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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

> Did I read this wrong or did it not say 500. MILLION. dollars?

This isn't directed at Zuck or Facebook, or anything. Because I really don't know him.

But regarding your shock about the dollar amount...

Keep in mind that it's incredibly easy to be generous when you are at the top. It's actually so easy, that it's almost effortless.

There really is a difference between a man that writes a check that makes no difference to him (in the amount), and a man with nothing that roles up his sleeves, goes out, and dedicates himself to helping others.

I'll celebrate the latter before I'll celebrate the former.

One throws money away, the other helps change everyone around him.

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Why not celebrate both?

Beyond that, even if we accept the premise that it's easier for Zucker to give away $500MM than someone with little to donate a fraction of that amount, the money will absolutely have a great net impact on society as a whole. Isn't that contribution to the betterment of all worth a major celebration?

I think part of the problem is that it's hard to conceptualize what sort of impact donations as large as these will have. If we actually met the thousands of people that this gift will help out, and heard their stories of what a different it made, I think it'd be much harder to dismiss than it is a written number.

If you think the aid is effective, you can celebrate that.

But (for example purposes - not targeting Zuck) why would you celebrate a person who is using a donation as a tax write-off?

This complaint comes up every time. But, can anyone explain to me how spending $500 mil /for the purpose/ of saving less than 500 mil in taxes would make any sense at all? People tend to frame it as if it was somehow a profitable maneuver.

Who cares if it's a tax write-off? What is at all negative about a tax-write off that in any way detracts from the manifest positive impact that the charitable donation itself creates?

500 Million is not effortless for anyone on planet earth. Mark Zuckerberg has somewhere in the range of 7 to 10 billion dollars. 500M is somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of his net worth. I realize that money has less marginal utility to billionaires, but donating 5 to 7 percent of what you've earned in your whole life is nothing to sneeze at. I'm pretty sure Mark thought about this decision as he has never been known to throw money around, and for you to dismiss it as "effortless" is fairly absurd.

I guess you didn't belive me when I said my post had nothing to do with Zuck or Facebook.

First, "throws money away", really? It's going toward something good, helping real people's lives. Second it's fine if you want to measure someone's charitableness by their personal sacrifice, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with measuring it by the impact of their actions. In your scenario I would say the money being thrown away would have much more of an impact.

I've long stopped believing that money helps improve the world. People do.

If you throw money at a problem, often times you create a dependency on that aid, and other times you just end up with even more mouths to feed.

It's not that monetary aid is always 100% ineffective. It's just that once you tally up the bad and the good, you're left with something that's in the red.

Money is an extremely effective social organization and incentive system. It's a way to get people to behave in a way you want to. The right investments can help change the world.

And you pay people with money.

> Second it's fine if you want to measure someone's charitableness by their personal sacrifice

Why do you think that's fine? Do you regard the notion that one person's happiness must be "paid for" by another person's suffering as a virtuous one?

You're not the first person to glorify volunteering and charity work over monetary donations, but I think it's misguided. It's my impression that most charities could use money a lot more than volunteer time, especially because it's easier to convert the former into the latter. If you make $50/hr as a contractor, you could go work as a volunteer for an hour or do an hour of contracting and give 5 man hours to a charity, as well as giving 5 people some work. Or if they don't need any extra labor but they need anything else they can use the cash for that. Even if it's a lot less romanticized, getting full value for your labor out of a market economy then redirecting part of it to charitable causes probably does a lot more overall good than doing a (relatively) inefficient amount of labor. You argued elsewhere that people can get dependent on money, but they can be just as easily as dependent on anything else you do.

The only exceptions I can think of are blood donations or anything where you're donating a 'human' element (visiting the elderly) rather than your work.

Ok, you can go back to celebrating your Steve Jobs poster. Jobs showed how much of a maverick he was by keeping all his money to himself and fuck the world. Now THAT took real courage and effort.

I celebrate the former first.

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