“If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.” - Jeff Bezos
A new opinion piece in the WSJ by Marian L. Tupy tries to calculate the value of the time saved by Amazon customers. I may quibble with some of his assumptions, but his point is that the cumulative value of the amount time of time saved by Amazon customers likely exceeds the size of Bezos's fortune. This is on top of direct savings from lower prices. Nordhaus famously estimated that entrepreneurs appropriate only 2.2% of the value of technological advances. Or Bezos likely got just a sliver of the pie that was created. Even if Nordhaus was off by a factor of ten, entrepreneur appropriability would still be less than 100%. The amount of consumer surplus enjoyed typically rises when profit is earned. No one needs to get poorer just because someone else got richer.
I am reminded by a video clip of John Stossel interviewing Ted Turner from 1998 (I am that old). Ted Turner made his fortune creating a media conglomerate but had recently announced he would be giving away $1 billion in charity. Stossel's video makes the point that Turner could "do more good" by investing the $1 billion than giving it away. Charity divides the pie, investment grows the pie.
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