Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#351

Post by buzzerbetrayed » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

newen wrote: post #318

canofbars wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think billionaires would just stop and let the system collect their money? My first thought is they would just donate all ownership over the cap to family members. They could probably continue this forever before every family member gains $1B

Seems perfectly fine to me. Gifts are taxed in the US. If it causes resulting problems, deal with it then. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.

How is this considered "good" in this scenario? Income is taxed anyway. So how to rerouting money away from "taxed income" to "taxed gifts" help anything?

Re: Billionaires Build

#352

Post by stopachka » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #201

stopachka wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then, you can be more confident in your conclusions. You may still be off, but heck, you would have subjected yourself to much more critical thinking than average, and can be much more confident in your opinions.

Re: Billionaires Build

#353

Post by jacobush » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #325

api wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pandemic happened to hit while we had a particularly idiotic populist demagogue in the White House, but even if we'd had someone more competent I still agree that China would have done better. Assuming you believe their numbers, China seems to be doing better than most of the world. I chalk up China's governmental competence to the number of scientists and engineers involved in their government. It may be authori…

Right, I was just responding to the question, whose posing is often used to suggest that the US is the best of all possible resource allocation worlds. I don't want to live under a regime like the CCP, but we did just run this experiment and the U.S. system of resource allocation failed miserably.

We need to remember they allocate resources horribly in other places though. Genocide is going there, forced abortion and sterilisation of entire populations.

Re: Billionaires Build

#354

Post by dnautics » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #304

dnautics wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a weak straw man. There are people who say this: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/aoc-accuses-...

It's a real argument, depending on where you stand. To become a billionaire, one must be able to amass 10 thousand times more wealth than the median household in the US. To reach the lofty heights of Bill Gates et al. one must amass ~ 1 million times more wealth than the median US household. The reason why some believe that to be a billionaire is exploitative is that they believe this 4-6 order of magnitude disparity…

I think this depends on what you mean by "exploitative". It's such a loaded word used for rhetorical purposes that it's not necessarily clear where one draws the line between any given pair of arguments.

Re: Billionaires Build

#355

Post by UK-Al05 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #330

throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation.

Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker.

The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place.

Basically the sum is greater than its parts.

If you want to know where profit comes from(assuming a well functioning market) in a modern economics point of view, look into Subjective theory of value and marginal economics.

Re: Billionaires Build

#356

Post by danans » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #321

drewrv wrote: post #235

This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of billionaires isn't that every single billionaire is directly exploiting people. It would be closer to something like this: The problem is that our society has feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty, and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more…

It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that, and those are the people he's addressing. I agree there are more reasonable discussions to be had about how to distribute wealth for the greatest benefit to society but there are people who believe that if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent.

> It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that

People oppose billionaires paying low taxes, and the related lack of public investment in bedrock services and infrastructure they need. When a rural area has no hospital, or a city has crumbling roads and transit, yes, people resent enormously wealthy people for whom those are not concerns. People do not, however, oppose their success at building companies that make money.

PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. "billionaires suck"), which is beneath him. I get that it's easier to do that than than argue over how the structural issues that allow massive wealth accumulation also undermine the foundations that markets and societies are built on, but it's really beneath PG to choose such a trite argument to oppose.

> if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent.

That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward.

Re: Billionaires Build

#357

Post by Viliam1234 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #22

Swizec wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love o…

I'm even less old, my career started in 2009. My personal experience was that people back then were both more nerdy and more ambitious, not a tradeoff. And now people are "ambitious" but it's a personal ambition to play the game and earn more money than their peers. The people I worked with in 2009 were ambitious in the sense of building products and teams and companies to succeed in the marketplace, or creating new…

I also get an impression that a decade ago people mostly went to IT because they loved computers, and now they mostly go to IT because they love money. A decade ago, telling people about design patterns would make you a guru, now it makes you a nerd.

Re: Billionaires Build

#358

Post by rahimnathwani » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #330

throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

"you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what you pay them to do it"

This implicitly assumes that "the value of someone else's work" is independent of the context in which that work is done.

The reason Jeff can pay someone less than the value (to Jeff) of that person's work is that, somewhere other than Amazon, that person's work would be less valuable.

The reason is Jeff must pay someone less than the value they bring is because that's the only way for a business to make a profit. If you pay me $100, and I add exactly $100 of value to your business, then you're no better off than if you hadn't hired me at all.

Re: Billionaires Build

#359

Post by postingpals » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

UK-Al05 wrote: post #355

curun1r wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where pro…

99% of people who invoke the labour theory of value misunderstand it. Welcome to the 99%.

Re: Billionaires Build

#360

Post by anon9001 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #328

Two things that are very obviously wrong with the take, both I think having the same reason: Not all billionaires are self-made, and a majority of them aren't tech entrepreneurs of the sort PG talks about in this piece. Seems like a very obvious fact but somehow doesn't really come up. Secondly, in the same vein, the kind of (aspiring) billionaires YC meets are, by definition, builders, because they're self-sorted fl…

> Nobody called Zuckerberg or Bezos exploitative when they were coding in dorm rooms and folding boxes on Ikea tables

Actually lots of us called them exploitive. It might not change anything, but it's worth noting that a lot of us knew that facebook would grow into the great evil that it is today. It was also obvious that Amazon would eat all retail stores, and it pretty much has.