame that the only way to spend a fortune is on caviar and jetskis.
This is a purposefully obtuse take. We have specific tax structures to incentivize charitable giving, building businesses, creating things to benefit others.
At the wealth levels at which the estate tax applies, a fair amount of luck has to factor in. Having been in the right place at the right time. That has little to do with morality because many other people had the same behaviors but never got lucky. The estate tax is more a tax on luck than it is on hard work and frugality.
The primary way inheritances concentrate wealth is through the "firstborn son rule" where the first son simply receives all of the wealth. If you were to split the wealth among the children it would disappear within a few generations. So simplify the whole ordeal by codifying that no single person may inherit more than 50% of the wealth of the deceased. If son and daughter receive half the wealth of their parents they are unlikely to collaborate for the sake of maintaining generational wealth. Even if the son kills the daughter he will only receive 75% of the wealth of his father.
No liquidation is necessary and therefore it is easy to implement. Paying taxes on inheriting a family business is far more difficult than simply splitting ownership among the living who are still working in that business.
If a person lives on a million a year, but accumulates a billion, do they become more virtuous if they accumulate a second billion?
If everyone lived virtuously, then society wouldn't need laws or taxes. Unfortunately, humans are inconsistently virtuous, so we use laws and taxes to help our society function well.
His argument is hilarious:
"We're going to try and avoid it anyway, so you might as well not try to collect it."
I'm sorry, but I'm not necessarily going to trust someone who has a vested interest in the removal of something that its existence was pointless in the first place. If it truly is meaningless, then why bother?
Another good question is why should a person's accumulated wealth go to that person's heirs upon their death? Those people did nothing themselves to earn that wealth. It is only through the accident of birth they were selected. They completely ignore that. It is assumed that passing their wealth down is natural and right and that any other outcome needs defense.
If that money changed hands via employment or purchase of goods and services, it would have been taxed, even if the exchange was between parent and child. Why is an exchange upon death special?
I found the problem.
Positing it as an unalloyed good to be frugal and accumulate wealth (especially at massive scale) is extremely murky at best.
If you have the means, there’s nothing moral about living frugally. Spending money creates jobs and strengthens the economy.
I don't know what the solution is, but it seems to me that the estate tax system is overly complex, too open to abuse, and needs to be simplified. It is unfortunately intertwined with Trust laws, Probate laws, Income tax laws, international tax treaties, etc. As far as I can tell, the estate tax exists only because of the "stepped up cost basis" feature in the US tax code, where all capital gains is zeroed out upon death by increasing the cost basis of the asset to the current market value. (Does any other country have this?)
I think it would be simpler to eliminate Stepped Up Cost Basis, and replace the estate tax with something like a "deemed disposition" tax, where the capital gains tax is paid upon death (above a certain exemption amount, say $5M/couple), or paid upon transfer to another non-pass-through legal entity (e.g. an irrevocable trust). Oh, we should also eliminate the long-term capital gains tax rate, and all capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as earned income. I think this would eliminate the "carried interest" loophole. Oh, and we should eliminate Dynasty Trusts, which can last as long as 365 years. It's hard to see how allowing a Trust to last 365 years is good public policy. Oh, and so many other loopholes need to be closed.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is much political will to tackle these issues. Estate tax law is a very obscure part of the tax code. Very few people care, except for the small number of ultra wealthy people and their lawyers who are taking full advantage of the current system.
This is the kind of concern that isn't a problem right now, but will be one day. And it will happen in the blink of an eye.
I'm curious what the statistics are for a family remaining wealth over a long period of time.
Even with wealth evenly split between each generations kids, given a growth of just 4% it might end up with each generation getting a greater amount of wealth still.
In the past large familes prevented this, but if the average extremely wealthy person only averages 2 kids. The dilution through children just doesn't occur.
Really? You have no problem one person owning so much money? That's around 30$ for _every_ person on the planet, can you even wrap your head around that? There's no reason why a single person should ever own this sort of wealth, none at all.
On the other hand, Bezos, a single person, has control of a $1.58T company and you are totally okay with it?
What I find sickening is people trying to meddle in other people's pockets.
Because we live in a system which rewards good genes, and that is a very good thing. By instituting a generational wealth tax you will be killing the human desire for wealth on a generational timescale.
