I don't know much about this guy, but I remember reading an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he was asked if his lifestyle had changed since he came into money and if he bought a new house or anything, and his answer was basically something like: "Not really, and I've already got good water pressure where I'm at, what else do I need?" I can't help but like his attitude.
I would argue that a $1mil manhattan 1br isn't modest. You know, you can start to split hairs what modest means. Is that a modest living space? Sure. Is the privilege of living in manhattan immodest? I also think so.
But at least that's within the realm of "modesty". At least there's at least one element of modesty to it. It's not a multi story 6 million dollar home with a floor to ceiling double floor library.
You need to prove to us that modesty is an absolute quality. Reasonable people would agree that that is a bit extreme ("immodest") and that modesty is relative. (Try cheap instead of modest to see how this works.)
> There's no way in which a $6 million dollar house is "modest".
Relative to his wealth bracket he is being modest but not cheap.
> Relative to his wealth bracket he is being modest but not cheap.
That's moving the goalposts. No one said anything about "relative to his wealth bracket".
And I don't think I have ever heard anyone using a term like "modest house" in proportion to someone's wealth. House-modesty is something people generally use to mean "when compared with other houses in the region".
That or Tribeca have to be my favorite areas of the city to live in if I had silly money which I don't so I don't and likely ever won't unless my venture petfood.ai strikes it big in which case I'll buy the entire building but won't put my name on it with large gold san serif letters. I may be poor but I have class.
I had the privilege of working and sleeping in the original Craigslist office/house in San Francisco. It was just another typical, ageing house they had rearranged a little to have a ton of deskspace in the main area. A lot of start ups (including Zappos IIRC) had also been there over the years. They had a mattress in the loft/attic you could crash on if you were up late too.
Craigslist is often held up as an example of a company "doing it right", but what is never mentioned in these posts is that a large portion of their revenue comes from facilitating scams. Around 25% of rooms/apartments I contact are scams, and Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these. A common scam is to take pictures from a real estate site of a house that recently sold and advertise it as for rent, but they don't even let you say "I live at this house and do not want to rent it, don't let anyone post it".
Craigslist doesn't make any money from those scams because they don't charge for rental listings. It sucks that it's there, but for them to hire staff to deal with it, they'd have to charge for the rental listings.
Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.
So why not charge for rental listings? i'm sure the number of scams would go down, while posting would still be of good value for someone looking to rent out a $3000/mo apartment.
From Craig's Wikipedia article [0]. He sure cares about fighting scams. Craigslist != Craig I know, but may these are intractable problems, not that there's necessarily negligence
> In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40]
> In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41]
> In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43]
> Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these
You could make your point without this lie. Craigslist moderators are both very active and quick to respond. Their moderation system is explained on the website. Try flagging scams when you see them.
Even if you take out revenue from scams, it does not change the question of what Craigslist could or should have done regarding governance.
Craigslist adhered to basic features and community volunteers partly to avoid responsibility.
The org had no problem enforcing its moat around UGC (posts) with lawsuits but only at after extraordinary foot dragging did they implement basic advancements in the best interests of their own community.
This has resulted in untold numbers of scam victims, yes but also it allowed bad landlords, (and tenants) to carry on with no repercussions. This continues, actually.
Craigslist was a benevolent dictator. It squandered an opportunity to be a low profit leader of p2p, instead yielding it to Facebook and a variety of venture backed products.
I have first hand knowledge of Craigslist response to market competition because my cofounder on Gliph and I are the creators of the product that Craigslist privacy relay email service is based on.
This point of who actually created the concept and tech is actually being litigated right now between Apple and a patent troll over the Hide My Email feature of iCloud in Rally vs. Apple Inc.
Wow, I wasn’t aware of this and it definitely predates our work.
I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not.
IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.
[wasn’t aware of this] That's odd. Anyone familiar with the history of anonymous email services and remailers would know about the penet, cotse, and cypherpunk communities in the 1990s. It was a fertile field. Odd that you haven't bumped into anyone from that space.
When I designed our take on it, I was solving a problem I experienced on Craigslist. I had not seen this prior art.
I built a simple refresh for a new email address interface that people really loved to mash, and it is nearly identical to the Use Different Address link behavior on Hide My Email.
To get to my original point, if Craigslist was aware of all of these examples, they did not seem to serve as impetus to provide it, despite it being in the best interest of their users.
I would highlight again that the system described by the Rally patent, if realizable in the example services means these groups also left potentially valuable IP on the table.
As the lawsuit over Hide My Email, afaik, is serious stuff.
I appreciate folks sharing links to prior art. I have more to say, that might explain my initial comment a bit more, but have to wait on that.
If only 25% of one section of CL is scams, that puts it well ahead of the cryptocurrency industry, the social media industry, the adtech industry and the AI industry.
They now charge to list your car, even as a private party. I'm not sure it was the right choice because it drove so much traffic to Facebook Marketplace, which is an absolute disaster.
