Can a rich person be a good person?

People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.

I don't mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.

I firmly believe there are no ways to become "properly" rich that don't require you to be a bad person.

To get out of that "doctor-making-150k-a-year" category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.

I find this take so hypocritical.

I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?

You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?

You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?

Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.

I'm probably more on the extreme than most people here but I don't completely agree with some of the things others say on here. I do see that in our system, the kind of person and the things that you have to do to attain that kind of money requires that you be a sociopath. There are certain points on the path to that kind of wealth where you consciously make decisions that are unethical.

What that looks like is making the conscious decision to fire thousands of people, real people who have families to feed, health insurance they may depend on their employment which in the end which ultimately simply boils down to wanting to have a bigger profit margin.

I mean even just thinking about it—when you have
much more money than anything for one single person to do with, why hoard it when there's so much you can do in the world with it? The moment you begin to care for things beyond yourself is the moment you realize that no matter how much money in the world you attain, there still would never be enough left over for you to be able to be wealthy.

I think if a good person were to amass half a billion dollars they would spent enough of it on charity that they could never become a billionaire. So there are no good billionaires, but perhaps a few good millionaires moving to ex-millionaire.

No.

I think a mistake in thought you might be making is that people are not simply "good" or "bad." I 100% agree with @UziBobuzi that hoarding more wealth than you or your descendants could ever reasonably spend is a "bad thing." And maybe that's a "very bad thing," that would tend to cast a dark shadow on other "good" things the person might do. Still, those good things are not erased; they still exist, and should not be subtracted.

Another important concept is that, while there is a lot of overlap, a person's actions are not the entirety of who they are. We all have bad habits, and regrets, and other shortcomings that we are fully aware of and have difficulty rising above. That doesn't make us bad people, it just makes us people.

Beyond the already presented arguments from the utilitarian perspectives and the perspective of active wealth accumulation that requires a lack of morals, I want to offer a perspective on the control that this much money gives you. Since a billion dollars, or even further, the billions of dollars that billionaires have are hard to imagine/visualize, here is a handy visualization which i urge you to scroll through. (you have to scroll to the right)

Now, beyond being simply astonishingly awful because of the amount of good those people choose not to do, it's evil (I dont like the word in this context but I lack a better one) because of the control these people gain. Having billions of dollars is not just money in the sense you and I think about it. Its control, its capital. Simply through its absurd quantities it gains the emergent property of influencing millions and billions of peoples lifes, often in subtle ways like where factories are built or how resources are allocated, decisions that should by all means have democratic legitimization but are controlled by individuals like feudal lords.

And beyond that, this power influences elections through voters or through plain and simple corruption. But not the kind of small level nepotism we think of where a company wins a bid for some building, but corrpution on a level that influences state legislature and millions of people for decades to come.

No

Many rich people fall into the trap of legitimizing their wealth to themselves the wrong way. Everyone, not just super rich people, had some help during their career. Everyone got lucky at some point too. Connections, inheritances, family friends and so on.

But the wrong way to go about it is to just say, if I can do it and so many others cant, it must be their fault. They must be lazy or stupid or both…

Even people who just won the lottery, so actually really just got lucky, can fall into that trap. And then they start to treat others according to their net worth.

Good people don't become super wealthy because once they get enough to live comfortably they start sharing it with people around them or people that need help.

Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".

And then rich Christians made up some shit about an "eye of the needle gate" to justify keeping their wealth.

If you're a billionaire, you didn't get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There's not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you're a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn't getting their fair share.

In theory, it's defenitely possible. Let's imagine a person who inherited 1 billion dollars. How their parents made that wealth has no impact on the morality of the person who inherited it. The only thing that matters is what they do with the wealth afterward.

While your argument is that a good person would give it away, that's a rather short-sighted approach. If instead, they invest that wealth at a 10% return and donate 99% of the returns to charity after 11 years, they have contributed more than if they would have immediately given away their entire wealth. But they are still considered a billionaire. And they are still making 1 million a year for themselves.

So just because someone has a high net worth doesn’t prevent them from being good. And you don’t have to play any “games” or exploit anyone to stay rich. Obviously, the exact numbers might not match the oversimplified version I presented. So instead of 11 years, it might take 15-20 years to give more than donating everything at once. But if set up correctly this could pay out money to people in need forever. Adjust the payments so that the initial sum keeps up with inflation and you could in theory pay out around 70 million in today's money a year for eternity.

millions to billions of dollars.

