Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Economic Inequality

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 580 posts

Re: Economic Inequality

#21

Post by rst »

[deleted] wrote: post #17
rst wrote: post #4

Central thesis (hidden a bit): "ending economic inequality would mean ending startups". So, who is the straw man who advocates completely ending economic inequality? Even left wingers in Europe (far to the left of anyone mainstream in the US) talk mainly of reducing it. So, if economic inequality were substantially reduced, would there still be startups? I believe another piece of common advice in this field is that…

[deleted]

Huh? The question isn't even about whether it's possible to create a "vast internet property". The question is about how much of the money the creator, heirs and descendants get to control personally.

Re: Economic Inequality

#22

Post by phamilton »

hobs wrote: post #14

The problem with income inequality is not related to a startup founder getting rich, its about the deck being stacked against people before they are even born, and then the super rich continually stacking the deck against anyone coming up and challenging their supremacy.

More concretely, access to capital is a function of ones personal/professional network. The greater the divide due to income inequality, the less likely one has access to capital.

Re: Economic Inequality

#23

Post by braythwayt »

jpmattia wrote: post #16

Great essay. I was struck by this though: > A woodworker creates wealth. There's an odd can of worms in that simple statement, which is roughly reduced to: How do you measure wealth? Part of the controversy is that wealth is often a summation of net worth in [dollars | yen | euro | yap stones]. However, if you look at the simple act of the woodworker selling a chair, the total dollars in circulation before and after…

Not exactly. Before the woodworker builds the chair, they have some wood. The value of the wood is less than the value of the chair. So building the chair increases the total value of the economy.

The actual sale of the chair to someone else is a NOOP, it’s just shuffling assets around.

Re: Economic Inequality

#24

Post by gedy »

Apologies as I'm not an economist, but one thing that seems wrong/misleading about using the phrase "income inequality" in the media is that it usually follows a populist, single variable: "they have more money, so of course they took it from everyone else!!"

Which implies modern money is a finite closed-system ala the gold standard. It's not, and money is basically created via the Fed, debt, QE, etc.

Seems the real problem is not feel-good bashing and taxing of "high-pay" (which usually just means middle class), but instead the people and organizations that are beyond income such as bankers, banks, politicians, etc. who control that creation and distribution.

Re: Economic Inequality

#25

Post by MisterBastahrd »

People still got rich when the top tax percentage was 90%. I personally don't care what people make, but I care when they use their massive wealth to influence policies which affect me. If you have more access to my representative than I do and you don't even live in my congressional district, then I want that to stop, one way or another.

Re: Economic Inequality

#26

Post by bko »

fivedogit wrote: post #2

Usually pg's essays are spot-on. But this one, I feel, is based on a false premise: People aren't upset about startup founders getting rich -- in fact, society loudly applauds it. What people are upset about is legacy capital growing and growing and growing while the poor and middle class stagnate or even contract. On this subject, I always think about farms. Back in the day, it took ~100 people to work a large farm.…

There is actually a lot more turnover of wealth than in the past and most of the richest people in the world are self-made (albeit most were not exactly from humble beginnings).

> Over the past 30 years, the origin of the wealth of the richest people in the United States has shifted away from old, inherited money. Our new metric, the self-made scores developed for the Forbes 400, shows that increasingly we find self-made billionaires among the ranks of the richest people in the country. This has accompanied the incredible increase in wealth of the members of the Forbes 400, which has jumped 1,832% times since 1984, when the total net worth of our list was $125 billion, compared with $2.29 trillion today [0]

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...

Re: Economic Inequality

#27

Post by [deleted] »

rst wrote: post #21
[deleted] wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Huh? The question isn't even about whether it's possible to create a "vast internet property". The question is about how much of the money the creator, heirs and descendants get to control personally.

[deleted]

Re: Economic Inequality

#28

Post by jrlocke »

Pg, in effect: "if there was no economic inequality there would be no startups (and all the good they bring). The real problem is the number of super poor, not the number of super rich".

But this is a straw man: no one is arguing for total economic equality, just a reduction in inequality. Further, pg asserts that startups are wealth creators, and they thus create rich founders without having influence on poverty in this country. This is patently false: the best startups make money eating other people's lunch, and they concentrate this money in the hands of the founders. Jeff bezos holds money that would have found its way to book store owners, Netflix money from video rental services, Uber money from taxis service owners, etc. The startups are often the better solution, you will not see me hailing a yellow cab, but the economic inequalities they are introducing must still be addressed.

Re: Economic Inequality

#30

Post by collyw »

[deleted] wrote: post #19

[deleted]

Exactly. As someone working in Spain, I can live a comfortable life on my salary, but I don't feel rich. I would certainly struggle to give up working for a year and try and bootstrap a startup from what I can save (it's possible but it would be tough).
Post reply on HN