> … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
We have a world built for humans, designed for humans to walk around and get things done. How, exactly, would it not be useful to have a robot that looks, walks, runs, jumps, lifts, carriers, pushes, pulls, twists, bends, steers, and labors like a human? It would obviously be incredibly useful.
As a person who works in a factory, areas are changed drastically, regularly, and quite fast. The cost of adapting areas to accommodate purpose-built machines pales in comparison to making robots work in suboptimal ways. It's much more cost-effective to rebuild a production area for very specific machines (something my workplace does frequently but never seems to replace workers) than it is to engineer and manager a machine to do work that's already best-suited for human workers.
> Most people need money to eat. I don't know if you can ever really have a fair negotiation with an employer when "the rent is due" is involved.
Your definition of "fair" is questionable.
If you're negotiating from a position where you've taken on debts and rent that you can't afford to pay, and time has run out to the point where you're desperate for a paycheck as soon as possible, that's unfortunate. But that's not the fault of the person you're negotiating for a job with. Exceptional cases aside, 95% of the time that's likely due to your own risk-taking, neglect, poor decision-making, or financial mismanagement. And you had a "fair" chance to not get into that situation to begin with.
But regardless of blame, it's certainly not the fault of the counterparty in your employment negotiations in that you're in that spot. Nor is it their responsibility. Nor should we want it to be! What kind of system would that be, exactly? A brutal one where many more people fall through the gaps than would otherwise. A much better system is the one we have, where people pay taxes, and do so at higher rates the more fortunate they are, and that tax money goes into programs like unemployment, which helps people in exceptional situations.
You can believe that’s fair. I don’t. I don’t believe that one party needs to be at fault for an economic transaction to be unfair.
I live in a country where “oopsy doopsy your insurance denied this so now you owe us 20,000” isn’t terribly uncommon and your employer can fire you without any warning or severance. “I need money for the rent this month” is not consistently some moral failing.
No one's saying we roll the same dice at birth. That doesn't mean that people who are so desperate that they can't risk negotiating a job offer are 99.99% in that situation because of birth rather than decisions made subsequent to birth.
Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.
At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?
Regarding personal responsibility, at an individual's level it's your responsibility to improve your life, because that's the only lever you have and you don't have the time to wait for societal changes that take decades or centuries to arrive.
When we're discussing policy for our society however it's too easy to blame people for the choices they made so we don't have to think harder. The world's complexity is beyond what the humans brain can hold at any single time. Some people are dealt bad hands, born in a difficult family, born in a body that slow them down or drag them down. Some people make one bad choice (even something mild like a financially unprofitable carrer choice) at 18 because millions of parameters that played since their birth compulsed their brain to make that choice at that moment in their life. Not even mentioning meeting the wrong people. You can do everything well and cross the path of someone who breaks you.
Truly and without getting too philosophical,looking back and learning about people's stories I've come to realize that we have little agency and by the time we understand how the world works and what we should have done instead it's often too late to change the outcome drastically.
To tie it all back to the topic of this thread, the 19 year old who's been pushed by his parents all his life to get good grades, study well, get involved in the right extracurriculars, ends up at Stanford, starts a startup because that's what people do around him, is told to apply to YC, is accepted, is taken care of by YC, tell me how much is he responsible for his success?
I don't disagree with you. I think there's an even argument along these lines that we don't really have free will, since our initial biology and environmental circumstances aren't within our control, and yet every subsequent decision and choice follows inexorably from those initial conditions.
To me, this inspires empathy and care, and it's why I believe that society should have a very high floor. But discussions like these, and the current "eat the rich" zeitgeist seem to focus so much more on lowering the ceiling. Which to me is the wrong focus.
Capping the ceiling would be a tremendous mistake. It would eliminate the "if" in your scenario. The same value in wealth would not be created. You would be massively disincentivizing people to stay here and innovate, and that innovation would flow elsewhere or simply diminish.
Luckily, we've never actually capped the ceiling, and it's unlikely we ever will.
If there's no cap on a ceiling, is it fair or humanly okay when someone's wealth is Epstein-enough to own other people's lives? Wealth is a proxy for power, when someone has more power than legal systems or enough to swindle all of it, is that a better world?
There should be a ceiling or we reach the current state where accountability is nothing a million dollars can't buy.
Do you seriously believe the by limiting people's wealth, we'll solve problems like this? Humans used to have thousands of times less wealth than we do now, yet people still had power and influence, harems and slaves, cults and gangs.
Solve? Likely not. Improve? Of course. Policies that improve the state of problems even if they remain unsolved are good.
More than one million people die of TB annually. We have a cure for it. Elon Musk could pay for testing and treatment distribution for the entire world without noticing a change in his wealth.
I feel like you should read about systems thinking. You're ignoring so many potential side effects, so much history, so many statistics, incentives, human psychology. The idea of capping wealth in order to try to prevent certain power imbalances like sex trafficking, is similar to firebombing your house to fix a leaky pipe. Not only would it mess up a ton of stuff, but it wouldn't even fix the problem.
