Hi Brian - please read up on Bill Gates. The book "Controligarchs" is a really eye opening read. Bill Gates's "philanthropy" is absolutely questionable. He invested in BioNTech well before the Covid madness in 2020 and suddenly earned a windfall as the Pfizer jab was mandated. He invested in Impossible Burger and has been buying up agricultural land and is an advocate for eradicating cows and a vegan lifestyle in the name of "saving the planet." Meanwhile flying around the world in his private jet.
Why is the Impossible Burger a bad thing? A lot of people want to eat less meat for myriad (health/environmental/religious) reasons, but want to eat something that has the taste and texture of meat. Going from the Boca/Morningstar garbage to Beyond/Impossible has been amazing.
Also, fewer cows-->less land for pasture-->more land for reforestation or to build houses to solve the crisis.
I'm not trying to be glib, and I'm not going to touch the COVID vaccine with a 10-meter cattleprod. But for the above two, I'm struggling to see a downside.
Most arable land is grassland and the only agriculture it can sustain is cattle rearing. Ruminants keep grasslands healthy and resistant to desertification, which is increasingly a risk due to climate change. They are a very significant carbon sink.
On the other hand, vegetables and fruits are typically grown on fertile land, and forests need to be cleared for that. We could of course desalinate water and green deserts instead, but that’s another can of worms.
That's a very good point, one I hadn't thought of. I'm not as worried about growing more produce, because we're about to lose half the world's population in the next 100 years--we won't need new land.
China is going to lose 1 billion people, at least. India might lose 500 million. The OECD is likely to halve in population. The only area of the world that's above replacement is Sub-Saharan Africa, and even that is changing.
If you're concerned about pandemics, investing in companies which help treat them seems like a good way to mitigate your concern. By investing, you're giving them capital to scale up their operations in advance of a disaster. So yes, he earned a windfall, but he probably saved a bunch of lives too.
He wouldn't have been even a millionaire, let alone billionaire, if it wasn't for intellectual property ("property") laws. We could outsource this question to Huemer as well. Many marvins starved because they weren't allowed to build on (to advance, to improve) Windows because of intellectual property "rights" (patents, copyrights, etc.).
It is literally impossible to consume as much money as people like Gates are making. (Paul Allen tried harder than anyone and even he failed massively.) Which means that, at the margin, these billionaires spend their money on either 1) charity or 2) "moon-shot" investments. Both of these have enormous societal benefits and certainly far greater benefits than the government would create with these marginal dollars.
I think Bill Gates' philanthropy is fine. No problem. But, to excuse Microsoft's very sketchy business behavior in the 1990s on the basis of what Bill Gates would give away is beyond dumb. Ever heard the phrase "Window's isn't done if Lotus 123 still runs"? They were literally tuning their operating system to ensure that competitive user software wouldn't run correctly, or at all. The problem was that the government didn't go far enough. Microsoft should have been broken up into an OS company and an application company.
That narrative is not only wrong, but backwards. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s. The Windows team went to heroic lengths to ensure app compatibility. Trying to get apps from other companies to run on Windows was often source of delays. One famous example is the bug in Sim City where they use memory after it was freed. They had to detect for that in Windows 95 and make it work. That tweak and others are documented here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-extra-mile-to-ensure-compatibility-of-simcity-other-games/
The story you are propagating was mostly told by Microsoft's competitors. It's nice when you can blame the big baddie for your poorly written app.
Friendly amendment: this is one part of a partial equilibrium analysis... I'm sure you have already written more on antitrust in an general equilibrium spirit elsewhere, maybe even in a link from this article that I didn't check?
Why exclude the upside of antitrust from your numbers? I'm sympathetic to your argument from an EA perspective, but only if antitrust provides no benefit to the economy. What about would-be innovators either strangled by Microsoft (e.g. through weaponized OS incompatibility) or acquired but drowned in paperwork? If the competitor would have improved the world faster and/or funded an even more philanthropic CEO, this is an incalculable loss--and this exact situation has likely occurred hundreds of times so far. It's the status quo, but it's an invisible shame.
You're assuming the antitrust action had zero benefits. Opinions might well differ on that, but to attempt a fair evaluation you'd have to make some kind of estimate, taking into account what the govt thought it was doing, for what benefits might accrue.
It would seem, then, that anyone who had any negative effect on Microsoft’s bottom line, and hence Gates’ net worth, would be similarly guilty.
No doubt, for you, is the tax man at the front of that line. But also, any Microsoft competitor who did anything to detract from Microsoft sales. And maybe even Microsoft employees….think of how many more lives Gates could have saved, if those workers did their thing for less money?!?
Assuming that Bill Gates is as helpfully philanthropic as claimed, perhaps the government shouldn't have targeted him with antitrust suits. But what about heads of monopolies that are not so philanthropic? Should there be a threshold for giving away wealth, and, if so, what should it be? And how is the government to know who will be clearing the bar for genuinely helpful philanthropy?
Hi Brian - please read up on Bill Gates. The book "Controligarchs" is a really eye opening read. Bill Gates's "philanthropy" is absolutely questionable. He invested in BioNTech well before the Covid madness in 2020 and suddenly earned a windfall as the Pfizer jab was mandated. He invested in Impossible Burger and has been buying up agricultural land and is an advocate for eradicating cows and a vegan lifestyle in the name of "saving the planet." Meanwhile flying around the world in his private jet.
