Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset. Superficially Gaben looks like a good answer, but then you find out how many people in the development and publishing space hate him for steam being "freeloaders." Consumer hate is rarer but still comes up with respect to some decisions they make.
So if we reframe the question as "who are the most ethical" billionaires I'm sure you can find some, it's just usually not people the man on the street knows about.
Consider the Duff brothers from Mississippi - they made their money running a tire company.
Or Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic gets a lot of flack but most of that is actually regulatory burden or angry competitors.
Plenty of people make a billion in generally unethical spaces (real estate, investing) while being no more unethical than everyone else in that space, sometimes even more ethical (just very good or lucky).
Epic low balls SWEs, back in the golden years of the SWE field, when entry levels were commanding 6-figs, EPIC would try to pressure hire you on a 60k starting. Many ex-EPIC folks are like ex-amazon folks. People did not stay there long. Idk if they stack ranked but it wouldn't surprise me.
Pretty much any large company with employees is going to run into the framing of: "If you got rich owning the company did your employees who were doing the major work get rich too? Did you fire anyone who was there too long so they didn't get equity? Did you give any equity?"
Not here to litigate the company from what I understand it has some bad parts as an employee and also some incredibly good parts.
Doesn't change that she actually attempts to accomplish ethics in business, took on the minimum of outside investment, doesn't overcharge customers and all kinds of other good things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Upsetting people doesn't make something unethical, though.
I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the most ethical billionaires would have to be those who did the most good* without trampling any particular rights. Given how hard business can incentivize one or another form of such trampling, then, it would be really hard to find a billionaire with clean hands. At some point they'd have signed off on a sketchy deal, or exploited labor laws, or just hired people who did. How much of that responsibility should transfer?
You could probably get a pretty good proxy of political affiliation by asking a series of comparison questions. Ask whether a person is culpable for X, Y, Z, with decreasing levels of personal involvement. Someone who believes in holding a CEO responsible for his bottom-level managers' hiring decisions is much, much more likely to subscribe to various left-wing policy planks. Collectivism is not limited to redistribution.
Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.
*Yes, yes, we also probably disagree on some key points of the "good". Not going there right now.
Probably going to be hard, because I think I really oppose their idea on this, but its interesting from a devil's advocate perspective, if its just impossible to be an ethical billionaire, in that they have created an unprovable tautology, or if even within this framework, one could find an "ethical" billionaire, and essentially prove their statement wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
Right. I bring up Judy because she did a lot of good (made medical records electronic) uses her power and influence the success of people and patients over the success of her company (as she sees these things) and generally does not engage in evil billionaire behavior.
It's so debatable though - lots of people who work for the company hate, lots of the people who work for the company love it, she does lobbying (evil) but it's almost always for the good of the company and the medical record industry (which has some bad parts but is usually good for people).
She's done a wild amount of good for the world but you could easily find people willing to shoot them.
Likewise with the brothers I'm sure you have some underbelly to the tire world and they didn't entirely make their money with right place right time, I Just don't know what it is.
A motivated socialist is going to find both of those and GabeN evil but that's not going to really capture things (or encourage people to not be evil which is a thing society has lost).
I think your comment abuts something which bugs me about the progressive crowd - nobody is ethically if they do something the slightest bit wrong, but if a system results in great evil it can still be good as long as no individual is making an evil move. It's weird.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.
I take it more as scapegoating than anything.
The latter is the whole point. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a way of saying "Don't sweat the ethical implications of your day job in HR at Evilcorp, latte habit, and collection of Apple products - the thing that matters is the work you do to overthrow the system."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link