The idea of capping wealth is to cap power imbalance, without power imbalance many things would not be able to happen within a system, alas there are as you say many potential side effects, implementations of how a cap could work would have to be discussed by society, right now I do feel people are very mad about inequality as is, what solutions are there for it?
There are plenty of people who would consider themselves extremely lucky to work at a startup, even for cheap. I know many older people working much worse jobs. I think it's fair to assume that most startup workers have other options, and that generally those options are worse.
Could you imagine this perception you describe playing into being underpaid?
Your last sentence you’re saying it’s fair to make this assumption that most other jobs are worse.
So that means if a non-startup offered you a better pay package your assumption and bias might steer you away and take worse compensation to do the same job.
I ask you this question because I made a similar mistake in my youth. I took a pay and benefits cut for a startup because it sounded a lot more fun. 6 months later and the company was going under and I was out of a job.
There are also plenty of employees who just didn’t get a job offer elsewhere. When I took my first startup job I didn’t have a competing offer.
I too have worked for startups that failed. And when I took those jobs, I had many thousands of alternative opportunities I could've taken instead that I considered to be worse, or at least not worth pursuing compared to the startup jobs. What's your point?
Here's an example that could help make my point: Glimpse is hiring a Security and Compliance Lead in New York City and is only paying $150K - $225K.
Meta is paying a Security Engineer (not a lead) $271,000/year to $347,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits across the following locations: Bellevue, WA, Menlo Park, CA, Washington, DC, New York, NY
I find it hard to reconcile that salary difference, and I think the only way to explain it is that startups offer dreams of upside like a smoky Vegas casino.
Working for Meta [1] is "boring" and corporate, but it's also objectively a better financial decision unless Glimpse becomes the next Uber. My point is that I am hypothesizing that tech culture encourages people (especially young people) to prefer objectively worse financial outcomes to do the exact same work at a more "exciting" startup company.
At the time you joined those startups, you considered those other opportunities to be worse, but I wonder if that was true or if that was perception? Of course, I don't intend to tell you that you were wrong, in fact I think it's highly likely you were right. I only mean to say that it's worth introspecting on the concept.
[1] Or insert any other large and slightly more ethical company, if we want to disqualify working for Meta due to its "evil empire problem."
Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, I don't disagree with you. I think it's a matter of perception. What's better or worse will always be subjective. And there will always be gaps in the market where people make genuine mistakes, because of a lack of knowledge, or an error in judgment due to inexperience, etc.
But there are also genuine advantages that others simply might not see. For example, many would rather apply to work at a startup because it's an easier job to get than one at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, etc., and not having to study as hard for interviews is a genuine advantage to some that's worth the money left on the table. Or for others, maybe they want a more casual work environment. Or others might just want startup experience because they hope to start a startup someday. Etc.
> Of course the employees agreed to the deal presented to them, what other option did they have?
What? The employees had infinity other options! They could have negotiated harder. They could have declined the job. They could have taken a job somewhere else. They could have taken the risk to start their own startup, and been in the founder position, instead of choosing to be in the employee position and getting the security and reduced stress that comes along with it.
> That’s another point I forgot to bring up entirely: PG also hand-waved over the quantity of billionaires from his accelerator that came from families of very decent means where they have the luxury of risking failure. The quantity of true rags to riches billionaires is extremely slim.
Over 200M Americans come from middle class backgrounds are above. YC also provides founders with the funds to pay themselves while they start their company. I did YC when I had almost $0 to my name and no well-off family to rely on.
I totally recognize what you’re saying. We have to be able to encourage risk-taking if we want to have innovation. I get it.
But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
In contrast, every startup I’ve worked at has offered equity in the form of options where I had to stake my personal finances just to own company equity. None of them granted shares to me as a reward for my labor. I was taking more of a financial risk than the founder of the company just to own a stake!
VC-backed Startups are much different than small businesses where founders take personal financial risks. The VC itself is also not taking any kind of outsized risk as it has mitigated that risk by betting on dozens of companies. They expect most of their companies to fail and leave their employees high and dry, but that’s not their problem and is baked into the formula.
Essentially VCs have plenty of capital and no ideas, so they pay outsized equity compensation to founders for ideas. But the early employees are just interchangeable implementers and get basically nothing by comparison.
If I started a cupcake truck with my friends, they wouldn’t be my friends anymore if I decided I get 50x their equity stake just because it was my idea.
In my opinion, our business systems have been allowed to get away with much more inequality than should be legal. Each caste is orders of magnitude away from each other rather than being linear steps above each other.
Every day, there are trillions of prices that are set by sellers, and either accepted or rejected or counter-offered by buyers. Of course, sellers want higher prices, and buyers want lower prices. There is no one person who can determine what a fair price is. A fair price is one that both buyers and sellers agree on, that creates a successful transaction.
Importantly, people are free to walk away from a bad deal. If you don't like a store's wares, you can go to another store. If you don't like a job offer, you can apply to a different job. Freedom of choice creates competition, which puts pressure on buyers and sellers alike to actually come to terms.