Where does the money go? To other people i assume, you have now created a system where the evolutionary incentive is to leech from the system contributing as little as you can get away with. We live in such a system today but at-least there are some benefits to contributing more, those benefits are inherently that you can turn wealth into more children and transfer that wealth to them.
Seems like that was by design.
It is. Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich, on the one hand, and are paternalistic on the other. The only things that get funding are things that can attract the attention of our "betters." If we had taxed them on the front end to the point they couldn't become billionaires in the first place then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable. And with the added bonus that the negative effects of they got to be billionaires don't cause more problems (Feeney worked in private equity. PE are strip & sell firms)
Yup. Even Adam Smith talked about this, it helps propel the capitalist system.
My takeaway from this story is to spend my time on things that matter to me. It's a reminder that our news sources are really just another form of entertainment, which is not something that can give your life meaning or a sense of accomplishment.
While weighing journalist's actions you might want to consider that Chuck Feeney wanted to remain completely anonymous and the media - the members of the media acting in accordance with your desires specifically - made that impossible.
(that some of us have known his name for many years might also indicate that this has never come to my attention is not a meaningful measure of the media's performance - perhaps it's a measure of your use of media)
Biography from 2013: https://www.powells.com/book/billionaire-who-wasnt-how-chuck...
The last time he was reported as giving away "the last of his fortune", in the NY Times, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/james-bond-of-ph...
NY Times at $1B left in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/your-money/a-billion-to-s...
At $1.5B left: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/nyregion/a-billionaire-ph...
NYT on his secrecy in 2007: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26about.html
Series when he was outed in 1997 while trying to remain anonymous: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/business/lone-rangers-of-..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/26/weekinreview/they-gave-mi..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/24/nyregion/quiet-man-with-b..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/a-man-who-repaid..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/he-gave-away-600..., https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/nyregion/giving-a-fortune...
Biography of Chuck Feeney https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2842145-the-billionaire-...
For a great read, and to get a sense of who Chuck Feeney really is, track down a copy of Hugh Lunn's book The Great Fletch, the story of Chuck's mate Ken Fletcher from his Hong Kong days.
https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/the-great-fletch-story-of-a-tenn...
By contrast, charities and non-profits get this halo of being socially beneficial, even though they're often some of the most wasteful institutions of all. Cornell gets a billion dollars from this guy, as if they didn't get enough money from the racket that is higher education in the US.
That's not true. You can go and pay people a 50 million dollars to make a yacht for you. Or you can pay that 50 million to other group of people to build housing for the poor. In both cases, it provides jobs and puts food on the table of the people you employed. But, the yacht is just a toy for you, while housing will be life-changing for hundreds of families.
If you let billionaires make the choices then sure you get some like Feeney/Gates/Buffett but you get Koch brothers.
Government could theoretically do a more equitable job but only if social programs are run competently. Think about the leadership of EPA and HUD.
[0]https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/finance/ucsf-childrens-ho...
[1]https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2015/02/123366/ucsf-receives-100m-...
> And he gave it away anonymously. While many wealthy philanthropists enlist an army of publicists to trumpet their donations, Feeney went to great lengths to keep his gifts secret.
Feeney seems like an awesome guy but sadly in 100 years nobody will know his name!
Yes, absolutely. And if a certain General Hospital in San Francisco were not named after the tackiest of billionaires then maybe it could honor, I dunno, Hugh Toland?
Instead of dedicating most of its "about us" page to shining a youngish oligarch's already controversial reputation?
https://zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/about-us/our-histo...
Basically, the uber rich want to be seen as something more than just money. Guys like Anschutz and whatnot. There seems to be a pattern where they get a new shiny glass and steel building with a bunch of sick kids in it, and then they put the wife's name, an ampersand, his name, and the last name in big 3-D letters on the side. Likely it's a tax writeoff.
Also, not to be too cynical, but it's not a bad thing overall. The money could be sitting in the Caymans afterall.
Recognizing what’s important to you and knowing that you have it is what’s actually valuable.
I think it's a cultural thing. In some countries it would be considered very poor taste for someone to pay to get their name on a building. If it's an academic building, I think it makes more sense to name it after someone who contributed to the field. Or it could simply be the "CS building".
I'm 99.9999999% certain that no one cares about their name when they're dead.
I would much rather someone have something named for them who donated their own wealth than a political party go around stamping their members names everywhere.
I would much rather have the naming of government buildings to be never named for any politician.