Even beyond scams they are one of the biggest factors leading to the collapse of the local news industry that was funded by local classified ads. So it’s hard at a macro level to view them as doing it right in a global sense, but they did make Craig rich.
I once wanted to build an alternative to Craig’s list. There were SO MANY things I had ideas to improve. Then I realized I had literally no idea how Craig’s list makes money. None. They did not charge for ads and they didn’t have advertising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You misspelled "ads for prostitution." Which they eventually stopped doing, only after considerable public pressure and state AGs threatening criminal prosecution.
Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
Its not a private business fault that US did not create a legal framework protecting sex workers and instead continue facilitate exploitation and traffiking by keeping it illegal.
US have legal porn industry and its strictly regulated and mostly safe for those wofking in it. Imagine how it would look like if it was illegal too.
> They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
From what I read back when this happened you have it backwards. The classifieds on CL and other sites for sex were were largely individuals choosing to do it. They were not being trafficked or pimped. By closing those listings down it would end up pushing sex workers to find other sources of clients, like pimps.
> The classifieds on CL and other sites for sex were were largely individuals choosing to do it. They were not being trafficked or pimped.
Yep. Just like with marijuana and other such "vices", the thing that takes most of the violence and exploitation out of the industries that produce, market, and sell a "vice" [0] is to make it legal to produce, advertise, and sell.
There's also a side angle here where some folks absolutely disbelieve that an attractive human who really enjoys fucking would rather make their own hours getting paid to fuck than get abused by a shitty boss at an entry-level job.
Are there people coerced into sex work? _Absolutely_. But, there are people coerced into nearly every sort of job out there, so that's not saying much.
[0] Well, actually this applies to any industry. No matter what it is, if you have to do illegal shit to create, distribute, and sell it, and if there's notable amount of money to be made in selling it, then there's inevitably gonna be violent folks involved in the process.
Legalization reduces the risk of violence to sellers and buyers and external parties. This in turn reduces the risk premium and quick score potential of the "business".
The problem with the legalization strategy to reduce violence is that it has its limits.
It turns a high-risk game into a high-volume high-scale game.
It validates the creation of a corporate ecosystem who then are incented to create demand for the "vice" while simultaneously concealing what they know (or come to learn) about the vice's side effects.
Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc.
As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.
Craigslist also undermined the entire newspaper classifieds business, which paid for local news reporting in communities of all sizes.
Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
Sadly, I think Craig might have done MORE for society by simply improving Craig's List and removing/reducing the amount of spam and junk posts it allows.
I can't claim the changes would be easy to implement, but if they made a FEW small changes the result would be 1000x better.
For example if you want to sell something on Craig's List they do some "you can't make this post because it looks too similar to a previous posting" kind of thing AND you might need a mobile number but somehow someone can stuff 1000 random keywords into a for-sale posting that's not at all about the item? So if you're looking for a
"Miata" you'll end up getting listing for a bunch of other cars since someone is gaming the system?
Or it's an option to "reject duplicates" -- why do duplicates or clone postings even show up if they have their "this is too similar to another posting" capability?
Or, Craig's List lets AutoTrader and other "commercial" sites post items but if you want to actually message someone now on AutoTrader you need to upload your DRIVERS LICENSE just to send them a message? So Craig's List is OK with a reciprocal arrangement with a vendor who does not honor the same "equality" rules Craig's List was built on?
Sadly, many years ago I would send feedback to Craig's List and Craig himself would reply. I don't know if he's completely checked out of his site now, but if you're out there Craig a few simple changes could restore the utility of the service which you created. People like me would even PAY to see these improvements.
I suspect this is sarcasm but seriously. Craigslist has floundered and now Meta/Facebook Marketplace is dominating the private buying/selling space. Is that not at least $500M of harm?
This is right. The good he was doing society was the product Craigslist.org. It touched hundreds of millions of lives for the better and, sometimes, worse. He had no great lever. I'm skeptical the non-profits/charities had any where near the societal benefit. The article seems light on what he actually accomplished by giving away $500M
If you're going to talk about societal impact then you need to also look at how much they enabled sexual exploitation and human trafficking, worldwide, by serving as an ad site for pimps.
Craig and James knew damn well where most of their revenue was coming from, and pimps were able to get increasingly bold with their slang, moving from "model" to "escort" to just outright saying "prostitute" because Craigslist didn't care.
They only did something about it in 2010 when public outrage grew and prosecutors - around the world - started investigating.
Craig and James belong in jail cells, not having their di...er, egos, stroked for giving away their money to organizations that help veterans - the most lazy, non-controversial target for a non-profit.
Is Craigslist still the go-to classifieds site in some places?
Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.
I sell on CL and FB Marketplace. Some items that I listed for months on CL sold in days on FB, but I prefer CL. FB search results are inferior often because FB posters created misleading ads and don't delete ads for events that have already occurred. Never tried Nextdoor because they required I give them my cell phone number. My landline number was not enough.