Why is the Impossible Burger a bad thing? A lot of people want to eat less meat for myriad (health/environmental/religious) reasons, but want to eat something that has the taste and texture of meat. Going from the Boca/Morningstar garbage to Beyond/Impossible has been amazing.
Also, fewer cows-->less land for pasture-->more land for reforestation or to build houses to solve the crisis.
I'm not trying to be glib, and I'm not going to touch the COVID vaccine with a 10-meter cattleprod. But for the above two, I'm struggling to see a downside.
Most arable land is grassland and the only agriculture it can sustain is cattle rearing. Ruminants keep grasslands healthy and resistant to desertification, which is increasingly a risk due to climate change. They are a very significant carbon sink.
On the other hand, vegetables and fruits are typically grown on fertile land, and forests need to be cleared for that. We could of course desalinate water and green deserts instead, but that’s another can of worms.
That's a very good point, one I hadn't thought of. I'm not as worried about growing more produce, because we're about to lose half the world's population in the next 100 years--we won't need new land.
Lose half the world population in the next 100 years? Quite a bold prediction.
China is going to lose 1 billion people, at least. India might lose 500 million. The OECD is likely to halve in population. The only area of the world that's above replacement is Sub-Saharan Africa, and even that is changing.
>He invested in BioNTech well before the Covid madness in 2020 and suddenly earned a windfall as the Pfizer jab was mandated.
Yep, Gates was concerned about pandemics well before COVID. See e.g. this talk from 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
If you're concerned about pandemics, investing in companies which help treat them seems like a good way to mitigate your concern. By investing, you're giving them capital to scale up their operations in advance of a disaster. So yes, he earned a windfall, but he probably saved a bunch of lives too.
No good deed goes unpunished.
He wouldn't have been even a millionaire, let alone billionaire, if it wasn't for intellectual property ("property") laws. We could outsource this question to Huemer as well. Many marvins starved because they weren't allowed to build on (to advance, to improve) Windows because of intellectual property "rights" (patents, copyrights, etc.).
It is literally impossible to consume as much money as people like Gates are making. (Paul Allen tried harder than anyone and even he failed massively.) Which means that, at the margin, these billionaires spend their money on either 1) charity or 2) "moon-shot" investments. Both of these have enormous societal benefits and certainly far greater benefits than the government would create with these marginal dollars.
I think Bill Gates' philanthropy is fine. No problem. But, to excuse Microsoft's very sketchy business behavior in the 1990s on the basis of what Bill Gates would give away is beyond dumb. Ever heard the phrase "Window's isn't done if Lotus 123 still runs"? They were literally tuning their operating system to ensure that competitive user software wouldn't run correctly, or at all. The problem was that the government didn't go far enough. Microsoft should have been broken up into an OS company and an application company.
That narrative is not only wrong, but backwards. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s. The Windows team went to heroic lengths to ensure app compatibility. Trying to get apps from other companies to run on Windows was often source of delays. One famous example is the bug in Sim City where they use memory after it was freed. They had to detect for that in Windows 95 and make it work. That tweak and others are documented here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-extra-mile-to-ensure-compatibility-of-simcity-other-games/
The story you are propagating was mostly told by Microsoft's competitors. It's nice when you can blame the big baddie for your poorly written app.
So what? Why is it Microsoft's obligation to support competitor software?
Sorry, but Batman has saved the entire planet multiple times. :-)
did he have any success improving the US education system?
Friendly amendment: this is one part of a partial equilibrium analysis... I'm sure you have already written more on antitrust in an general equilibrium spirit elsewhere, maybe even in a link from this article that I didn't check?
Why exclude the upside of antitrust from your numbers? I'm sympathetic to your argument from an EA perspective, but only if antitrust provides no benefit to the economy. What about would-be innovators either strangled by Microsoft (e.g. through weaponized OS incompatibility) or acquired but drowned in paperwork? If the competitor would have improved the world faster and/or funded an even more philanthropic CEO, this is an incalculable loss--and this exact situation has likely occurred hundreds of times so far. It's the status quo, but it's an invisible shame.
You're assuming the antitrust action had zero benefits. Opinions might well differ on that, but to attempt a fair evaluation you'd have to make some kind of estimate, taking into account what the govt thought it was doing, for what benefits might accrue.
Hmmm…
It would seem, then, that anyone who had any negative effect on Microsoft’s bottom line, and hence Gates’ net worth, would be similarly guilty.
No doubt, for you, is the tax man at the front of that line. But also, any Microsoft competitor who did anything to detract from Microsoft sales. And maybe even Microsoft employees….think of how many more lives Gates could have saved, if those workers did their thing for less money?!?
Assuming that Bill Gates is as helpfully philanthropic as claimed, perhaps the government shouldn't have targeted him with antitrust suits. But what about heads of monopolies that are not so philanthropic? Should there be a threshold for giving away wealth, and, if so, what should it be? And how is the government to know who will be clearing the bar for genuinely helpful philanthropy?
I don't think we even need to ask such questions. In any other context Bryan would clearly oppose the government playing favorites in this way.