Your post comes across as someone who is consistently in the seller position (selling your labor for compensation), and who's simply advocating for his own personal interests in wanting higher wages. But for some reason, you think your own personal opinion about exactly how much you should be paid is what the bar is for "fair", rather than the prices set by the market, that is, the repeated agreements by tens of thousands of people day after day for years.
And that perplexes me. Why are you so special? Why is your opinion or anybody else's opinion supposed to be the basis of what's fair? I've never met someone who's not just going to argue for their own interests here, exactly as you're doing.
If you don't think it's a good deal to work at a startup and get the equity that you're offered, then you can negotiate or you can just walk away from the deal and work somewhere else. There are many tens of thousands of jobs that I personally don't think are a good deal, or I wouldn't work there. But for other people, they are a good deal. I don't really understand where this belief comes from that, because you personally don't find it to be a good deal, that it's objectively unfair for everyone else, even as they're accepting it willingly.
> But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily. Instead, I spent a ton of time and effort trying to create something new in the world and take it from zero to one. That was a lot of personal sacrifice, giving up my nights and weekends and living off Ramen noodles and almost no money. Just that I could get something successful and useful enough to be in a position to realistically even apply to YC and hopefully get accepted. And I was still rejected twice before finally getting in.
If you think being a founder is so risk-free, so easy, and such a good deal because of how much equity you get to keep, then presumably what should happen is many more people should find the prospect attractive and become founders, relative to becoming early-stage employees, and that should drive up the prices that early-stage employees are able to charge.
I think the way we can summarize exactly what you said as:
Selling labor on the labor market, well, you can just go find whatever offer is on the labor market (e.g., your first five paragraphs)
You had to beat out a bunch of other people and get rejected twice in order to go the startup route. However, I think you are mistaking hard work and low pay for risk in this transaction.
There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
You aren't risking any personal property or savings. A college student is also living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends, but they are actually taking a bigger risk than a VC founder by paying tuition to the school.
What is happening here is that VCs/incubators are using scarcity as a quality filter since they're trying to buy good ideas/stake in early stage companies and dangle the founders' lottery ticket/casino jackpot to buy those ideas.
I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs in the worst case and being unfairly over-compensated by them in the best case. I'm sure many of your early employees also worked nights and weekends just like you did, but they have less of an ownership stake than founders do.
Maybe the founder's scenario is similar to an NFL player, where average players have short careers and are left with broken bodies and dreams, while the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires. This is why the NFL has a players union.
> There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
The risk is the opportunity cost. Going and getting a job at Google pays a lot of money. Repeatedly starting and failing at startups, or getting rejected by YC, doesn't pay you anything. I was a student and then a recent grad with lots of debt, so I had all the normal risk of a college student living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends.
> I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs
What makes an agreement between two parties exploitation, exactly?
> the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires.
I think it sucks that the NFL destroys people's brains and bodies. But why is it so bad that the star quarterbacks command such high pay?
This is pessimistic and cynical. Many millions of people are capable of succeeding if they strive for it, and in doing so making better lives for themselves and others. Hearing words of encouragement, useful advice, and inspirational examples from those who've done it can be tremendously motivating, and is often the difference between trying and not trying. Between "I did it" and "I wish someone had told me it was possible."
He stated the odds at YC were 30 out of probably 12k founders or so. That's not hyper unrealistic. And that's just for ~billionaire status. Much higher odds for 7-, 8-, and 9-figure outcomes. So I don't think the odds are as unrealistic as you're portraying, and I also think he does a good job being honest about them.
By comparison, many people out there are trying to get rich playing the lottery, gambling on stocks, etc., which often have far less likely odds. Is it not better for them to hear about what PG is preaching?
You're taking the topic so literally that it's disingenuous. For some reason you're acting as if PG's advice doesn't apply to achieving success short of $1B, or as if anything short of $1B is unsuccessful, and we both know neither conclusion is true. So I'm confused what point you're trying to make, exactly.
> This is pessimistic and cynical. Many millions of people are capable of succeeding if they strive for it,
How many is "many"? If you meant 100 million people, then that's still just 1.2%.
And in my opinion to claim that 100 million people have the opportunity to become a billionaire is laughable. Even if you're a super genius and you do everything right, there are just WAAAY too many happy accidents (opportunities) or just lack of unfortunate events stopping you.
Like you could be born to the best parents, who can afford the best school, growing up with the best opportunity business partners, and you work your ass off and are very smart… and then there's STILL a 20% chance you're in a car accident before the age of 30[1], potentially derailing your whole trajectory.
So car accidents ALONE could take away the chance for 20% of people. Not saying a car injury is terrible, but it could be sufficient to derail the billionaire plan.
That said, you work with what you got. And become a millionaire? Sure, doable. Billionaire? You need to win several lotteries AND have skill & contentiousness, I'm sorry let's not pretend otherwise.
[1] 2.44 million people injured in traffic in the US every year (2023 data, and US traffic injury and death is skyrocketing UPWARDS thanks to the car lobby's light truck loophole, while everywhere else in the world traffic deaths are going WAY down).