That’s quite the understatement. FB marketplace search results are pretty close to useless. Search for something, it will show you maybe a couple of that something and then ads that look like listings, and things that are supposedly related (they aren’t), hours away from your search area. No way to filter or anything. I go out of my way to not use FB marketplace, that’s how bad it is to me.
I think he has given away a whole lot more than half a billion dollars when you think of the opportunity squandered to grow CL the way other unicorney companies grew
it was an intentional choice to not go big. I can seriously respect that. I feel like all these "big tech leaders" like Zuck or Musk have some pretty blatant mental health issues, its a path with significant drawbacks because that level of absurd wealth causes issues.
If your goals require trillions then millions are not enough. Craig’s goal = have a modest comfortable life. Musk’s goal = Make humanity a multi-planet species
Yes, now there will be arguments about if that’s really Musk’s goal. that’s beside the point. The point is some goals require money than others
> Musk’s goal = Make humanity a multi-planet species
I totally see how the acquisition of twitter and funding of probably the worst US government in recent decades is in keeping with that aim. OR perhaps he just wants people to think he's cool, so he invests in "cool" stuff. This is because he has some of those mental health issues lots of absurdly wealthy people do, that results in him feeling like he constantly has to prove himself.
> to grow CL the way other unicorney companies grew
By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.
I'd be curious to know how the economics of craigslist works, such that he's made so many hundreds of millions of dollars. It only charges a modest fee for a small fraction of transactions, but presumably the denominator is big enough that this adds up (and of course he would have subsequently invested the proceeds).
I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generate perhaps tens of millions of profit (he's well known for having given away money to media, so obviously there's some profit). But I didn't realize that it made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Are there any articles that break down how this pencils out?
I suppose some of it is due to craigslist being around for 30+ years. At $25-$30 million a year, it adds up over time. And then if he invests most of it, 30 years of compounding interest does the rest.
Yeah, and investing during the last 30 years would yield incredible results even if you are lousy at picking stocks. And of course, if you'd put even a tiny bit into BTC, you'd have even more.
He and James made hundreds of millions of dollars off ads for prostitution. Knowingly.
Throwing money at military veterans doesn't erase the stain of having a hand in the explosion of human trafficking and sexual exploitation Craigslist (and Backpages) enabled.
The FBI arrested Gambino family members for child prostitution, and one of their top ways of soliciting Johns was via paid ads in Craigslist. One state AG counted 200,000 ads a year and estimated the revenue to be almost $2M, in their state alone.
I know that this can be a controversial opinion, but I and other folks who enjoy fucking should be permitted to sell use of our asses -and/or other body parts, as negotiated- to folks who are looking for people to fuck. It turns out that -even if it's not legal- fuck-enjoyers still do exactly that. Wild, right?
Some folks might not be aware, but human trafficking and slavery are both illegal. Making prostitution and other sex work legal and subject to the same worker protection laws as any other job is the most effective single thing that can be done to remove the foundation from the sex-industry wing of that rotten house. We can't control the priorities of the police, but we can give folks in the industry somewhere to go and safely complain if their workplace is unsafe.
Pinnacle because it was a simple, functional website back when it started in '95. Back when UI design didn't cost millions of dollars with MBs of crap JS clogging things up.
Come off it. Adding a few lines of CSS to give things reasonable contrast and spacing is not "millions of dollars". 2005 called, they want their jQuery back.
It is all about the system of values. The system of values that the stereotypical high powered CEO billionaires have is unfathomable to me. Do they have time to breathe? Do they have friends? Their lives sound boring and unfulfilling.
That is beautiful! I hope to be able to be well off enough some day to give to causes I believe in (to start I would fund a ton of open-source engineers on projects that I use).
I have a lot of fun memories about when I moved to SF in 2006. Among them was meeting Craig and interacting with him casually a handful of times. He was a regular at Reverie in Cole Valley, where a good friend and mentor of mine was also a regular. The two of them were friends and times I'd meet with my friend, i'd sometimes talk to Craig. He always seemed kind and had a sharp wit. I remember the first time I met him, my friend introduced me and said I had just moved to town. I blurted out, "know a good way to find an apartment?" Craig gave me a good-natured eye roll.
I asked him one time what he was doing. Answering emails, he said. Customer support emails. I think he really enjoyed that part of the business.
My experience is a few decades old but it was pretty simple. Some servers for the text and some for the images. The data is super cacheable, the hot set is really hot (current listings), and storing text and some image pointers is pretty simple for even a moderate database (which can be split by metro).
I was on the security team for eBay/PayPal at the time they took a minority stake in Craigslist, and one of the jobs we got was securing their infrastructure (they didn't have a security team).
I wonder if they still have that arrangement with eBay...
> “They told me that I should treat people like I want to be treated,” he said. “I should know when enough is enough. And they told me I should be my brother's keeper or my sister's keeper. And that made sense to me.”
Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
This is a great reminder even for those of us who aren't multi-millionaires. It's easy to get wrapped up pursuing ostentation and even notoriety as elements of our culture hold it up as as goal to strive for, and I think it's important to see it for the hollow goal it is regardless of your income.
Truthfully, it doesn't shock me that the founder of Craigslist in particular, a site that found a good, workable setup and then left it as is, would know this. Its more disappointing that no one else really seems to know when enough is enough.
> Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
What makes you think rich people keep working to make more money, instead of doing it because they want to build things and want to have the capital to do it? We don't exactly live in the era of inherited wealth anymore.
maybe because we don't see many of said rich people (unless by "build things" you mean "start another company that they can sell and make them even more money")
It's almost as if you can make $1 billion without intrusive, exploitative, sneaky data gathering and products that are a witches brew of dark patterns.
>The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
That is the explicit design of Capitalism yes.
It's literally a system built around "Those who can amass the most capital are explicitly in charge of distributing it."
It cannot go any other way. Without some external forcing, it will always lift up sociopaths who can squeeze more blood from the stone.
It's like getting upset that Apple's reviews aren't impartial and reliably screw over people trying to compete with Apple. Like, what did you expect? What are you going to do to prevent the obvious outcome?
I remember in the early days of Craigslist, I interviewed for a job with someone who advertised there. After the third interview, they offered me a job--with no money. They wanted to pay in shares of this tiny startup. I had explicitly asked them--I took good notes--in interview #1 if they had an actual opening for an actual job.
I filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara county for "Fraudulent Misrepresentation" and they settled with me for $5,000. (California law is very good on this. They broke two laws with no cash wages and a non-compliant job posting.) But I also told Craig Newmark, because they had their job listing on Craigslist. He pulled their job listings, and sent me an email assuring me that nobody associated with the company would ever be able to advertise on Craigslist again. I was very impressed.
I'm curious about the logistical details of Newmark's donations. Skimmed the article but didn't see an answer. This is just a pledge to donate at this point, right? Newmark has not yet actually transferred any money? Presumably his trust would handle the transfer after his death or something. But then what exactly are they donating? Shares in a private company?
The article does say that he’s already given away this amount of money since the founding of Craigslist 30 years ago. From the sound of things he’s always actively doing philanthropic work, but I could be reading into it too much.
It is great that he’s doing this and it’s making the world a better place.
It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has.
We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”?
If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a donation to an art museum in a developed country - and I think people should, and it matters morally.
The difference between for profit and non-profit isn’t really important either compared to “what concretely did they spend money on and what does that plausibly achieve”.
(Tbc some cause areas he donates to are explained, and they seem reasonable and close to his life, but unfortunately not in any depth).
It says right there in the article that he donates to military veterans' charities and animal rescue charities. I don't see him as a big arts benefactor considering that the main motive the ultra-rich have for making lavish donations to fancy museums is to get invited to the right parties, Met Gala and the like.
He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.
I appreciate any and all support for (independent) journalism. Craig Newmark Philanthropies has been very generous in that regard.
Were I king, I'd (also):
- Create endowments for journalistic orgs. Sufficient that they can maintain financial, and therefore editorial, independence.
- Award lots of grants to independent journalists, to simply do their thing, no strings attached. This ensures plenty of content for those independent orgs.
A keen observer may notice my proposal mirrors the right-wing ecosystem built up over the last 50 years.
Currently, investments by non-right-wing donors to non-right-wing orgs are contingent. Metrics, strategy, ideology, blah blah blah. Whereas the right-wing ecosystem doesn't get bogged down by the money chase, endless self-justification, navel gazing, consensus building, etc.
Having single-handedly done more to destroy American journalism than any other five people put together it is somehow even more deeply frustrating to find out that he didn't even really care about the money while he was doing it.
Ugh, the only thing giving money out has done has made a few millionaires. If he had $500M he would create much more for the public by creating companies. Seriously, wealth generated by companies far far far exceeds philanthropy, which enriches very few.
Planetwork org (serious,respected,boutique) interviewed with these people and got a sort of snotty frat guy to answer to.. He wanted to know if I had been to any weddings in France recently, as part of the interview. no checks were written
I strongly disagree with this framing that moving away from formal philanthropy has resulted in a move "toward hard-edged individualism and ostentatious displays of wealth".
It's easy to forget now with the massive market valuations what Tesla and SpaceX were like in the early days. Both were considered to have a very small chance of success and were in a large sense seen as philanthropic enterprises, intended more to move humanity forward then make a lot of money.
Much of the early investment in these companies and even some of the investment in these companies today is driven by altruistic motives, not personal profit seeking.
While the typical business venture like a new ad network or a social media platform might have some subtle economic benefits that economists can tease out through studying their second and third order effects, I think it's hard to to argue against the notion that the latest mega companies including the AI companies, but especially Tesla and SpaceX, are doing much more good for humanity and have the potential to do much more good for humanity than companies traditionally have. There are already literally hundreds of thousands of people who now have internet connectivity that did not before, thanks to Starlink, for example. Tesla, for its part, has contributed to significantly lower pollutant emissions, especially through its impact on other auto companies, in spurring them to commercialize battery electric vehicles.
