Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#681

Post by known » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

somethoughts wrote: post #459

somethoughts wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - perhaps PG should have added qualifiers along the lines of "YC originated billionaires" versus attempting to cover all billionaires that have ever existed. It seems somewhat naive to say that every person with a billion in their bank account has built something and always is the best allocator of capital. Oil and Gas billionaires leverage the fact that society hasn't figured out how to factor in negative enviro…

As a follow-up thought - perhaps when Forbes makes its Billionaires List, instead of a basic sort ranked by on net worth, Forbes should incorporate Environmental, Social and Governance (a.k.a. Triple Bottom Line accounting) like factors similar to those starting to be used for Equity investing [1] and do a final ranking based on ESG x net worth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line

And may be with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29

Re: Billionaires Build

#682

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:58 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Billionaires Build

#683

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:59 AM 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…

The Beatles did not exploit the labor of people pressing their records to become wealthy. Those same people pressed records for other artists who did not make it big, or even fell flat. Their labor input was exactly the same.

The difference was in the songs the Beatles created. The Beatles created those songs, not the laborers who pressed the records.

Or take Stevie Nicks, who google reports is worth $100m. Are the stage hands who set things up for a concert creating that wealth for her? Nope. Those stage hands could do exactly the same for my unrecognized musical talent, I could pay them the same, and would lose gigantic amounts of money.

Is Stevie exploiting those stage hands? If she is, then wouldn't those stage hands doing the exact same work for me be exploiting me for my foolish money?

Bottom line is people are entitled to what they can negotiate for. They don't give it back if their employer loses money, so why would they be entitled to what their employer made?

Re: Billionaires Build

#684

Post by known » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:59 AM UTC

CraigJPerry wrote: post #489

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…

> I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty Really? You’re 16 years old, you’ve a high IQ and a passion for programming. Your parents are alcoholics. You don’t have nice clothes. You don’t have perfect manners because it’s just not the world you live in. How do you get to the university admissions interview in the next town? How will you compete against the mannerly, well turned out student wit…

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running

Re: Billionaires Build

#685

Post by PhineasRex » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:00 AM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #395

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…

You left out a key part in this simplified formula - you pay $X and make $Y from the work, and you do this for N people. If you leave X and Y the same and scale N down to like 50 or 100 employees, you have a good old hard working American business that's creating solid working class jobs. When you scale N up to an almost inconceivably large number (Amazon has over a million employees) you get an owner with an inconce…

Or that business with a million employees could just return a greater share of the wealth to the employees instead of the owners, thereby avoiding triggering the marginal tax

Re: Billionaires Build

#686

Post by confidantlake » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:01 AM UTC

hnracer wrote: post #615

chillwaves wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange. Hard disagree. We won't see eye to eye on this point, and it really invalidates the rest of w hat you are saying.

If I'm a fitness coach charging $60/hour, all my customers are there because they think I'm providing a service of value greater than $60/hour. Perhaps their subjective value is $80/hour, so they get $20/hour benefit and decide voluntarily to engage in this transaction with me. This is a positive sum voluntary transaction where all parties are better off (except for the carbon pollution which we expelled to drive to…

No one is trying to take the $60 an hour you make coaching. The way Bezos or Gates or Zuckerberg make their wealth is not at all similar to how you or I do. If you want to take the conservative argument, Gates taking my tax dollars by selling his computers to the government is not a voluntary transaction. He then takes that money to lobby the government so that I have to give him even more of my tax money.

Re: Billionaires Build

#687

Post by mistermann » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:01 AM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #602

mistermann wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. PG's statement: > The second is about something politicians sometimes say — that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people — and why this is mistaken. He is framing it so he is debunking an absurd claim: that the only way (no other ways are possible) to become a billionaire is by exploiting people. This is distinctly different from whether "exploiting people" (opinions vary on what this…

Data isn't sexy, data doesn't sell. The "common man" neither cares about real numbers nor has the education and ability to interpret them, even in very simplified graphical form. Look at the percentage of people who can answer extremely basic questions about charts and be horrified: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/

So far, but has anyone ever given them something worth taking seriously? How wide of a variety of approaches have we tried?

Ross Perot did all right, and he was a total amateur. If a group of people actually put some serious though and effort into it, who knows what might be possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_c...

In the 1992 election, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, about 19,741,065 votes, but no electoral college votes, making him the most successful third-party presidential candidate in terms of the popular vote since Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.[46] Unlike Perot, however, other third-party candidates since Roosevelt won multiple electoral college votes: Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968. Compared with Thurmond and Wallace, who polled very strongly in a small number of states, Perot's vote was more evenly spread across the country. Perot managed to finish second in two states: In Maine, Perot received 30.44% of the vote to Bush's 30.39% (Clinton won with 38.77%); in Utah, Perot received 27.34% of the vote to Clinton's 24.65% (Bush won with 43.36%). Although Perot did not win a state, he received a plurality of votes in some counties.[47][48] His popular vote total is still by far the most ever garnered for a third-party candidate, almost double the previous record set by Wallace in 1968.

A detailed analysis of voting demographics revealed that Perot's support drew heavily from across the political spectrum, with 20% of his votes coming from self-described liberals, 27% from self-described conservatives, and 53% coming from self-described moderates. Economically, however, the majority of Perot voters (57%) were middle class, earning between $15,000 and $49,000 annually, with the bulk of the remainder drawing from the upper-middle class (29% earning more than $50,000 annually).[49] Exit polls also showed that 38% of Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Bush, and 38% would have voted for Clinton.[50] Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler," post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome.[51]

Re: Billionaires Build

#688

Post by jrsala » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:02 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #628

nostrademons wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a selection bias there: people who think YC or YC's startup model is out-of-touch don't apply to YC, and certainly don't get selected. Personally, I've watched YC grow from something that I thought was an obviously good idea but nobody else agreed with me about (I applied to the first SFP in 2005, as a college student), to something mainstream that lots of people aspired to (~2010), to being something at best…

That's a point about the general population, not founders, who form a pretty different (and pretty small) subset. The other thing I'd be cautious about here is that the curve you describe basically always happens. Shit was always cooler when it was newer and we were there before everyone else, etc.; people say this about everything. I'm not sure how to correct for this, but it's a strong skew.

But GP, despite using the word "cool", is not really talking about how "cool" in a light sense those occupations are perceived. They explicitly talk about how some activities today are "actively bad for the world" and perceived as such.

There is a moral judgment behind the "That's cool dude!" you get when you reveal you're working to fix the climate crisis and I suspect there is fear of moral judgment behind GP's omission of their employer, due to their employer's poor record on the moral issues of the day. This goes deeper than shit being less cool as time passes. In short we're not talking about dubstep or fidget spinners.

Moral judgments like this do not follow a curve that "always happens". It has always been good to volunteer at soup kitchens on one hand, and on the other hand while it used to be good to not be evil and "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", I'm sure you'd agree nowadays Google is not perceived as less cool than it was only because it's not the latest shiny new tech success.

Re: Billionaires Build

#689

Post by confidantlake » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #233

chillwaves wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe in meritocracy? Because ownership of that amount of wealth is surely going to skew the entire system. How long before we just have a permanent ruling class, and how does that move humanity forward?

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_…

Why "only". 400 people controlling 4% of the wealth of a country of 300,000,000 is massive.

Re: Billionaires Build

#690

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary.

His secretary can buy Berkshire Hathaway stock at any time and pay a lower tax rate than Buffet, while growing wealth at the same rate as Buffet.