Interesting idea but I don’t think that’s challenging to do well and I’m not sure it’s merited:
Determining consumer surplus generated is very difficult
… Particularly as we are in a situation far from perfect competition in most industries (IMO). Did Bill Gates’ Microsoft/Windows add consumer surplus, did it add more welfare than his charitable work? Hard to say. Obviously the DOJ was claiming he cost the world a tremendous amount of innovation and surplus.
Incentives: Non-donation impact may be accidental
Was Gates trying to make the world better by building Windows? Was it his main aim? I doubt it. But you might say ‘why does it matter’? Maybe it matters because the impacts of people trying to make money can be good, bad, or neutral.
Consumer surplus/income and distribution
In principle all the income that is accrued the global wealthy and upper middle consumer surplus as a result of Bill Gates (etc.) could be passed on the neediest causes. But it wasn’t/won’t. It’s hard to know how much diminishing returns to income to put into the welfare function.
But if we look at the other big billionaires, like Bezos/Amazon, the same issues come up. How much value did amazon bring? Probably a lot compared to ‘no central web commerce site’. But if it weren’t for them, presumably something else comparable would have arisen.
Interesting idea but I don’t think that’s challenging to do well and I’m not sure it’s merited:
Determining consumer surplus generated is very difficult
… Particularly as we are in a situation far from perfect competition in most industries (IMO). Did Bill Gates’ Microsoft/Windows add consumer surplus, did it add more welfare than his charitable work? Hard to say. Obviously the DOJ was claiming he cost the world a tremendous amount of innovation and surplus.
Incentives: Non-donation impact may be accidental
Was Gates trying to make the world better by building Windows? Was it his main aim? I doubt it. But you might say ‘why does it matter’? Maybe it matters because the impacts of people trying to make money can be good, bad, or neutral.
Consumer surplus/income and distribution
In principle all the income that is accrued the global wealthy and upper middle consumer surplus as a result of Bill Gates (etc.) could be passed on the neediest causes. But it wasn’t/won’t. It’s hard to know how much diminishing returns to income to put into the welfare function.
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None of these seem fatal to me (but then I’m not the one proposing to do the heavy inference).
Yeah, Gates is an exception.
But if we look at the other big billionaires, like Bezos/Amazon, the same issues come up. How much value did amazon bring? Probably a lot compared to ‘no central web commerce site’. But if it weren’t for them, presumably something else comparable would have arisen.