And the wealthiest man today, Elon Musk, whatever you may think of him, is not into "ostentatious displays of wealth". The man lives in a tiny fabricated home most of the time, and seems far more concerned with his social causes than personal consumption.
I don't have much love for this guy. He donated millions to the EFF to the point where CL owned the EFF.
When CL bullied people who lightly scraped their site with CFAA threats, the EFF would not help. Ultimately, they ended up on the wrong side of history.
While Musk has created hundreds of thousands of jobs and God knows how many millionaires, Newmark complains about him while having only created around 50 jobs. 50.
Instead of building something else and employing more people he watches TV and feeds pigeons.
Bravo. He's basically a beatnik who won the lottery.
Ea appears to primarily be a post hoc rationalization for someone's unhinged drive for money and power. A way for people who see themselves as good, but act according to a different set of principles, to launder their consciousness through a compelling sounding framework. Now, this isn't to say that all EA practicioners are like this, or that it's bad (I think doing some good is better than doing none, if we can quantify good...), or even that there's a better alternative in the system that we live in. But the whole thing just feels inauthentic and handwaves externalities in a way that always felt uncomfortable. So I'd hardly say EA has "proved" anything.
I know two people who immigrated to the US with essentially no money. They're multimillionaires now. America is the place to be if you want to get wealthy.
I've always been an advocate of the free market. And I'll tell you why.
When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War.
The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the machine guns. All on the east side.
We went through Checkpoint Charlie on a bus, and were searched by the East German guards entering and exiting. The guards ran a mirror under the bus. They were all carrying machine guns. You could sum up East Berlin in one word - grey.
There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall. It was loaded with pictures of east Germans being killed trying to escape to the west.
West Berlin built platforms next to the Wall, so you can stand on the platform and look over it and see what a freakin' abomination it was. I never heard of anyone using those platforms to "escape" to East Berlin.
In West Berlin, there was the Russian War Memorial. It was an island of East Berlin surrounded by the west. The memorial was surrounded by barbed wire. There were two guards on duty there, with machine guns, of course. We waved at them, and they grinned at us.
Then an officer came out and looked them up and down. Their faces turned to stone, looking straight ahead.
I asked my dad about it, he said the guards were a pair who didn't know each other, with strict orders to shoot the other if one attempted to get escape through the barbed wire.
It was pretty obvious to my 9 year old mind that people simply do not like living under communism.
I've read a lot of history books over the years. It's pretty clear that communes and communism and socialism do not work. They don't work when people do them freely, they don't work when people are forced into it.
And the more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is. The evidence is strong and everywhere.
Some time ago, an American leftist told me that the Berlin Wall was necessary to keep the West out of East Berlin. he wasn't happy when I started laughing. I said that even to a 9 year old, it was clear the tank traps were set up to stop people fleeing to the West.
It's too bad the Westerners did not leave a section of the Wall standing. It would stop people from rewriting the truth about it.
After my dad passed, I realized I had taken for granted all the anecdotes he told me. These days, when I think about one of them I write it down in a log.
I do have my grandfather's letters when he went around the world in 1895 on a steamboat.
America is the place for very few people to get wealthy relatively compared to the rest is more accurate.
I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.
Disagree. I have gripes with my country right now, but it's impossible to ignore how much easier to make and save a lot of money here in the US compared to other places.
First, it's so easy to start a business in the US.
$1000 (maybe less?) gets you an LLC or an S-Corp, properly done with an accountant. $200/mo gets you a virtual office or a coworking space. Tax code is also friendly to small businesses. Healthcare is the only disadvantage, though you can get on group plans to work around that.
If you have an idea, it's easy (well, easier) to scale it in the US.
Actually, going back to taxes. Tax in the US is CHEAP compared to other developed countries. I met someone from Denmark some time ago that told my wife and I that they left to escape 50% taxes. Here, the worst you'll do is ~38%, federal, state and city combined. This means that you can make great money as a worker bee depending on the industry.
All of this is a major reason why so many people all over the world come to the US, make their money (with enough to send to family back home) and move back.
"The rest" is still quite wealthy, even by today's developed economy standards. Median household disposable income is higher in Mississippi, a state widely panned for its poverty, than Germany, the richest major EU nation.
In American discourse, there's a ton of talk about inequality from the haves against the have-mores, pushing policy that often times will lead to worse outcomes for the have-nots.
median household income is not higher in missisippi vs germany, especially not true if you adjust for the value of healthcare, education, and social benefits including time off work.
There are, of course, many ways to measure this, some of which are slightly higher for Germany and some for Mississippi. Many are in the same ballpark, which is pretty crazy to think about. Many of these statistics take into account the taxpayer-funded programs you mentioned.