I didn't say millions of people are capable of becoming a billionaire. I said millions of people are capable of becoming successful. Both of you are reading into the "billionaire" part of PG's essay too literally, as if it's saying the only yard stick for success is billionaire status.
But PG is literally addressing the billionaire question. He's literally replying to a statement about billionaires specifically.
We're not reading too much into it.
Like I said, millionaire sure. (You could see it as another word for "successful"). Billionaire? Absolutely not, and it just sounds like you and PG are trying to change the subject, because the actual topic can't be refuted.
Or PG is so disconnected from reality that he's intentionally directly saying "I earned billions".
Go read the last paragraph of his essay. He's talking about becoming rich. He's not literally saying that billionaire is the only line that matches. Again, you're reading into this too literally. Do you genuinely think that PG would say that making less than a billion dollars is not successful? He's obviously using the "billion" yardstick as a rhetorical device.
In what way was she misrepresented? In what way is PG mocking her? I don't follow. She really does believe that you can't earn a billion dollars, and that there are no ethical billionaires. And that sentiment is echoed by many millions, most of whom I would wager know very little about the economics and mechanisms behind creating wealth.
First, I'm assuming that you are not a free market maximalist, and that you believe that a market without any regulation will result in mega monopolies where it no longer matters if you find the price of the product to be fair.
The distribution of the wealth created by the massive increase in productivity has been trending towards the organisational top for many decades now.
I don't think that the management has gotten exponentially more efficient and better at their job to justify their increasingly bigger share of the profits.
That's not your determination to make. Other people, obviously, disagree. I think capital has been the primary driver of the increase in productivity. So it's sensible that a larger share of the gains go to that.
Nitpick: There's no such thing as a "market with any regulation," because regulation is what creates markets in the first place, by making most unsavory forms of profit illegal, in order to incentivize people to innovate and create.
If you only look at nominal dollars, you could say the wealth has trended toward the top. But the average person is materially richer today than at pretty much any point in the past, in terms of real income + real consumption + net worth + access to goods and services adjusted by quality + safety. There's a lot to be happy about, and I know few if any people who'd rather go back in time and live a worse life just so they're part of a time period where inequality is less.
Also, inequality has always been high throughout human history. The brief period of time in the mid 20th century where things seemed a bit closer, was the exception, not the rule, as far as I understand.
And again, if you only look at nominal dollars, maybe inequality seems extreme. But thanks to technology, the actual lived experience and quality difference between middle and upper classes is lower than it's ever been. What exactly is Bill Gates doing in his day-to-day life that's so much higher quality than what the average American is doing? He's eating the same burgers, wearing the same clothes, driving on the same roads, consuming the same entertainment, and getting more-or-less the same healthcare. His improvements on these things are incremental at best.
Compare to the gap between the rich and poor at any other time in history, and it's miniscule today. Housing and education and healthcare, imo, are the real areas to focus on the most. And I'm a big believer in raising the floor. But lowering the ceiling just so you can say things are more equal in nominal dollars isn't going to help anyone.
Good question. When the robber pointed his gun at my head, I thought: since I am willingly giving this man my wallet in return for my life, he must have earned it.
All of your analogies fail because you ignore the fact that (a) most people are happy shoppers who genuinely enjoy buying much of what they buy, and who anticipate newer and better releases of games, movies, restaurants, and other products; and (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.
You yourself are using an expensive phone or computer to type Hacker News comments, presumably not at gunpoint because you choose to do so. Which means you think it's better than the alternative that you're apparently glorifying.
> (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.
Almost every single person I know would rather do this, including myself, and can't. The woods are all private property, and unless we managed to hide somewhere, we would be removed by force.
Historically, (at least in my country, Scotland), people have been forced via economic and military coercion to migrate to the cities and adopt a lifestyle of employment and consumption, there's very little free choice going on.
Can you not join an intentional woodland community? What about moving to another country and living in the woods? If almost everybody you know would rather do this, it sounds like you've got quite the group. Why not pull together and make it happen?
I would be interested to hear of any in my nation that would have me, seems like quite an ask to allow a stranger to join your community when they bring little of value. That's not to mention whether it's legal or not, which I suspect it is not, planning laws are rather strict.
I do not believe I could move to another nation without employment or family relations legally.
We cannot pull together because even pooling all our resources, we could not afford to purchase the land nor the means of survival for ourselves and our families.
First, that's different to the previous suggestion and does nothing to disprove the previous suggestion being impossible. Second, how does that community avoid getting removed by force?
People share a terrifyingly large amount of DNA with mice and apes and other creatures that can become hopelessly addicted to self-destructive behaviors. What is also interesting is the susceptibility of many people to believe really insane things. People join cults. People start cults. People do the cinnamon and tide pod challenges. People jump of bridges. People commit copycat suicide. People do lots immoral and stupid things when that's society's standards.
And no, I don't think that most people are "happy shoppers" but seem deeply disaffected about their lives, and shopping might be a compulsive behavior that helps them soothe underlying fears of dread.
