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Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

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Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#11

Post by fsuts »

“ Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.

Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have,”

So in 21 years and 6500 companies (and turning away multiples more) he has seen 30 billionaires.

Now if you take some examples:

Zuckerberg stole the idea and then pushed his cofounder out

Uber drivers were recruited without sufficient vetting and committed crimes inc rape of women

Tesla put out self driving that led to deaths

And so on

I’ve previously worked for a company owned by the founder who became a billionaire at around 60 and he started the company in 20s and it was a solid company that looked after the employees and customers.

He could have been a billionaire much faster if he had been a scumbag

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#12

Post by coldtea »

ForHackernews wrote: post #6
coldtea wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. What's "clearly possible" is to create a product. Or to create C. It's not at all clear than anything of the sort "deserves" a billion dollars. Except if we reduce it to the trivial "as a product it can be potentially worth billions of dollars in the market". But "is worth" doesn't equal "deserve". One is an econom…

Norman Borlaug saved ~1 billion lives and did not become a billionaire. https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/05/07/dr-norman-borlaug-he-sa...

But some guys destroying health globally with sugar water did.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#13

Post by triceratops »

panny wrote: post #2

There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs. Ritchie created C. Ritchie created Unix. They both died in the same month, but Jobs was the billionaire and everyone wrote a story about his passing. Ritchie was not a billionaire, he simply did the work that changed the course of hum…

> William Shockley invented the transistor, but [didn't become a billionaire]

In fairness that wasn't for lack of trying. Shockley founded a semi-conductor company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laborat...) and ran it so poorly that eight key people left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight), founded their own company (Fairchild Semiconductor) and became enormously wealthy. Two of the eight then went on to found Intel and became even wealthier.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#14

Post by AnimalMuppet »

triceratops wrote: post #13
panny wrote: post #2

There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs. Ritchie created C. Ritchie created Unix. They both died in the same month, but Jobs was the billionaire and everyone wrote a story about his passing. Ritchie was not a billionaire, he simply did the work that changed the course of hum…

> William Shockley invented the transistor, but [didn't become a billionaire] In fairness that wasn't for lack of trying. Shockley founded a semi-conductor company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laborat... ) and ran it so poorly that eight key people left ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight ), founded their own company (Fairchild Semiconductor) and became enormously wealthy. Two o…

Yeah. The problem is that knowing how to invent something like the transistor, and knowing how to run a company, are two very different skill sets and backgrounds.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#16

Post by regularization »

coldtea wrote: post #3

> this pair of arguments makes a very tempting motte-and-bailey. The left can make the more dramatic argument that “all billionaires are cheaters”. Then if anyone points out that it’s possible to inherit a billion dollars as a baby, before you could possibly have done anything wrong, they can fall back to saying “ah, but clearly the baby didn’t deserve that billion dollars, which is what I was talking about all along…

> the baby which merely inherited the money

How many babies inherit money? The earliest heirs usually get access to their inheritance is when they choose to at eighteen.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#17

Post by vinyl7 »

I think another different perspective is that its not the fact that there are billionaires. The problem is that there are billionaires while the rest of world is decaying and getting worse. For better or for worse, billionaires doing the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" deal with society at large will prevent a lot of future problems for them.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#18

Post by scotty79 »

Wealth is not a resource to be gathered or utilized. Wealth is just a number. Number that determines what fraction of future output of human civilization this person can command on a whim.

Letting one person have this amount of power is just wrong way to do things. There should be caps on that. Such amount of power should be under command of organizations, not individuals. Otherwise we are are stuck with living under a handful of spontaneous, random dictators, hoping they are benevolent and not incredibly stupid. While they constantly make idiotic and malevolent decisions that waste actual resources and human capital.

The question who deserves what and what was earned and how is almost irrelevant if the total outcome is this bad.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#19

Post by scotty79 »

fsuts wrote: post #11

“ Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies. Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have,” So in 21 years and 6500 companies (and turning away multiples more) he has seen 30 billionaires. Now if you take some examples: Zuckerberg stole the idea and then p…

The skill that billionaires have is to stay on top of some self-inflating economic baloon while pushing other people off.

People who are billionaires now are people who were lucky enought to get on top of the baloons that actually flew and continue to self-inflate and stayed there while pushing everybody else off of them.

If the process of balloon selection wasn't mostly random, pg would have help found 30 conpanies instead of 6500.

Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

#20

Post by coldtea »

regularization wrote: post #16
coldtea wrote: post #3

> this pair of arguments makes a very tempting motte-and-bailey. The left can make the more dramatic argument that “all billionaires are cheaters”. Then if anyone points out that it’s possible to inherit a billion dollars as a baby, before you could possibly have done anything wrong, they can fall back to saying “ah, but clearly the baby didn’t deserve that billion dollars, which is what I was talking about all along…

> the baby which merely inherited the money How many babies inherit money? The earliest heirs usually get access to their inheritance is when they choose to at eighteen.

That's a pedantic distinction that doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument.

"Baby which inherited the money" could just be baby born into wealth, or baby who will eventually inherit billions when it grows older and its parents die, or baby whose diseased mogul parent left a trust of billions for, or whatever....

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