Broadly speaking, the median Mississippian is about as rich as the median German, with the tradeoff being that the Mississippian has greater access to private goods (e.g. a fishing boat or a big car), whereas the German has greater access to public goods (e.g. socialized insurance or college).
My point is that even "the poor" in America are really quite well off, and not just in historical terms.
Why is the median considered "poor"? The true poor in Mississippi are way worse off than those in Germany. If you neglect everything it takes to live a good life like public capital, education, healthcare, time off with family, a retirement, total years on this earth and ignore the insane inequality in Mississippi then sure the median numbers are not that far off.
Because most big-city coastal Americans think of the median Mississippian as that way.
> If you neglect everything it takes to live a good life [...]
We're speaking past each other somewhat. You seem to have a belief system that says a good life is not possible without the stuff that Germany provides via taxation and redistribution. Whether that stuff is a necessary or sufficient condition for a good life for you, I'm not sure; but it is clear you place a lot of importance on it.
I'm saying that in America, more of those things are left to choice to the people, and that a good life, even a great life, is available to the average Joe (hence my banging on about the median) in one of the poorest states in the union, to a degree that is not matched anywhere else.
Put another way: you've defined a good life in large part as access to taxpayer-subsidized goods and services, or at any rate the lifestyle outcomes enabled by such access. By that metric, you're right, Mississippi comes behind Germany, and America as a whole likely behind Germany. But if you look at people voting with their feet over the past few decades, more Germans settled in America than the other way around in absolute numbers; which is even more striking if you consider the difference in population. Clearly there exist people who value the stuff that America has to offer that Germany doesn't.
Emigration of Germans to the USA is only 10,00-15,000 people per year since 2000 and is trending down especially since 2016 to lowest levels ever. Emigration of US citizens to Germany started from almost nothing around the same time and is now trending up to almost 1,500 people a year. We are talking about a small number of decidedly non median people in either case but even then the rate of change is clear, neglecting the fact that Germans learn English in public school while Americans typically don't have public schooling in German. My family is descended from German immigrants who came during the 1930s to escape right wing authoritarianism.
Your point is totally and completely wrong. Germany has public benefits that actually matter. Germany's average life expectancy is ahead of Mississippi by *10 years*. Germany ranks as one of the highest in the world in general satisfaction of the people, Mississippi does not.
> Your point is totally and completely wrong. Germany has public benefits that actually matter.
Objectively wrong, because Germany does better in the things that subjectively matter to you?
> Germany's average life expectancy is ahead of Mississippi by 10 years.
Comparing like for like, that gap drops down to 5-6 years and puts Mississippi on par with, say, Thailand or Latvia. Hardly grounds for condemnation.
> Germany ranks as one of the highest in the world in general satisfaction of the people, Mississippi does not.
Those rankings are all stupid, but in most of the ones I've seen, Germany ranks a scant few spots higher than the US. Sure, if Mississippi were a country, the distance would be greater, but how meaningful is it? I just saw one that ranks Saudi Arabia and El Salvador ahead of Spain and Italy[0].
And in any case, why do people keep leaving those satisfactory countries for America?
America used to be a great place to be.
To put it in perspective, I myself am an American in the top 5% of earning households. I am strongly considering leaving. The value is no longer here. I don't want to live in a country where my healthcare is conditional, on principal. I don't want to live in a country where the Epstein class is protected.
Of course it is, to be healthy you need to be born Mississippi is double the OCED average for infant mortality. Then you can track obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, etc. throughout life. The only area where all this supposed American exceptional wealth confers an advantage in healthcare is post op outcomes where higher penetration of CT / MRI scans can make a measurable difference. Even then the difference is not large. You don't get a DECADE of life expectancy difference without an objective difference in health.
This is no good because different companies use different criteria for infant mortality. For example, the US leads the world in trying to save premies, and does well at it. But the failures are counted as infant mortality. Other countries categorize premie death as a miscarriage.
Some societies do not count a baby as an infant until it has survived its first year.
> life expectancy difference
Criminality, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and obesity strongly affect life expectancy. It's an error to blame it all on the health care system.
The 1% hold more than 40% of the wealth, and therefore should be paying much more than 40% of income taxes, based on proportion alone - nevermind historic precedence before trickle-down Reaganomics.
When the top 1% are not in the top tax bracket, something is horribly wrong.
They are not in the top bracket by choice - a luxury option unavailable to non-wealthy people in the working middle-class who actually are in the top tax bracket.
As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income.
0. Taxable events need be overhauled to cover loopholes, including removing tax-advantages of borrowing against securities. The legal fiction that allows rich people to spend money not recognized as income is deleterious.
1. Warren Buffet, IIRC, noted his assistant was in a higher tax bracket than him.
> As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income.
There is no optimization for anything actually, its just income. There's lots of different forms of taxes that the US government takes part in as you know. Quitting your day job removes the income part until distribution/settlement for any owned assets.
You can argue for a wealth tax, but conflating two separate concepts is not how you do it.