The most insane belief that people currently possess is that we should all be miserable, despite living in what is undoubtedly the best, most prosperous, safest, healthiest, and most abundant age of all of human history. It's a cult, and its members don't even realize they're a part of it.
Oh, I agree. I don't think we should be miserable. We'd be a lot less miserable with less stuff and more friends. Less internet (probably), more music and hobbies. Yet here we are :)
Many of us aren't miserable, love our stuff, and love our music, friends, and hobbies! And I suspect many more would be in the same camp if they weren't being told so often that "everybody's miserable."
When people hear "the world sucks" enough times, they start think, "the world does suck", and easily enough that leads to "my life sucks". Hearing that the world is great can help have the opposite effect. But it's often derided as foolish or even insensitive not to dwell on the negative.
I think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.
I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.
I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.
Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.
But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.
Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.
There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.
I don't understand this dichotomy between the people you've mentioned—nobody makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a vacuum by themselves. Swift had her parents, staff, record companies that helped push and advertise her and rowling has a similar story.
That and Taylor does get brought up the whole time for being rich and wasteful, I can't count how many times I've heard about her incredibly short private jet trips in the past few years.
Your criticism of Bezos are also a bit ridiculous. Nearly every company that isn't B2B SaaS junk uses roads in some degree. I fail to see how the warehouse workers being on public assistance have anything to do with Bezos—if you wanted them to be self sufficient a politician could increase the minimum wage.
Your criticisms of Musk dishonest, but I would also argue that he didn't "earn" a lot of the money for Tesla, as he's just a jackass with a bachelors in econ that did none of the work on it.
AOC/Bernie types have never been directionally correct, as allowing the government to rob you in America will usually not correlate with any increase in QoL for the general populace. Someone on here described taxes in America and Western countries as "tithes" like you would pay to the mafia as "protection" money, where every dollar you give them makes them more capable of extorting the next one out of you.
AOC once summed up her political position as "I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," and I would consider that directionally right.
I don't think it's a fallacy since AOC so clearly implies, if not outright states, that the reason people are poor in America is because people richer than them have too much money, and should have less. If that applies to them, why doesn't it apply to her? At what level is the cutoff?
No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it. She's dedicating her biggest resource, her time, to fixing this.
There's a greater wealth inequality in the US now than there was at any other point in time.
> No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it.
What's the difference? Either way, she's trying to change it so people can't have so much money.
And why? To what end? How does trying to tear down people who have money help anyone else? Why doesn't she instead spend that time trying to create more worth and opportunity for people who don't?
Because she believes that the economy is closer to zero sum than you do. One person having a lot means another person has less, not just in terms of material distribution either, but also the distribution of power.
It is rather strange to have a system where the problem is lots of people don't have access to material goods and power, and you see a few people with huge amounts of those things, and not think that maybe those few people should have less so the majority can have more. You may disagree based on economic analysis, but surely that follows intuitively?
I think she's wrong in almost every way. AOC is a demagogue who focuses on getting her constituents to dislike people with money, and in order to do so, she massively oversimplifies things.
First of all, the average person has more power today than at almost any point in the past. If you're obsessively focused on making people hate others with money, then, of course, you're going to spread the message that money is the only thing that contributes to power, but that's far from the case. Any scholar of personal power would tell you that that's incredibly oversimplified to the point of being almost laughable.
Compared to, say, 70 years ago, the average person has a greatly increased ability to: publish and distribute ideas, organize large amounts of people quickly, start a business, influence culture without being gate-kept by institutions, gain and maintain attention without being gate-kept by institutions, etc. Education is better and more broadly available, capital is more accessible, legal and bureaucratic tools are easier to use, geographic constraints matter much less, more paths to elite influence exist. And of course, far more people are included in what "the average person" is, more can vote, more can be part of society. And this is over the exact same time period that income inequality has increasing. Income equality is only part of the picture when it comes to personal power, not everything, as AOC would have you believe. Also, there are more people in the upper and middle classes today than there ever have been in the United States!
Also, she's hugely oversimplifying the economic landscape. There aren't just two parties, rich and poor. There's a huge third party known as the government. And that party's express mandate is to take care of the people. And the people pay into that party's coffers in order to help it do so. And they pay at progressively higher rates based on how rich they are. The top 1% alone pay about 40% of federal income taxes.
So yeah, if you just completely oversimplify things and pretend that this entity doesn't exist, and you came into a situation where the rich had all they money and power, you might propose a system exactly like this. And I would agree. We should tax people, and that tax should be progressive, and that tax should go to a central government, and that central government should have stewards who we elect to help redistribute the money. And that's what we do.
But these stewards are also so busy telling everyone to hate each other -- hate the trans, hate the atheists, hate the rich, hate the men, hate the conservatives, hate the business owners, hate the elites, hate the immigrants, hate the blacks, etc. The average person is extremely susceptible to demagoguery. It's much easier to hate and blame your neighbor than it is to actually look into government budgetary figures.