Trump Tower, Trump Airlines. Trump Taj Mahal
Oh wait.. NVM
Basic numbers and letters. Building 4, Building C, Building 97, Building Z, etc.
Not when it's on a submarine ;)
Edit: I'm more than fine with it because it makes Zuckerberg seem less special.
Consider giving at least 10% of your income to cost-effective charities -- because cost-effective charities can do thousands of times more good than merely regular charities. So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well.
Join others: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
But how would you go about verifying any stated claims?
I remember watching a documentary on him some time ago. There was some issue he was interested in. I think it involved a community in Ireland. He put his money into the issue, but it didn't have the desired outcome. He looked closely at what they were doing and decided the strategy wasn't a failure, so he committed some astounding amount more with specific strings attached. His strings forced others to put skin in the game with him. Then they worked together towards their desired outcome.
How do you make sure that your donation to the blind center will get that roof repaired? Grab a hammer.
It's important to recognize that some causes are not as cost-effective as others, but are still worthy. I'll use my own donations as an example:
1. Against Malaria Foundation - widely recognized as one of the charities that can do the most for a dollar. Malaria nets cost about $2-3 and it's estimated every ~$2500 given to them saves a life from Malaria.
2. Larkin Street Youth Services - helping homeless youth in San Francisco (where I lived). A very expensive city and they provide not just housing but education, job services, medical care, etc. Helping just one full-service client can cost $40,000 a year.
At the same time, I think it is a bad systemic solution to rely on charitable giving to solve large-scale problems.
Imagine an island with 100 residents, each with $100. Their moral compass varies randomly from Mr. Rogers all the way to a few outright sociopaths. Each day, everyone decides how much to donate. The kinder people donate more because they're kinder. The selfish assholes obviously don't.
What does tomorrow look like? Well, now all the good people are a little poorer and have a little less power. The sociopaths are richer and stronger. They use their edge to secure a little more power, maybe skim a little more off the top.
Watch that island for a few years and what do you start to see? A few avaricious monsters with all the wealth and a horde of poor decent folks doing their best to distribute fewer and fewer scraps equitably amongst themselves.
This is the real magic of taxes. Because taxes are morally neutral. They don't preferentially take more money away from the most decent folks. Ultimately there are some bad selfish people out there and if you don't have some way of forcibly reducing their power, they will take it all. Taxation backed by the force of government is one of the least violent ways of doing that.
Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.
Umm, no
"“supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth — either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry — I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others. The rest of my wealth belongs to the community and must be used for the welfare of the community.” [1]
Each time I bike past Cornell Tech, Feeney's generosity awes me. What a mensch. Makes me proud to be human.
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mahatma-ga...
Can we just celebrate Chuck Feeney and his awesomeness?
“I wonder if I ever will have the strength to do what he has done.”
“I’ve long argued for massive estate tax rates on large estates in order to incentivize behavior like this.”
“This is a role model I can actually appreciate.“
“I humbly encourage everyone to make giving a larger part of your life.”
Those are quotes from the current top 5 comments in this thread — plenty of celebration of Chuck Feeney’s awesomeness.
Please read my other comment:
Nice A/B experiment.
If you were raised a certain way, in a certain era, it wouldn't be rational to spend it on 'frivolity'.
There are a lot of people like this. Tons of very rich folks living in normal homes, driving normal cars that they 'never buy news'.
I think in some ways more common than not, especially in more rural and suburban areas wherein projecting wealth isn't actually necessary to their professional identity.
I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said already, but his donations - right up to the last - have made genuine and lasting differences in the hearts and minds of kids growing up here and I doubt even he knows all the good that’s come of what he did in this place.
I don’t want to ramble on because it’ll end up sounding like a eulogy but he’s done an incredible thing for our people and we’re incredibly grateful for it.
I hope I can live like Mr. Feeney, although I personally wouldn't be quite as ascetic as he given the circumstances (I would own a small but nice house in San Diego or Hawaii and a nice 0 emission solar/sail powered boat).
Good work Chuck!
He is known for helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That is, to end the Troubles, a conflict that lasted about 30 years, from the late 60s to the late 90s. People who were not yet adults in that time may have difficult imagining the violence of the Troubles. The terrorism, riots, violence and armed actions that characterized a guerrilla war and its suppression, all on the edge of Western Europe. The southern counties that now make up the Republic of Ireland had only achieved independence a few decades before that (the dates are complicated, but let's say it was in 1921) after 800 years of British occupation, and a recent war of independence.