My footnotes are the entirety of my argument, and it's not even as radical as a wealth tax. My argument has 2 easy steps:
1. Remove the arbitrage between actual liquidity events and the limited set of what the IRS currently considers taxable events. Borrowing against securities not being taxable is an example of what's broken. Arbitrage using trusts or LLCs needs to be deleted, based on controlling interests and/or ultimate beneficiary.
Yes, all those things would be broken if I don't need any leverage, and my loans were backed by liquid assets I already possess that I'm avoiding selling in an effort to avoid taxable events even though I really want to purchase a fancy Palo Alto compound that occupies an entire block.
For the vast majority of folk who take out the loans you listed, the loans are leveraged and are either unsecured, or secured by the car or property the loan was made out for, and therefore no underlying value to tax prior to the loan being issued. You knew this already, and I have doubts you're making this false equivalency argument in good faith.
>700k. Still a ton of money, but very very far off from a billion
that 700K is income, but the billion is assets.
earning 700K is the income from $10 million in the stock market (although working to earn $700K is in exchange for you time while the income from $10 mil is passive. OTOH people with the work ethic to earn like that tend to like what they do.
a billion in the stock market is $70 million a year, a large number but far from a billion.
TLDR: 700K compares to a billion 1 in 1000, but the truth is closer to 1 in 100
That is a strawman argument. Nobody is seriously arguing to take all the money. I called out extreme wealth disparity, and implied it was a problem. You can disagree at the latter, but you cannot disagree with the former.
>a byproduct of wild wealth disparity, not because the rich are so generous with paying the government
you're overcorrecting WAY too far. Tax rate percentages are much higher on high income people, and THAT is why they pay most of the federal budget, it's forced generosity paying the government.
and it's actually the top 20% who dominate income and taxes, but including that extra 19% is important because that is the class of people ("coastal elites") who have a (all too human) tendency to rig the system in favor of their children in terms of good schools, universities, learning high status pasttimes, "internships" at prestigious institutions, rent paid in high value/opportunity areas after university etc. These high income people basically earn their livings from the 1%.
(that should not be interpreted as a pure sign of oligopoly, capitalist markets measure productivity, and that's how it works out, production in these industries is highly valued by the populace, but turnover of these people is high, where the top of the list is almost invariably new people each generation.)
I do not understand what you mean by "overcorrecting WAY too far". I have not posited anything aside from wealth disparity existing and that the wealthy do not have a tendency to just give money to the government for the fun of it. If they are paying most the taxes, it is because they have most of the money. Seems self-evident to me.
Except capitalism is a zero sum game. The two people you talk about that are multimillionaires are lucky. For each person you know that has made it, there are thousands of people that are equally as hardworking/talented but are destined to slum away for the rest of their lives.
All human beings deserve to live a happy life. We live in a world where few have accumulated more capital than they could ever spend in their lives while others starve to death.
I don't think anyone with a good moral conscience can support America's brand of capitalism. We live in a world where few live, the rest survive.
As they should. Money boils down to a finite resource, and a class of people have been flaunting their theft of the working class since the famous balcony champagne image taken during Occupy Wallstreet.
That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.
Theft? I don't see any indication of widespread theft. The fact that you don't make as much as you wish you were making doesn't make you a victim of theft.
The reason there is cynicism around philanthropy by America's elite class is perhaps the obliviousness to the methods and means it is created and supported.
"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes
it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.
I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.
Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.
You do not become a Billionaire without abusing and taking advantage of others. It would be foolish to think that anyone with that pattern of behavior would or could be philanthropic.
The one exception I had for this was Bill Gates.
Then I looked into the past behavior of Microsoft, and what he was going with Jeffery Epstein.
For a few years I certainly didn't, despite donating more than 10% of my income to charities, since the standard deduction was increased and the SALT cap was very low.
For most folks these days, only on up to $300 of donations. Otherwise, they have to have total deductions in excess of the standard (somewhere in the $12-13k ballpark last time I looked carefully). If you have a large enough house/mortgage, you may be able to hit that from the interest payments, and then donations are the cherry on top. For everybody else ... nope.
We are almost two decades into the age of billionaire philanthropy and what’s results has it produced? Can you point to any area where it’s really changed the world?
I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.
This is a common refrain of many people, but I believe it is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of philanthropy and charities in general. They don't really exist to "fix" problems, they are mostly a band-aid over the structural issues that lead to social problems. The long-term solutions to most of these problems involve policy changes rather than "spot fixes"
Like, funding a homeless shelter or the Trevor Project won't fix the problems causing homelessness or LGBTQ teen suicides. But there are enough people with immediate problems who we do want to support them somehow until policy changes happen, if ever.
You're right that the Gates Foundation is one of the few that has achieved some lasting changes, but I would say that is because their MO is quite different from what many NGO's do. This is based on second-hand knowledge from somebody who works there, so I'm not sure if they do this exclusively, but they strongly prefer to partner with the local governments to introduce highly targeted interventions.
