One reason to make a lot of money is to get a good spot on the league table of rich people. [...] Being the richest person in the world does seem cooler than being the second-richest person on the world, though I doubt that your consumption basket changes much between those two spots. [...] And so you might imagine that the design of the league tables could motivate behavior.
Put another way: Had the Oracle of Omaha held onto his stake through the years, he’d have a net worth of almost $400 billion as of April 30, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s $67 billion more than the fortune of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.
Charity-adjusted billionaire rankings! Why not? [...] When you irrevocably donate your stock to charity, you no longer own it in any legal or practical or economic sense, but should you still own it for league table purposes? Would that incentivize more donations? “You can give away all your money and still be rich (in our rankings)”?
Matt Levine mostly treats this as a joke, but it would be cool if someone put some effort into making a lux-looking billionaire ranking website that adjusted for charity. Matt reads his reader email, so I bet you could get it featured on his newsletter.
An interesting way to think about this is that when you donate money to a good cause, nobody can ever take that away from you. Not the tax-man, not Trump, not a recession or a stock-market collapse. You will forever have that "credit" in your account.
The idea of this post is so obviously correct that anything else just doesn't make sense. If it's a competition for who has earned / inherited the most money - which sadly for some people it is - then why shouldn't money voluntarily given away be part of the total?
Right now, rich-lists are a contest to find the greediest humans, people who amass but do not share huge fortunes. Maybe calling the the "Forbes Greed list" would help change this??