That was the backdrop against which Chuck Feeney tried to bring peace. He did so by working with both sides of the conflict, the Catholics and the Protestants, with diplomacy and massive investments, to make sure that they could see a path to peace despite all the anger, animosity and desire for vengeance that decades of violence and killing can instill. He helped resolve that. Not alone, but he was crucial. And we don't even think about it any more because it's all been relatively normal for a while. And that's amazing.
Giving away your fortune then letting go is harder.
Take for example, Elon musk. Even though he hasn't given monet away to charities like Chuck, his for-profit enterprises like electric cars, solar farms, spacex and possibly neuralink might just have been things that end up equally great for humanity.
So if you have billions I guess timtowtdi.
Tesla and SpaceX don't make a profit or pay dividends. My guess is he finances his entire life from taking on debt which is secured against his stock.
So how exactly are people like him supposed to just give money away? What happens to the stock he owns then? Would he forgo control of his companies?
How would he pay taxes on that income anyway?
Lots of questions the billionaires-shouldn't-exist crowd have no concept of.
Farmers working under communist rule in China who started private farming caused agricultural productivity to skyrocket and the number of starving people to drop [1]. Say what you will about human greed, but aligning a behavior you want with a natural economic incentive is a powerful tool.
On the flipside, some industries like healthcare don't belong in such a ruthless system, because "voting with your wallet" is sometimes equivalent to "voting with your life". Other industries like scientific research have too long a lag time for the the companies to stay afloat, or for the decision makers to benefit from the decision. These industries are the ones that frequently need help from government, nonprofit, donors, etc.
[1]: https://reaction.life/chinese-capitalist-growth-happened-spi...
That data could reveal which things are the most effective things to operate charitably in terms of increasing human happiness.
That's something I really like about Jack Dorsey's approach. I get to follow along and see what works.
Crazy respect for this. Many times billionaire charitable foundations are just tax preferred ways of building your image or amassing influence. Bill Gates has done a lot of good, but his charitable work also served to redeem his image from that of the ruthless businessman crushing competitors that he had in the 1990’s. In addition, it has also given him a lot of soft power. I bet there are dozens of heads of state, especially in Africa and Asia, that he could personally get on the phone within 30 minutes if he really wanted to.
I think we need 5x the number of representatives at the House level. Separate their duties, strip power from some of them, and keep them in district most of the year so they can actually be held accountable. Would also help to further democratize the House.
He needs to amass connections and power if he wants to accomplish his philanthropic goals.
As for fixing his image, sure, maybe that was part of it. But I doubt it. He could have just made a few really big donations and then went off to himself to enjoy his wealth.
2) A man feels a certain responsibility to take care of his wife even when he's gone.
3) $2M only spins off $80k in income, hardly a rich lifestyle and far less than most Americans on this site could live with.
* And check your math, 2% of 8B is $160M not the $2M stated in the article.
Plus, your math is way off. 0.025%.
Chuck is human like all of us. Most people have to spend some amount of time solving for generating enough capital to meet their (and their family’s) needs - whatever they may be. The fabulously wealthy / successful did too once upon a time but at some point crossed a threshold the vast vast majority of people - which I will refer to as “typical” - will never, and that is having enough to do and buy literally anything they could possibly desire indefinitely.
Thus the motivation to keep on going professionally (ie to earn more and more, something that drives typical people who are solving to meet needs), I suspect, changes to things money can’t buy which are nevertheless “typical”: The desire for impact.
Some want it in their life times, others want it for generations (legacy). Some want it in their church or on their job. Others seek and have the means to achieve it on a global scale.
I'd much rather work as an individual contributor and earn an upper middle class salary for my entire career, with enough to retire comfortably. Growing up I always heard stories about how happiness is not correlated with income above a certain (commonly achievable) level, and I can now corroborate those stories!
You don't have to be rich to give. You can not make the money in the first place, and instead make the world a better place by tending to your own happiness and doing something you enjoy. And if you are lucky like Chuck you can give it away. Or if you are lucky like Jonas Salk you can dedicate your talents to good causes.
Congratulations to Chuck for being happy.
> When I visited a few years ago, inkjet-printed photos of friends and family hung from the walls over a plain, wooden table. On the table sat a small Lucite plaque that read: “Congratulations to Chuck Feeney for $8 billion of philanthropic giving.”
