31–40 of 249 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lower class are basically slaves" You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery ? You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
yes - in order to say something that is true, I need to say something that is false. You'd be right to call me on it, and I'd have it no other way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lower class are basically slaves" You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery ? You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
yes - in order to say something that is true, I need to say something that is false. You'd be right to call me on it, and I'd have it no other way.
"I am a manufacturer of income inequality."
I hope I didn't go too overboard by dissecting PG's essay like this, but I felt it was necessary to correct many of the items that I read. It may seem spurious now, but economic inequality is relevant for the tech industry, too. The massively increased productivity that information technology provides is very infrequently distributed proportionally to the people who actually forged it-- exactly the same condition as…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lower class are basically slaves" You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery ? You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
yes - in order to say something that is true, I need to say something that is false. You'd be right to call me on it, and I'd have it no other way.
What does this mean?
PGs articles aren't wrong - but they are second order, when we need a first order response to a current evil [ before it leads to bloody revolution ] If you look at income distribution its a hockey stick - you really have to slap yourself on the face and realise there is no middle class - what you thought of as professional-middle-class-contributor is actually college-debt-burdened-lower-class - no matter how many ye…
That phrase could mean anything in practice that anyone wants it to mean. If we're going to discuss these things, we should be specific. What specific policy is desired, and how is it going to help? "Humanity" and "democracy" are not economic policies, nor are they specific enough goals to design policies around.
I am unsure whether economic equality is a goal that we should strive toward. I wonder if a better measure for our economy would be how well off people are at each place in the distribution. Almost all middle class people in America today still have really nice TVs, mobile phones, Internet, etc., which suggests that their standard of living is quite good in absolute terms. We should be looking at absolute terms, not relative terms.
Taxing the wealthy has undesirable effects. It's not as if wealthy people take their money and put it under their mattress. No, they invest it. That investment money flows to other corporations who then spend it on goods and services, or spend it on their employees. All of the wealth that the rich accumulate makes its way back into the economy, except it's at the direction of the rich according to their investment decisions. The alternative, if you tax the rich, is that the same money flows to the government and the government spends it on programs.
That's certainly valuable, and I believe it makes sense for the government to have tax revenue to spend on its programs, but I don't necessarily think that more revenue for more programs will lead to better results. I'd rather that we spend substantially less on wars, for example, and redirect that money into infrastructure for our own country.
Take the F-35 development program - the government has basically thrown over a trillion dollars down the drain (I'm being hyperbolic, but it's really pretty bad). A trillion dollars!! The government would have plenty of tax revenue to spend on smart infrastructure investments if it stopped throwing money away on programs like that.
I'd hazard a guess that wealthy investors through their investments are more effective at creating wealth and raising the standard of living in the country than the government is (on a marginal basis from where we are today). Investors are far better at examining where their money goes, what effect it has, and doubling down on investments that demonstrate promising results, and pulling the plug on pointless ones. The government by comparison keeps burning more and more money on programs that are clearly ineffective - examine the Healthcare.gov or F-35 boondoggles. Private investors do better. Let them keep their money to invest it smartly.
I think it's useful to draw a bright line around the 'value creation' that PG is referring to, also. It's not just creating chairs, it's aggregating great wealth by 'disrupting' traditional industries. Those traditional industries have workers and shareholders who lose out. What makes successful startups so profitable is they displace a large and less-efficient system with a small, efficient one. Efficient in terms o…
Yes, this is exactly it. I also agree re: Piketty being quite verbose... many of the same old points rehashed again and again.
This is spot on. I think it is important to evaluate PG's essay within context. He, like most people in Silicon Valley, is stuck in a bubble and views the rest of the world through a very distorted lens. That's where much of his rhetoric about wealth creation comes from: he's surrounded by people (founders) who create value in the form of software. When a portion of those founders become rich, he looks at himself as…
PG is in a bubble and has a distorted view, but unlike a lot of rich people, he's a real producer. Y Combinator has made the world a better place in terms of new businesses, wealth created, people trained, etc. Also PG and Sam Altman are very responsive to critics, they understand that they live in a bubble and that other people have a valid point of view. Compare that to the essays written by the people at Andressen…