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Billionaires Build

paulgraham.com

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Re: Billionaires Build

#201

Post by travisjungroth »

stopachka wrote: post #147
travisjungroth wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, coaches and generals are also much better comparison. Either way, I think your argument is weak. “Sure you feel this away about billionaires. But change ‘billionaire’ to something different and your feelings change.” Well, duh. That’s not even an analogy. You’re just literally changing the subject of the sentence. Billionaires are super different than writers in ways that are relevant to this discussion.

My argument is more like this: Most people have a natural bias towards billionaires. To remove the particulars of the essay, to look at it with fresh eyes. Yes, indeed it changes things, and no one change will map completely. Do this a few times though and a clearer sight comes through

What if I do that and I come to the same conclusions I did before?

Re: Billionaires Build

#202

Post by RestlessMind »

tmcw wrote: post #191

56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.

This is an amazing nugget which should be the context for any controversial discussion about "Billionaires". I have utmost respect for the former category, but I also believe that the later category should not exist (as in those people should exist but they should not have any unearned billions and all the unearned power and privileges that come with it).

Re: Billionaires Build

#203

Post by neonate »

season2episode3 wrote: post #87
Meekro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California legislators made this kind of argument earlier this year as they tried to force Uber to reclassify their drivers as employees. California voters rejected that. Uber drivers themselves overwhelmingly wanted to keep their contractor status. Maybe they don't consider themselves exploited?

Or maybe Uber et al outspending their opponents on political advertising by hundreds of millions of dollars had something to do with it? Not to mention constant advertising for free in their apps. They had the “no on prop 22” people hopelessly outgunned. Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver…

FWIW, I've asked a number of Uber drivers how they felt about Prop 22 and they were all overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. On the day that it passed, one was so excited he was telling me about the big bottle of vodka he was going to drink to celebrate. He was particularly thrilled that he was now going to get health benefits while keeping his contractor status.

I mean, it's a small sample of course. But the effect size was large.

Re: Billionaires Build

#205

Post by googlryas »

mbgerring wrote: post #198
googlryas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with this? Employees have different risk profiles than founders. Employees can jump from job to job within a few days. The same is not true for founders. Employees paycheck is (basically) guaranteed until the outfit collapses. The same is not true for founders. If I dump all my time and savings into founding a company and it fails, will my employees bail me out and help me get back on my feet?

First, I would argue that most employees never get a meaningful offer to accept more risk if they so choose. I think it would be better if employees could choose to accept more risk in the form of profit sharing in place of salary, but it’s not typically on the table, even at a startup. Second, the point here is that PG is misapprehending (or deliberately obfuscating) what people mean by “exploitation.” When Marxists…

Employees have the choice in that they are free agents and can choose to accept or reject any contract. And they themselves can go and found a company just like the founders on the other side of the table.

Would it be nice if employees were given options to wiggle fixed comp to adjust to their own risk profiles - so they could choose more guaranteed pay with less risk, or more possible upside with more risk? Sure, absolutely. But I don't see how that should be a requirement, nor do I think companies not offering part-ownership are doing something wrong.

And I don't understand why employees would ever be compensated for the "full value of their labor". When you work for a company, your labor generally only makes sense within the context of the larger organization. Could that context explain the differences between what employees produce for the company, versus what they are paid?

Re: Billionaires Build

#206

Post by austinpena »

RestlessMind wrote: post #202
tmcw wrote: post #191

56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.

This is an amazing nugget which should be the context for any controversial discussion about "Billionaires". I have utmost respect for the former category, but I also believe that the later category should not exist (as in those people should exist but they should not have any unearned billions and all the unearned power and privileges that come with it).

You don’t believe that if someone makes billions they should be able to pass it on to their children?

Re: Billionaires Build

#207

Post by tekdude »

I think one issue with this viewpoint is that while a successful company may be doing wonderful things for its users... not everyone is a user. Even the users themselves are not users 100% of the time. So, even if a company is not actively exploiting its workforce, customers, or suppliers, it might be exploiting its non-users without ever giving them much opportunity to object.

Again, Airbnb is probably the best example: users who book stays and users who rent out rooms/homes may love the service, but other people who live in those neighborhoods or buildings may not. Airbnb overrides those objections by exploiting a few issues: ambiguities in local laws; inadequate enforcement agencies who cannot handle the number of listings in their area; the inability of local residents to sufficiently organize and force their local governments to prioritize enforcement, etc...

Re: Billionaires Build

#208

Post by yetanothermonk »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #183
yetanothermonk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the heads up. The old title was also clickbaity but this new title is even more so. I wonder if even HN comment reactions are more towards the title vs the content.

I think there's an inevitable framing effect. There are lots of points I'd agree with if presented in isolation, and indeed PG has written solid essays before on the general topic of how destructive it is to say that business owners can only make money by exploiting others. But it's hard to talk about those things when the article explicitly builds towards a thesis that billionaires are great and all good YC founders…

One way I could hear people interpreting your comment--I agree on the framing point by the way, there's also external framing now with a hate-billionaires view--is that the steps to get to the thesis make sense but the thesis is not palatable. I'm not sure you'd agree with that interpretation of your comment; I'd love to hear what the problem is with that interpretation

Re: Billionaires Build

#209

Post by tudelo »

RestlessMind wrote: post #202
tmcw wrote: post #191

56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.

This is an amazing nugget which should be the context for any controversial discussion about "Billionaires". I have utmost respect for the former category, but I also believe that the later category should not exist (as in those people should exist but they should not have any unearned billions and all the unearned power and privileges that come with it).

I agree, but in a distributed world I wonder how we could ever end up enforcing something like that in a positive way. Like, if we add some inheritance tax that ends up being prohibitively large, at some point the amount of money these people have seems to make it impossible to enforce.

Re: Billionaires Build

#210

Post by dcolkitt »

daralthus wrote: post #174

Not sure what to make of this. Billionaire companies != seed funded startups. The exploitation really kicks into gear after you have 5000 employees and there are many inflection points of power differentials until then. Each not as a big deal, but slowly eroding some rights the farther and lower you go.

The evidence is indisputable that workers at large firms have substantially higher productivity than small firms.[1] Big business also pays its workers substantially higher wages.

If your model of big business is that it's a tool for exploiting workers, you'd expect the opposite of this dynamic. Instead the economics is pretty clear that most large firms create synergies that empower individual workers to produce much more than they'd be capable of individually or in small, informal organizations. As a bonus, the sizable bulk of this productivity surplus accumulates in the form of higher wages to the workers themselves.

Big business accomplishes this by consistently applying the best practices in organizational management[2]. In contrast small business tends to be much more sloppily managed with a lot more decisions made haphazardly, with many more decisions being made for individual gain rather than the good of the organization as a whole.

If anything the balance of the evidence would make a much stronger case that small business is really more exploitative than big business.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/117089?seq=1 [2] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.1.203

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