And it's much nicer as a steward of the government budget to get everybody hating their neighbors than to have everybody scrutinizing what you're doing with their money.
Have you actually listened to AOC? Because this entire post feels like one massive strawman. I don't think AOC has argued things were better 70 years ago, and I think you know that. She has correctly suggested the wealthiest country in the world, one that routinely exploits poorer countries, shouldn't have citizens that are afraid to call an ambulance. That's tremendous failure.
Your government budget comment is just fluff. If you actually engaged with her in good faith, you'd realize she is not someone who thinks government spending should go unchecked, and the only issue is how much it's getting. She just disagrees with the right on where it should go. For instance, it shouldn't go towards bombing a country for 3 months just to wind up paying them billions for the same deal we already had. I think we can agree having a world leader that is so easily baited into pointless conflicts is bad for our budget. But I guess we balance it out by slashing social programs.
A lot of people's interest in government budgets coincides with the introduction of DOGE. That is to say, their entire understanding of it ends with what Musk tells them. Most people have no idea how it works, and half the things they suggest are already happening. It shouldn't shock you to know some people think billionaires could pay a little more and we can be smarter about where the money goes.
I didn't say that AOC said that things were better 70 years ago. I said she makes it sound like people have decreasing power due to income inequality, so I'm comparing to times where income was vastly more equal, and I simply don't think her claims hold up. Your-income-relative-the-richest-people's-income is, imo, a very small factor of how much overall power you have in society as an individual, compared to the other factors I listed. Yet it is repeatedly harped on as if it's the only factor that matters.
I don't believe I said that AOC thinks government spending should go unchecked. But the vast majority of comments I've read from AOC seem to blame the plight of the poor on the success of the rich.
People have decreasing power because the very people AOC is targeting are nakedly taking power from us, thumbing in our faces, and then whining when they get called out on it. This goes way beyond hoarding wealth. There's no world in which Palantir exists and you can seriously argue these rich people are not our problem. I think AOC feels a way about the oligopoly that many of us do. The lobbies that flood our elections, the social media companies pumping filth to make the internet a hellscape. We do not have to pretend they need to be coddled anymore. People have had enough. Yes, they are scumbags, and they can pay more, and nobody gives a fuck if they think different. Heaven knows they deserve worse. If they acted like real human beings for even a few seconds, they would be treated like kings. But instead they ratfuck the country
The only real question is how someone can delude themselves into buying the Aw Sucks routine of the most powerful people on the planet.
For one, if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her??
For another, as a sibling comment points out, AOC can have a much greater impact by influencing policies that help the people than through charitable donations, which, let’s face it, are just a bandaid on the structural issues that lead to such wealth inequality. Making something one’s professional goal when in a position of influence is much more impactful than optional activities on the side like charitable donations.
> if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her?
If she was truly moral, she wouldn't need to be feted for her actions. Virtue comes from doing the right thing even when other people are not looking.
Her using her position of power to extract money from Peter and give it to Paul does not bestow on her any morality or virtue points. One could characterize it as "buying votes with other peoples' money".
> But the reason it's a "fallacy" is AOC could donate 100% of her current salary for 63,000 years and that would equal 1% of Elon's current net worth.
I didn't say anything about Elon's money being related to AOC's morals. I said AOC's morals were dependent on her donating her money without bragging about it. The claim of logical fallacy does not follow.
At becoming billionaires. Many more than that succeeded at making a good chunk of money that was life-changing for them, their families, their early employees, etc.
So I think your reading of the chance of "hope" are overly cynical. Of course it's not easy to make millions, but it's not so bleak and the market isn't so ruthless that it can't be done for those who try intelligently and persistently.
And of course, even below that level of wealth, there are tens of millions of people who work regular jobs and are able to afford pretty high standards of comfort and living by any yard stick that's ever been used to measure.
He very explicitly engaged with her claim that the system is unfair/unethical, and whether you agree with him or not, he argued against it:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
In other words, he's saying that rapid wealth creation can (and often does) come from creating and selling things of value to willing buyers, at scale, and that that's not unethical to do.
I do agree with you that AOC's point is not particularly strong, though :)
He only really addresses the fact that the system can be nasty. It can be and regularly is, but he only argues that a company doesn't have to be nasty, so he can conveniently ignore specific examples. But the system is not just nasty (and AOC mentions this). It also disproportionately rewards good fortune. That's not cheating, since anyone can have good fortune, but it is unfair, since fortune is not a consequence of hard work or ethical behaviour.
He also doesn’t engage with the fact that this company required funding from y combinator to get to that point
Which is something that is not an option for most people.
Look at where y combinator founders come from. It’s 99% people from elite institutions
That is a core part of AOC’s point
Getting a startup funded is just not something that is possible for most people. They just aren’t in the right circles. Does not matter how good of an idea you have
However, if you’re in the right circle, you’ll get shitloads of chances even after repeatedly failing. Just look at how many of these founders that “made it” drove multiple companies into the ground before making it. It’s a lot easier to find “good fortune” when you have a lot of chances than when you have 0 chances
Yes, you have to accomplish extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
How else should it work?