2 million and two billion are different worlds.

How rich are we talking about?

I can't believe no-one has mentioned Chuck Feeney.

He's prettymuch the answer to the OP's question: Can you be super rich and a good person? Yes, but you prettymuch have to make it your life's work to not be super rich any more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/

Funny, I was just watching this 'Some More News' video about what excessive wealth does to one's behaviors and morals. It's a bit of a watch but it's worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.

At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos' Ex, can't give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.

I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.

In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.

Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.

This is likely why Elon Musk can't afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he's likely extremely cash poor and doesn't have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It's unlikely he'll ever admit this however.

Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.

The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don't exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It's all fake.

I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other "money" purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from "the rich."

forget the rich, YOU are not a good person

Precisely two, who meet the standard of "not completely evil".

The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.

Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he's cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn't pretend to be nice.

I don't understand the obsession with rich people and their not spending/giving money in ways that please others. Also, the notion that wealth can ONLY be achieved through exploitation of others is silly. Has SOME wealth been acquired through exploitation? Of course. But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement. There is no benefit focusing on what others have, focus on what you are doing. This is straight grown-up advice, if you disagree, you don't have enough life experience yet.

Are any of us good people? I think there is a level of selfishness in wealth that all of us engage in, and so I'm not willing to condemn people for having wealth that seems disproportionate to us. Is John Famousactor a bad person because he lives in a mansion worth ten times the average American's? Is Jake Factoryworker a bad person because he lives in a house worth ten times the world average? What matter of suffering can be alleviated in developing countries by our sacrifices in developed countries? At what level are our sins equal? Is it a matter of principle? Proportion?

The vast majority of people who 'make' millions do so by exploiting others, or by exploiting society to keep it, though, so fuck 'em.

It's impossible to become a billionaire without extreme exploitation. You can't exploit people or the planet to this degree and be a good person.

To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.

I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that's a good point

I think the rich can be good, for a given value of “good”. If good is defined as a lack of self-centeredness, then improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people can be considered good.

Good can be complicated. If one uses their wealth to cure disease in the jungle, but in the process upsets the ecosystem to the point where the people are now starving to death, was good actually done?

It goes so much further than just having a surplus of goods and services while so many go without. We've organized society into one that decides ownership through money, and that includes things that make more money. It's a real life broken gameplay bug, it's why there are people maxed out in everything they could ever want without making the slightest dent in their wealth. It's also the cause of a lot of problems stemming from the people making the biggest decisions in the world not being in those positions from merit, intelligence, hard work, or credibility. It's just money, an amount of money that can only come from the feedback loop bug of money making more money. Insurance companies deciding medical treatment, people not even living in the same state owning all the homes and only allowing for renting so they get paid indefinitely with no loss of equity. People with no passion for cooking deciding what the largest restaurants in the world can sell, people owning water itself. Owning creative rights, there are people who created original works that arent even allowed to use worlds and characters they created. Just every industry in the world, ownership by wealth has made worse.

Can? Yeah, absolutely. Trouble is, most rich people use exploitative measures and fuck the Everyman over just to get as much money as possible.

There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.

You said it friend.

fyi, no one in here is entitled to the wealth of wealthy people. wealthy people are people just like you and I. don't pretend you wouldn't change your tune if you became wealthy

imagine if someone less fortunate than you thought you were a bad person just because you have more than they do

Fuck no.

I don’t really look at it as how much money someone has, but rather how their money was earned. Just like in your example, if someone earns a lot of money because they have an in-demand skill like being a doctor, that’s awesome. You’re making money off your own labor and you’re adding value to the world.

If you make your money off of something like being a landlord, I’m going to respect that less because you aren’t really adding anything to the world, that property would exist without you renting it out and it’s only making you money because you had enough money (usually) to obtain it in the first place.

There’s room for nuance, of course, and you can be poor and still have gotten what you have via unethical means. All this is a generalization. Ultimately people deserve to be judged on an individual basis.

I think a lot of these questions get into philosophical territory, which even when correct isn't particularly useful.

To me, how much wealth you have shouldn't be linked to anything but how much money you've made. The amount of money you e made should be proportional to the impact you've has on the world and others. I don't see a problem with someone being a billionaire if they did something that impacted a billion people lives and collected a dollar for it.