I don't know why the author had to cross the line into falsehood with the title. It's a great story about a great person, why sacrifice your integrity with an utterly false headline, particularly when the story doesn't need it?
More scandalous title gets more clicks. Sucks...
That said (i.e. time to be the irritating pedantic little asshole, but I think it's a genuine enough question about the purpose/execution of philanthropy)... does the anonymity really warrant extra props? We know that the guy gave away essentially all of his money; does the anonymity of the individual donations really make it more selfless? If anything the headlines "Feeney gives $100M to cause X" and going on TV to talk about it etc. would likely bring more attention and donations to X, which I assume is why Bill Gates and others tend to do things that way.
Edit: ok, I've just figured out from other posts that it basically wasn't known beyond a small group of people that he was giving away most of his wealth. I didn't realize that (although it's also my first time hearing of him). I agree then, he really did spend the bulk of his life being pretty much truly anonymous and that does deserve extra props.
For myself, I have always wanted to appear to be doing my best in hiding my charitable donations while inadvertently getting discovered for my generosity, killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, I don't nearly have the wealth to pull this off.
One of the things almost all foundations do is this: give 100K for $100M problem. There are certain reasons for this: (a) foundations have become mini governments; (b) foundations want to support everyone that comes their way; (c) either foundations can't judge the potential of ventures or they end up supporting their crony or pet projects.
He has $2 million in retirement. That's over 7 times the median net worth of Americans 75+. He's anything but "broke".
This is why I want to believe. I want to believe in the goodness of people. Just as I’m constantly troubled by the realistic notion of death as I try to appreciate the transient presence of being here, I want to believe things will get better in the sense that there will be less suffering and people will learn and mature and become wiser and nicer to each other.
As we approach death and become one with nothing, we become one.
As we exist, we are only inducing more pains to ourselves. There are meanings though. I hope there are more meaningful things. We are sentient.
But it still makes me sad to see this sort of thing celebrated. A small number of ultra-rich people should not be deciding for society what causes get funded, no matter how pure their intentions are. The fact that individuals are able to amass this much money in the first place is itself a problem.
[0] Then again, we can't actually know that he's ideal, since he's worked hard to keep his activities anonymous. On one hand I applaud him for not seeking fame for all this, but on the other, we have little insight into whatever impact -- good or bad -- he's had.
What's your proposed alternative to the amalgamated actions of rich individuals? I'm not sure what else could work better, and we've certainly seen worse collective approaches throughout history.
It’s sad when all these billionaires and multi-millionaire athletes are afraid to risk a few million dollars by commenting on human rights abuses (concentration camps in China e.g.). You can’t take it with you! Use your wealth for good...
Chuck Feeney is officially welcome at my table, anytime.
Not sure word “broke” is the right adjective here. If consciously someone donated their money to charity they need to be celebrated as a “winner” or overpoweing materialistic “money”? Something amazing. “Broke” means very negative. I don’t know. I could be wrong.
I think when an article is shared on HN some consideration needs to be given to ambiguous situations like this.
I know it sounds revolting that giving money to politicians is better than fighting malaria or cancer. But at the end of the day, those who are having the most impact in alleviating poverty and disease are not international philanthropists, but the governments of the respective countries. Misery is the result of the lack of institutions or their systemic failure under corrupt, inefficient and incompetent leaders. We have known for decades how to eradicate malaria and provide all people on Earth with basic food, shelter and education, what we lack is world-wide execution of essential state-building and infrastructure that would enable it, and much more.
And money is a fundamental part of politics; politicians are just like any other people: if a decent, respectable living an be made in the field of politics, public office will attract decent and respectable people. If the only way you can get into power is by making trades with the devil, since no one will found politics, then what you get is corrupt and ineffective leaders that oppress rather the serve the public.
This is why, for all his sins, George Soros remains one of the most effective philanthropists in the world. And this is why he's vilified by a whole wagon of authoritarians, from Putin to Orban to Jinping: they know that the most pressing threat to their power is not some foreign country, or a political or military international alliance; they are most afraid of a well funded and cohesive internal political opposition that can properly articulate the public discontent.
I know Ted Turner did it with the UN Foundation, although that isn't technically the UN itself.
Are there other examples?
They certainly can. I don't how many people actually do it, but most governments will accept direct cash donations. E.g. here's a page on how to make a gift to the US Government: https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
Edit to add: Here's some data on donations made to reduce the federal debt https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm . You can see that this seems to average a few million dollars per year.