Should investors give funding to people who haven't built anything, whose startups don't have any users, who had bad test scores and did poorly in school, and who have no references? If you think so, why? And how is that fair?
If you believe that, should professional sports teams draft mediocre players? Players who didn't play in college or even in high school? Players who didn't make the JV team? If so, why? If not, why not, and how exactly is that so different?
We all know there is no such thing as a perfect meritocracy. There never will be. Things will never be perfectly fair. That's life. But we can try to come as close as we can. And that obviously requires offering more opportunities to people who perform the best. Otherwise, what incentive is there to even strive and try to do well? The alternative isn't fairness, it's randomness.
This reply is so far removed from the comment you replied to I'm worried you replied to the wrong one. They did not mention anything about people who haven't built anything, startups with no users, and having no references - you invented that. They literally only mentioned elite schools. "drafting mediocre players" is incredibly bad faith, when one of the only things they claimed was "does not matter how good of an idea you have". Having a good idea is the only qualification for an incubator!
Look, if you think people who go to elite schools have all the good ideas, just say that. You don't have to wrap it up in high-minded pragmatism.
> Look at where y combinator founders come from. It’s 99% people from elite institutions
Your comment and the one I'm replying to are so far removed from reality that I'm worried you know nothing about Y Combinator, elite institutions, or startups in general.
You do not just waltz into elite institutions. Let's take my alma mater, MIT, for example. The average SAT score there is probably around 1500-1550. The average GPA is near perfect. College admission are insanely competitive. Pretending like getting into these institutions is zero signal is bad faith.
Followed by the claim that it "having a good idea is the only qualification for an incubator." What? No it's not! Out of the thousands of admission advice poss that are publicly available online, written by YC's founders, partners, and successful applicants over the past 20 years, I challenge you to find a single one that even kinda sorta comes close to echoing that sentiment. What matters WAY more is demonstrating technical, sales, and marketing prowess by building something and attracting users at a high growth rate.
> Should investors give funding to people who haven't built anything, whose startups don't have any users, who had bad test scores and did poorly in school, and who have no references? If you think so, why? And how is that fair?
This is very obviously not what the person you responded to was saying. It's so far off that it's hard to believe you are even arguing in good faith anymore...
But his N=1 anecdote doesn’t prove anything. He shares a feel-good story about an early stage company with very high growth on a small base. This person is not a billionaire yet.
The actual comparison would be to look at all the startups with billionaire founders (so likely $10B companies) and then analyze the market dynamics that enable them to keep growing so fast.
What AOC actually said was (linked in the essay): "You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that." That is a strong claim - a claim of universal impossibility - but it's the claim she chose to make. Because she made a universal claim, an N=1 anecdote is enough to disprove it by counterexample.
That's an argument for AOC to make. This post is about PG responding to the argument she actually did make.
She has made vague, handwavy, and (depressingly) oft-repeated statements that "there are no ethical billionaires" and that "it's impossible to earn a billion dollars," but she has rarely supported with these statements with any facts or evidence whatsoever.
The statement that there are no ethical billionaires who’ve gotten there by creating something approximating a billion dollars of value can be trivially disproven through a single counterexample.
The fact that her detractors have spilt gallons of ink arguing against her point without providing such a counterexample speaks volumes.
Plenty of counterexamples have been provided, people just don't accept them because the definition of ethical is subjective. And when you have circular reasoning that defines making money itself as unethical, then you become impossible to please.
But here's a quick list from the top of my head: Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, Hamdi Ulukaya from Cobani, the founders of Canva, the founders of Stripe, Tobi Lutke from Shopify, Paul Graham himself, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, George Lucas, Roger Federer, J.K. Rowling. Probably dozens/hundreds of others.
If you do something that somebody likes and they give you $1000, that's ethical. But if you do something a million people like, and they give you $1000, then you're a billionaire, somehow you must be unethical?
I just took a quick look at the first person on your list: Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems
Umm - a healthcare company selling patient health records. I'm willing to bet a lot of those records were not obtained through ethical disclosure and most patients would refuse to have private details of their health sold to anyone who wanted it.
Ok, let's take a look at the next: Hamdi Ulukaya from Chobani
My point exactly. Your grand slam-dunk evidence that all billionaires are unethical is that:
1. One started a healthcare company, and bad things happen in healthcare, and you aren't going to look into any more than that.
2. One is a rich man being sued by an ex-wife who wants his money/stake in his business.
By these standards, not only are there no ethical billionaires, but there are also no ethical millionaires, or thousandaires, or taxpayers, or politicians. Because they're almost all going to be a degree or two of separation from someone or something doing something unethical or making a claim. "Ethical" is such a high bar that no one meets it, and it becomes a meaningless standard. AOC herself isn't ethical[0][1].
> Epic became the dominant vendor of databases because it was better than anyone else at combining regulatory compliance with maximizing hospital income. Epic enables the hospital to maximize the use of codes that determine the payment. “Before Epic, nobody was able to systematize upcoding,” says an executive of one hospital system.