The bigger problem I see is that the current system rewards folks for doing anything that makes money. It also prioritizes money to the point that it's a virtue. So effectively you tell folks you matter more if you have more money, and don't put constraints on making money.

So I guess it's seems pretty true that "behind every great fortune is a great crime ", but it doesn't have to be the case. Which is. 100% useless statement. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

A priori, yes. Being rich is not automatically incompatible with being good - philantropy is a thing. But depending on how rich, how much or how little they give back to the community, how they acquired/maintain their wealth, etc, you eventually reach a point where the person is simply put a social parasite. And that IS incompatible with being good.

There's a lot of arguments here based on emotions and assumptions rather than logic.

I don't think any person is simply "good" or "bad". A person can perform a "good" deed one moment, and a "bad" deed the next. When people look at someone and judge if they are a "good" or "bad" person, they are usually either: 1) judging that person by the overall sum of their publicly known deeds, or 2) judging that person by deeds they have performed for (or against) the judger.

Being in possession of great wealth is not a deed. A person can come in possession of great wealth relative to other people in a society without taking any action (e.g. inheritance, etc) or without taking any evil action (e.g. winning the lottery, taking profit from a sufficiently large business that doesn't perform any ethical violations, etc).

And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?

It's a complex topic, but this is the crux of the matter I think. If we're talking about today's world, then I don't think there is a billionaire who is not complicit with participating in a system that is rigged (for lack of a better term) in their favor, and profits in an unfair scale from the work of others.

On the other hand, I also don't think you need to disown your material wealth and start living paycheck to paycheck to be able to qualify as a good person. So... in my head, there's definitely millionaires who are good people, who earned their riches with authentic hard work and some genius ideas/inventions/services, and pay the people they employ well, or keep good relations with the people they work with.

My $10 goes a lot further than their millions of dollars. I spent $10 on a donation, who will then spend it on an uber. The uber driver will then spend it on something else. Their millions of dollars will just sit in a bank account not adding value to anything but their net worth. Fuck rich people.

A bit late to the party, and haven't read through every comment, so apologies if this is was already stated opinion.

In many (if not most) cases excess wealth is a byproduct of capitalizing on others labor in an unfair way. There was (not so long ago) a time when excess income over a certain amount (say a million) was taxed anywhere from 60-90%. This high level of taxation mixed with the victories of the labor movement standardized that upper management and ownership made around 10X max what their average laborer did. That number has now swelled to 100X-1000X the average salary and with minimum wage (US) basically the same for the last 20+ years.

Beyond having more than you could ever use and depriving a portion to those below you; the systems of capital seem as much about cleaving society into separate castes and classes (as much as anything.) We've had the ability to bring the world out of poverty and hunger for a long time now and instead we've managed to perpetuate myths about those less fortunate being a burden around societies neck. The poor are raised to look at the poorer as impediments to their ascendancy and the idea of base universal standards as rights for humanity have stalled and are largely no longer talked about. Capital has done everything it can to divide people with hate and drain money from the bottom, while maintaining the expectation for never ending growth of markets and resources. This is unsustainable and will eventually lead to rifts that will break governments and societies around the world. Probably faster than most of us think or are willing to accept.

In America so many of us think that we're always one lucky break from rising away from those like us. So as secret millionaires we tacitly approve in the hopes of living better than the rest. Legitimately though, to be rich (from means other than luck (EDIT, see bottom)) will come down to how little you care for exploiting others. If you can take more from those around you and feel less about it, then you could be the next millionaire. And it is this difference in ethics and mentality (possibly psychopathy) that leads to being rich and doing fucked up shit.

I've worked for very wealthy people and they are masters at disguising themselves as adequate people. They are usually very charismatic and can say all the right things without being found out for a very long time. Being wealthy makes people view you as exceptional. You must have been smarter, worked harder, more godly and/or more worthy. As such, people almost always give you the benefit of the doubt much more than they would a regular person. And the rich are exceptionally good at wearing that trust just to the point of breaking for as long as they can. From my experience they are largely on cocaine or prescription stimulants, so that they're always "on point." They buy excessively, without thought and will throw even costly unopened things away. They become bored with life and begin sexual abusing those in proximity to them. These tastes will continue to become more extreme and degrading so that they can feel more power and hurt others more. Hurting people, without consequence, is a great way to assure ones self of how untouchable they really are. They come to enjoy these things and have no care for those they hurt unless it affects them in some meaningful way. They can make up stories that allow them to feel fine about this when it's clear they've done horrific things (DARVO behaviors) and thus will likely never feel any lasting remorse for even the worst of things.