Especially knowing that for having such a career behind him, he must probably have spent a lot of time working and not being there for his family.
Still, mad respect for what he/they did.
I'd call it Sexat. It's like Taxes but spelled backwards.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/james-bond-of-ph...
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/talk-cheap-rich-guy...
It sounds great but I'm still puzzling over this phrase and trying to grok it
Other than science, those are some very bloated and inefficient causes. $1 billion to Cornell? Aren't most of the prestigious universities already swimming in billions of dollars of endowments? He can do what he wants of course, but it would have been nicer if the money was targeted to long shot bets--that only a super rich person could fund--rather than normal things are already well funded through taxes.
Where else does research get done? Who pays for the buildings, where each one costs hundreds of millions of dollars? Scholarships? Who pays for new tenured positions?
Yes, administrative costs could be cut (I think substantially). But there's this long-going misunderstanding about the roles of endowments at American universities. These endowments have been budged into the next century of operation -- each year they are expected to generate some income to cover operating expenses. These expenses include salaries, financial aid, etc. The larger the endowment, the more income. They can't just drain the whole thing to pay for a building, because then they auction off the future for the present.
He's not broke, he still has two million dollars (in a very advanced age). I wish I was that broke.
And you can't be solving big systematic problems and bring about societal change by working with individual cases. This is like fighting fire when you should have made the building fireproof in the first place.
Two million is, like, the opposite of broke for the vast majority of Americans. But this is Forbes.
To be that good at making money and that intent at giving it away is such a massive paradox not to mention paradigm shift from how we typically discuss wealth and wealth accumulators.
Looking for video interviews....
I don't pretend to know the motivations of Bezos or even Musk (even though I think he has been clear) but I see this as consistent with what Feeney did.
I can at least conceive of a thought process like "I can help humanity now and in the future by making money to fund new businesses that would not otherwise exist." Maybe the best way to contribute is to give away money to charity, maybe it is to start a rocket company. I don't think either of those are wrong, and I think they can have the same base motivation.
It feels like a weird and maybe bad example, but it feels like sort of a chaotic good version of The Dark Knight Joker. You have the idea of "if you're good at something never do it for free", combined with a more wholesome version of "some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money."
Maybe you just have weird anomalies where you have someone who likes business, like what their work entails, but for whatever reason aren't drawn as much to some of the other trappings. I think the assumption being the baseline is that the interest follows the money.
Hope I can learn something from this. What does a non rich person do? I guess it is about trying to influence things rather than injecting money.
Do we really need to take time out of our day to praise billionaires? What about the workers who's productivity they robbed to get their status?
I think the billionaires are well compensated enough by society. Really odd to see people rushing to defend them.
Yes you could argue that.
> Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away
Now that is a big jump. It does not follow that we all have the same responsibility that we all have a specific responsibility.
Historically some rights were tied to the ability of the upper classes to fulfill some base responsibilities that the lower the classes could never possibly meet. Such as being able to afford a full set of bronze armour and a spear. Thus achieving both moral and social superiority.
When the Waltons utilize the interstate highways, they do so using giant tractor trailers which chew up blacktop with heavy loads.
They deserve to have a higher tax burden because they use more resources.
What an absolute gut-punch of deeply sickening waste.
I feel extremely outraged reading. It’s a absolutely shocking waste of money. I can’t believe this is celebrated or held up as good. This is a form of basically negligent homicide.
$3.7 billion on education? $76 million to lobby for Obamacare.
How can you not instead fund known, effective charities like Against Malaria or SCI. $1 billion to a wealthy Ivy League credential mill - that’s astronomical waste.
This is the charity equivalent of seeing a lottery winner blow their money on sports cars or Vegas. This is appalling.
I mean this so sincerely. People should be sick and outraged over this degree of negligent waste.
Yes, there was probably a more impactful way of spending it from a humanitarian perspective, but presumably there wasn't a more satisfying way to spend it for Feeney.
Nearly everything that everyone does is a negligent homicidal waste if you view it through the lens of opportunity cost. Unless you are living the life of an acetic, working every living hour, and donating it all to charity, you personally are hundreds if not thousands of people a year.
The speakers they mentioned are the most establishment politicians you can find. What does that say about his actions that those are the people representing him?
How can you give $70M+ to something that is grassroots too?
This is immediately the reason why these donations are anonymous!
Guy gives away nearly all his money, and people are still not happy about it.
