Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.

These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.

This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not.

Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)

One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from.

Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).

So really it's a two pronged thing:

* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).

* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.

But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.

That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.

They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.

Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.

Interesting. Honestly I don't know as much about his philanthropy, which ideology does he push? How did it make lives worse?

They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy..

I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company.

I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.

I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.

Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.