This last part is again from personal experience, but it largely matches over a number of people and I see no difference in the actions of the vast majority of the wealthy. Surely there are some wealthy people who not all of these things apply to, but they are exceptions and not the rule.

We could point to so many things that make the world awful but the overly rich and powerful are a nearly singular point that if toppled could right so many wrongs. Humanity needs a second bill of rights and even beyond a maximum wage, the majority of excess wealth and holdings needs to be taken back and used to fix humanity's course.

All of that certainly isn't going to be happening though, so I look forward to spending the horrifying future with the rest of you poors!

Edit: @Aesthesiaphilia pointed out that inheritance is the largest means of wealth transfer and they are absolutely right. Previously the notated EDIT portion said "to be rich (from means other than luck or some inheritance)" and I've edited out the inheritance portion because you could inherit a million dollars randomly or 500 million. The amount doesn't matter as the impediments to generational transfer of wealth between elites has been substantially weakened even recently and it very much folds into the myth of the self made millionaire/billionaire, which is not supported by reality.

Theoretically... yes and no? First of all it's a given that any truly rich person in today's day and age is a capitalist, no exceptions.

Modern capitalism is based on the assumption that "maximizing profit" leads to the best outcome for everyone... which is not true. So if theoretically a rich person is trying to be 100% rational then they cannot be "good"

On the other hand... also theoretically, rich ppl have a lot more resources to give and support causes they care about, so on this aspect they could be good? I know ppl who donate a ton to social causes but I honestly don't know how much of their donations can be attributed to tax benefits

In practice... I guess most of what you could call "good" people wouldn't want to make that much money in the first place? Or it could just be probability, good people and rich people are both quite rare, so good+rich is even rarer (if we assume they are independent).

There seems to be something particularly poisonous about money. If you reframe the question to address wealth, as in exclusive access to property or resources, then I think the answer is yes. Sejong the Great was king of the Joseon dynasty, and did an absolute fuckton to help his country. He wasn't a "billionaire" in a literal sense, but I think he falls in the category of people you're thinking of, and he was an absolute champion of the people.

The first example I thought of was Bill Gates. He amassed his wealth from a corporation that employed anti-competitive and immoral business practices. That makes him “bad”.

But what he has done with his fortune in the past few decades definitely doesn’t make him a bad person. Is his foundation and its goals the most efficient way to go from point A to point B? Probably not. Does that make him a bad person? Probably not, but it also doesn’t absolve him of sins he committed in the past.

I suppose it depends upon how it was made and what they do with it once they have it. If it's hoarding wealth for wealth's sake then, yea, probably an issue. It seems though, there are some that have obtained wealth and chose philanthropy.

To a certain degree they can but there has been a fair number of times they have not been.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you're very rich, you can't be a good person, there's no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there's quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.

I think there is a line, and it's different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children's inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don't know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying "there I've done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor" and that really wouldn't accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there's overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it's likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn't do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don't think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don't think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

I suppose it depends. There are plenty of rich people who do actively seem to care and go out of their way to not only donate to charity, but actively get involved in communities and try to improve things. Very clearly putting themselves out there and not for personal fame and prestige.

The big part you have to focus on is whether the charity is being done for tax write-offs or other personal benefits, such as what you see with most conservative rich people like the Kochs.

Of course, no matter how a rich person uses their money, even if they very clearly are spending massive amounts of it on helping others and improving the lives of those around them, they'll still be considered evil just because they are rich.

It's an interesting paradox. For some people who have a very narrow view on the subject, they will only consider a rich person "good" if they make themselves not rich. Entirely so. Of course, such a no longer rich person wouldn't be able to help others at that point.

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

yes, they can be - but why do they need to spend their money to benefit the public to be proven as "good"? are you yourself bad because you're unwilling to spend your money to benefit the public?

I dont see myself as greedy, but I am unwilling to spend my own money to help humanity. not even one iota