He has built one of the largest charities in the UK, and I believe it is top 10 in the world. He has given away his net worth multiple times. His general story is also totally remarkable for the UK, he came from literally nowhere.
Somewhat inevitably these days, he is regarded negatively in the media (most recently, he came up because the UK's finance minister used to work at his fund, so Hohn was the "vulture" capitalist with his beak in govt...funnily enough, their view didn't change when they found he is the main funding for Extinction Rebellion...2020 is amazing).
And then those celebrities say "You should also donate Joe Doe, we must ALL be charitable".
Meanwhile Joe is in debt and cannot even afford to eat non-pesticide laden food while the celebrity retain 99% of his $$$$.
Like you said most people don't really have any extra income. They have a mortgage. Their retirement is heavily underfunded. Kids future school is not paid for.
Then there are people that have 100% of everything paid for and already have more than they will ever need... not to mention they can grow their money way quicker than the people who need it.. Yeah, it's pretty easy to be "generous" in that situation because it's literally extra money just sitting around doing nothing but making more money.
edit: wow, downvote me and op for this? Must be by the HN 400k engineers without a family who don't understand what the problem is
One stops and carefully donates his money to have the most impact. He ends up "officially broke."
The other doubles down on for profit enterprises, but focuses on those with the most impact, like electrifying a fossil fueled sector of the economy or making us a multi-planetary species. The profits are reinvested to accomplish these goals. He ends up richer than ever.
It isn't clear that the second billionaire is less admirable than the first.
For God's Sake
Let this great guy who gave away $8 billion of his hard earned money get proper credit without dragging a @#$#$ subsidy entrepreneur into it
I guess EVs have less environmental impact after four years of use, but do Teslas last that long? The intent there (and the impact) is still very much to monetize
I don't know about everyone else on HN, but having 2mil in the bank is not my definition of "Broke". I want to see what trusts have been setup. What life estates has he retained? I credit him for giving most all of it away, but "broke" doesn't mean you are worth 0.0001% of some huge number. Broke means you might not cover next month's rent and are parking your car at a friend's to hide it from the repo guy.
If anything, having enough money to take care of his needs I think is good. If he was hiding his car from the repo man, it's probably because he's not paying payments on it, and therefore all the people that rely on those payments for their jobs you're kind of "stealing" from, in that you aren't fulfilling the legal and financial obligation. And that doesn't seem very charitable either?
- How much to employees at Duty Free Shoppers (DFS) make? Is their healthcare fully covered? Do they have generous paid time off and access to higher education for themselves and their children? Was any of his fortune used to give back to the employees whose labor built his wealth in the first place?
- Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill? Giving to Cornell seems counter-productive to me. Giving a bunch of Ivy League jocks more resources doesn’t seem like an equity promoting endeavor.
Not to diminish his other accomplishments. Still, philanthropists get to choose who to include and exclude. Ideally, it wouldn’t have been possible for this guy to amass 8 billion dollars of wealth in the first place - it would have been properly taxed and invested into our communities equitably.
Questions can be raised about some of his specific donations, but when someone gives away $8B of his wealth, spending nearly none on himself, does it globally, influences other billionaires to do the same, picking at any one of his specific donations seems counter productive.
Yes Cornell is an Ivy League school, but it is where he went to school, he probably has very strong ties to that school, perhaps met his wife there, or his business partner, if he chooses to give back to that school that is also good.
Plus there was a tremendous amount he gifted to "education" so without knowing all of the details, hard to imagine that he didn't provide some sort investment in to under represented communities. If he helped Vietnam with their healthcare he obviously wasn't just US centric but helped where he though his donation could have an outsized return.
By the way he gifted a large amount of money to the Obamacare campaign, so by proxy, he was providing healthcare to his workers, and more likely than not.
I have similar thoughts when I hear about the philanthropy of the mega wealthy. Instead of a single person like Chuck Feeney or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates amassing ungodly amounts of wealth and then later choosing how to distribute it, why couldn't the companies they built have made 1,000 or 10,000 or X other people relatively rich instead of one man mega rich?
The West is hyper-wealthy.
No idea. Maybe some of it was.
> Does this dude realize how difficult it is to get into Cornell compared to when he went there on the GI bill?
His donation to Cornell was earmarked for opening a new campus (Cornell Tech) to employ more educators and educate more students. It wasn't for replacing a stadium and putting his name on it.