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Billionaires Build

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Re: Billionaires Build

#541

Post by nostrademons »

Loughla wrote: post #36
AlwaysRock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain right?

I've never fully understood that saying. Failure to stay relevant and understand the world as it is without your blinders on doesn't make you the victim of time. That's a choice you've made. It's simple to lose touch. You did what the youth are doing a decade ago; hell, you're still in the game, albeit in a much different role. The world shifts around you, but you are so rich and powerful that people in your personal…

You usually don't become a hero without staking a position. Once you've staked it, it becomes part of your identity, and is pretty hard to let go of. Even if you shift your views, much of the rest of the world will hold you to your younger self. (Though with enough time, they'll forget. Remember when Arianna Huffington was a conservative commentator, or Donald Trump was a Democrat, or Elizabeth Warren was a Republican, or Benedict Arnold was a Patriot? Hmm, maybe some of those aren't great examples.)

Re: Billionaires Build

#542

Post by dcolkitt »

oblio wrote: post #243
dcolkitt wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In aggregate, the 400 richest billionaires put together only constitutes 4% of the total wealth in America.[1][2] Even if you assume that power correlates perfectly with wealth, there's not really evidence that billionaires control anywhere near enough money to become a "permanent ruling class". [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_…

Well, expand that category to include every billionaire and also everyone above 100 million, as an arbitrary figure that most people will never make throughout their lives. I imagine that percentage will go up immensely.

Two thirds of wealth in America is owned by the bottom 99th percentile, i.e. households with less than $12 million net worth.[1] A near majority of wealth is owned by the 90th-99th percentile, i.e. households with between $1-12 million net worth.

By far the biggest source of wealth inequality is the division between the top and bottom 50th percentile, who have essentially zero wealth. The uber-wealthy may be rich on an individual basis, but in aggregate they still hold constitute significantly less than run-in-the-mill retirees, dentists, and actuaries.

[1]https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Re: Billionaires Build

#543

Post by siliconc0w »

So a lot of today's billionaires are solidly rooted in historical imperialism and the pillaging of people and nations (i.e old money). Maybe not new YC startup-billionaires but they tend to get their capital from the former. Also they tend to get a lot more compensation for their time/effort than most employees - even early ones that took similar risks and worked just as hard due to lopsided startup equity and the games played with it. Also there are entire classes of billionaires that got there through leveraging negative impacts to society they didn't have to pay for, government collusion, monopolies or other unfair business practices, or regulatory capture (due to regulations they got through bribed politicians) to think of a few.

Re: Billionaires Build

#544

Post by svachalek »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #529
cactus2093 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful. I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools…

> Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. > just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way You're not wrong, but funding education is _expensive_, and education is only part of the puzzle, access is another large part of it, and so are…

Yep. And good luck figuring out how to impress girls that spent every summer of their childhood in Paris and Switzerland.

Re: Billionaires Build

#545

Post by robswc »

akg_67 wrote: post #453
Aunche wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezo's wealth comes from his shares, which he had since the beginning. 20 years ago, anyone who worked at Amazon could have used a small fraction of their wages to buy Amazon shares. If they had, they'd be millionaires. However, that's a risk that only already rich people are willing to take.

Tell that to Amazon warehouse worker making $10-20 an hour that instead of putting food on the table, roof on the head of his family, he should have bought Amazon shares. Bezo is epitome of what’s wrong with America and American “capitalist” system.

How?

$10-20 an hour is better than minimum wage and a few years ago I worked a labor job that "only" paid $12.00/hr.

Is Jeff Bezo's personal net worth the causation behind someone not being able to support a family?

What about Zuckerberg, what is the average salary of a FB employee? If its above a certain amount is that a "moral" billionaire?

I would argue that pursuit of profits can lead to bad things for employees... but I never understood going after billionaires when their wealth is almost exclusively because they created a company worth billions. If that were the case, everyone making minimum wage should have seen their salaries skyrocket when these billionaires lost great %'s of their wealth over the last year.

I personally see rent/CoL being the problem. I don't know of solutions but I do feel going after billionaires is just a waste of energy. I'm a bit bias as my work has some crossover with "wealth and finance" (trading stocks) but all too often these ideas about "taxing rich people" just blow up and leave everyone worse off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...

TL;DR, they tax each trade on the market. It makes a fraction of what it was projected to make and never comes close to making more than they did before by just taxing the capital gains (profit from trading). Its an idea I've seen showing up more and more.

Re: Billionaires Build

#546

Post by josephg »

centimeter wrote: post #480
bedhead wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about the feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty. The most uncomfortable one to talk about is basic social network effects. Two people meet at some prestigious college and get married - are we shocked they have children who are predisposed for success? Besides from having god-given IQ, they are likely some combination of ambitious, punctual, respectful of authority, long-term oriented, hard-…

Heritability studies suggest this is much more strongly mediated by genetic factors (such as IQ and time preference) than social factors.

Sure; but this trend doesn’t rely on upbringing alone.

The children of two collage graduates have collage graduate genes and a collage graduate upbringing. It’s no surprise they’re (we’re) overrepresented in collages.

Re: Billionaires Build

#547

Post by somethoughts »

8note wrote: post #524
somethoughts wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - this! Perhaps it should be "Ok yay you won, now did you win in cheat mode (by exploiting people and reasources) or real mode!" Since Forbes is the default scoreboard perhaps when it makes its Billionaires List, instead of a basic sort ranked by on net worth, Forbes should incorporate Environmental, Social and Governance like factors similar to those starting to be used for Equity investing [1] and do a final ra…

Nah, it's an option for starting againm.in video games you get to win in the initial difficulty, but then you can start again in plus mode

Yes - that's fair - that's the Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel style of gaming. After winning first in cheat mode, play again in real mode!

Re: Billionaires Build

#548

Post by schwartzworld »

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…

> Zuckerberg

You mean when he was coding the site to rate which of his classmates were hottest? Yeah, cool cool.

Re: Billionaires Build

#549

Post by pdonis »

mightybyte wrote: post #385
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…

> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Here's a slightly different take on this idea: The only way to become a billionaire is to use leverage. I think this is a much more defensible argument. You can't become a billionaire by yourself. You have to have some mechanism of leverage to magnify your impact. Hiring employees is a form of leverage. Using a computer is a form of leverage. Putting your…

> I think that leverage is the core kernel of truth lurking within this question.

I like this idea, because it focuses the ethical/moral/policy question on something that seems to me to be much more tractable: what kinds of leverage should society allow you to use, and to what extent?

Re: Billionaires Build

#550

Post by eloff »

jdkee wrote: post #404
eloff wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A lot of billionaires do choose to share, currently that's up to them. I think we can should make laws to put higher taxes on the rich, but in practice it's tough to do that well. Often they just move themselves or their money to get around that. One has to balance harvesting eggs com the golden goose with not killing it or driving it away. Taxing just billionaires specifically wouldn't do much as there aren't m…

Not if we eliminate all global tax havens such as Bermuda or Lichtenstein. That combined with serious criminal penalties for tax evasion.

That's seems unattainable. They're sovereign countries competing in a world market for capital. The incentives go the other way.
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