This simultaneously makes it extremely slow and frustrating to operate (especially in countries with dysfunctional governments, which is where help is most needed) and ironically reduces the leverage of money (which is a problem when you have a mandate to spend X% of your money annually!) but also means that whenever any change happens it is generally structural and long-lasting.
There are many other organizations that operate with similar long-lasting principles, but it seems to me most focus on immediate, short-term support, which may be a function of the limited funding and skills of the people available to them.
> They don't really exist to "fix" problems, they are mostly a band-aid over the structural issues that lead to social problems. The long-term solutions to most of these problems involve policy changes rather than "spot fixes"
Non-profits are 12% of GDP, over $3.5 trillion. Excluding hospitals, universities, and churches, leaves over $2 trillion in non-profit expenditures. Of that, about $300 billion comes from the government. That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.
My dad spent his career in non-profits working on public health in third world countries. These NGOs were able to work with highly dysfunctional foreign governments to achieve real and measurable improvements in some of the poorest countries in the world. Which is why it blows my mind that non-profits spending vastly more money domestically can’t work with e.g. the government of Baltimore to deliver meaningful improvements to the abysmal literacy rates in that city, or work in infant morality in inner cities.
The key difference it seems to me is the lack of accountability in domestic non-profits. The U.S., EU, Japan, etc., care how their foreign aid dollars are used. Every project is evaluated for effectiveness in quantitative terms. That culture of measured accountability seems entirely absent in domestic non-profits.
It doesn't surprise men to find we spend trillions on nonprofits and get little in return. There is an enormous amount of corruption. More than forty years ago I knew a woman who was cold calling people to raise money for research into a canine disease.
If you donated a dollar, she got fifty cents. Her boss got twenty five cents, the company got their cut, the university took a little, so did the department and the professor. By the time it came down to some poor grad student looking at slides there was only a penny or two going to pay him/her. This kind of thing combines the worst of both government and private business.
> That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.
But that's the thing, the money is not helpful when it comes to policy issues. As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will. I can only surmise that the reason more US non-profits don't achieve lasting change is because they are not able to or they are not trying to.
This is not to say they are deliberately being ineffective, e.g. consider that inner city infant mortality rates have socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism. Offhand, I really can't see how non-profits would be able to address these with even billions of dollars.
Of note, a sibling comment mentions the book "Winner Takes All" and links its wikipedia page which has this quote:
> The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism's rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, "Give back," which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system – surgery that might threaten their privileges. The Aspen Consensus, I believe, tries to market the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice."
Not saying I agree entirely, but that is the kind of thing that could lead to billions in spending without achieving lasting structural changes.
> As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will
Lasting change comes down to data-driven programs that work and the money to implement them. As long as you’re not asking for money and meet the community you’re working with where they are,[1] politics is mostly a red herring. My dad worked on projects that achieved incredible results in Bangladesh, for example, even though the government of the country was a complete clusterfuck the entire time.
> socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism.
The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. There may be overarching “factors” that contribute to a result, but there’s usually an immediate cause of a problem that you can tackle directly with an effective program.
Mississippi, for example, is now #3 in the country for NAEP 4th grade reading and math scores for black students. It’s #1 for reading and #2 for math for Hispanic students: https://mdek12.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2025/01/NAEPR.... Mississippi didn’t “solve poverty and racism.” It implemented a program that identified the immediate cause of certain problems and fixed them.
[1] Effective programs avoid creating political problems. When my dad was designing maternal health programs for Bangladeshi villagers, he met them where they were instead of where he thought they should be. For example, it turns out rural women wouldn’t use newly built clinics for giving birth because they didn’t trust “big city doctors.” So the program developed relationships with local midwives and traditional healers, who the women already trusted, and had them get training from the doctors and refer high risk pregnancies to the clinics while handling routine deliveries in the traditional way.
Sounds like you may have read it but the book Winner Takes All is about this topic and pretty enjoyable.
I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.
The Gates Foundation also put a lot of money into education in the US, but my understanding is that it’s had mixed results. Public health seems to be easier.
I understand Gates has also helped in reviving Nuclear power, from reading news on this site and others. Smaller, updated designs that don't face quite the same level of pressure from regulators.
If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.
Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...
There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...
We're a century into it at least, even in nominal dollar terms, starting with Rockefeller as the first billionaire.
I don't know whether John Arnold is spread too thin or not, but he's certainly top caliber and does a lot to measure progress before/during investment in various causes (including education). He also seems to be more agnostic on what the most appropriate solution may be at the beginning of the process.
It's too bad the pimps and prostitutes ruined casual encounters. Craigslist had to remove it because some people were using it for prostitution. It was a safe place to arrange experiences that you would never have had otherwise.
It's also too bad our society shares in the collective delusion that sex work can be prevented. It not only makes sex work far more dangerous, but it tramples on these exact kinds of novel spaces for sex/intimacy.
