this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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I mean this money isn't literal money; it's assets and shit. As shown by Elon Musk's Twitter fiasco, that kind of "money" can't be converted into liquidity on a moment's notice. The assumption that giving away all one's wealth immediately leads to maximum good is also not true, because the whole point of capital is that it grows. In Mackenzie's example she could donate six billion right now and end up right where she started (ignoring inflation, which we probably shouldn't). That means that, hypothetically, she could donate 36 billion dollars every seven years, or about 5 billion dollars per year, forever. That's 50 billion per decade, and there are many decades in a human lifetime. You count how many homeless children that is. Capitalism is an unethical system, but there's merit to participating in an unethical system where one is given power if they can do more good with their presence than with their absence. It's basically the same logic as a regional bureaucrat with a conscience in a dictatorship. For fun I tried to calculate how much money adjusted for inflation you could give out starting from 36 billion dollars over a human lifetime, assuming all remainder gets given away on death and that the giver is going to die exactly forty years later. Here's the result: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/ysyzv7ur1m (x axis in years, y axis in billions of dollars). Here you have four donation schemes, in order from the top, with growth rate 11% and inflation 4.5%:
Of course saving a starving kid now is better than saving a starving kid later so these numbers shouldn't be taken at face value, but you get the idea. Money is power, and there are better things to do with power than immediately give it away.
Edit: Made a mistake in the math. #1 should be 11% of 36, or roughly 4, per year.