> Epic’s software can enable doctors and hospitals to overcharge patients, insurers, and Medicare and Medicaid.
Edit: so really, "billionaire healthcare company owner" is all you need to know about the ethics of that person.
So you're evil if you make a tool that "can enable" other people to do evil stuff. I guess most software developers are evil. Anyone who makes silverware is evil. Etc.
As I already pointed out above, your bar is going to be incredibly unrealistically low for what counts as evil, and I was right.
You're also just ignoring most of the people on my list anyway, picking on one person (quite poorly), and then trying to generalize that to all billionaires.
About the only "ethical" billionaires (did not exploiting anyone) would be the ones at the end of your list. That would be Taylor Swift, Beyonce, J. K. Rowling, Roger Federer (and no George Lucas is not on that list).
> I guess most software developers are evil.
Not most. Anyone who willingly works for Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Advertising/Palantir and other exploitative companies is.
>Anyone who makes silverware is evil. Etc.
Umm, silverware?
>picking on one person (quite poorly), and then trying to generalize that to all billionaires.
Yeah that was my bad - to clarify: anyone who became a billionaire through their own work/talent and without exploiting anyone is an ethical one in my book. Anyone who became one by stealing (yes, "upcoding" medical charges is stealing, unpaid labor is stealing) is not.
I wonder why he didn't argue against the point by using an actual billionaire to illustrate. Instead he chose someone who is not a billionaire, and imagined them becoming one with nine and a half months of constant 93% growth. Couldn't his counterargument become stronger without the underpants gnome logic?
Funny that it use to be the millionaires everyone hated. I guess there are too many millionaires these days and vilifying them means turning yourself or someone you know into the villain. That’s probably a little too uncomfortable.
Well, I would reframe it. A comfortable retirement nest egg is now over a million in most parts of the US, and the people who used to rail against millionaires were never intending to argue that people shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy a comfortable retirement.
Inflation has made so many "millionaires" (8% of US households), and at the same rendered it a meaningless title - a salaried worker who paid off their 30 year mortgage and has a little in their 401k is quite likely to cross the million net worth threshold.
A million is hardly buying mansions, yachts, and champagne-filled swimming pools in the current economy
Meaning is derived from real usage, not from dictionaries. Descriptivism has won. And in the real world, it's simply used as a cheap shot to claim that certain policies or thoughts are only for the winning of votes rather than well thought out or other "ideology" based.
Do all the non politically affiliated people who hate billionaires not count? Or why is the granularity here important? Your point is stronger the other way!
Populism is a "thin" political ideology that often gets layered on top of other political ideologies, both left- and right-wing. It simply means "policies that appeal to ordinary people" (vs. a rich and perceived corrupt elite). By definition, someone who hates billionaires simply because they are billionaires is a populist. They might hate other populists that have attached themselves to other political ideologies (and have different scapegoats or preferred policy prescriptions to rectify the inequality), but they are still a populist.
How often does this actually happen? People have been studying capitalism for more than a 100 years and this argument has been rehashed for a long time. Free market capitalism will only allow a startup to gain ground via innovation and offering of a superior product or service if the market is not totally free and monopolies are not allowed to form. Monopoly is the natural end state for capitalism.
Furthermore, the company motivated by profit that does not have to pay for polluting the environment will also pollute the environment.
Regulation is also necessary to pay for long term externalities and other boom and bust cycles.
There is nothing new in PG take except COPE and blame shifting about the increasing inequality and other societal and environmental issues.
In my view, there is no such thing as free market capitalism without regulation. The only thing that could create anything resembling a "free market" in the first place is regulation. The whole point of the endeavor is to enact regulations that essentially play whack-a-mole in making every means of profit illegal, except for means that serve the greater good, i.e. producing, serving, innovating, and/or lowering prices, or investing in those that do.
Without regulations (just a fancy word for "laws"), few people would bother to do any of these things. As it would be much more profitable to simply sabotage competitors, form cabals or monopolies, oppress and steal from the populace, conquer and loot your neighbors, lie and deceive and trick your partners, etc. And even if it weren't, anyone who did want to truly innovate or produce something useful would be discouraged by the fact that, due to others engaging in the above activities, they wouldn't see any profit.
So, to answer your question…
> How often does this actually happen?
All the time! Hundreds of thousands of times per year! Because we don't live in an unregulated free market, because there's no such thing and the concept is absurd on its face.
There are plenty of gaps and inefficiencies where new businesses can provide value to customers at scale who will happily part with their money in return.
Not to mention the fact that the constant march of technology (as well as changes in policy, culture, environment, knowledge, etc.) are constantly tearing open new holes in the market.
He explicitly and clearly disagreed with the claims, and argued against them:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
To any honest reader, it's clear he's saying the system isn't necessarily dishonest, and that it's possible (if not common) to rapidly earn money in the system by simply creating things of value and selling them to willing customers.
I don't know what you're reading, but he's talking about the fact that her startup is growing, and has happy end users, who are purchasing her product, and telling their friends.
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
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