How the Rich Got Rich

If he chooses coding his project versus producing bullshit for you, the same kid has to go work at a grocery store or something and do some coding in his spare time. If he were serious about raising money, on the other hand, he basically couldn't work on his project at all while he does. Which is the same as raising money with no idea.

It's awash with money, but not to the people who have any immediate use for it to generate return. You will invest in a kid's powerpoint, his "team", his business "plan", no code, no project, but you wouldn't invest in a project, no powerpoint.

So "our society is awash with capital" to whoever learns to say the right things to get it - which is pretty much the opposite skill of doing something that actually requires any.

Hence the importance of "super-angels", who go against this grain, who will invest in and mentor the kid while letting him actually code instead of making him refine bullshit instead!

Every day we hear of teams who have raised $50-$200k, where neither of the cofounders is capable of producing anything but bullshit. They literally can't make anything. When was the last time you heard of a kid who made a project and scaled it by continuing to work on it instead of learning to spew bullshit?

Honestly, there is almost no money for anyone who is working on something, unless they quadruple their investment of time and personal risk to bring the project failure rate up to 95% as they jeapordize working on it it in order to 'raise money' instead. Our society - and, specifically - you, reward people who say what you want to hear to get money, and finding out what you want to hear takes a lot of time and has nothing to do with working on anything else.

The US is a post-apocalpytic nation. Literally. The indigenous people and cultures were so badly wiped out by a variety of factors (some with European fault, some without) as to leave a sense of an untamed wilderness (actually, there were probably advanced agrarian societies over every inch of the US at one time) and an abundance of land. I think much of the appeal of zombie/apocalyptic fiction in the US comes from a longing for a future (like our semi-imaginary past) of open land.

When land was (or seemed) effectively free, the "obviously virtuous", positive-sum thing to do was to find unused land and bring it into productivity-- rather than to squabble for allocation of an existing resource as people did in the cities. Hence the association of the rural frontier with positive-sum virtue and urbanity (and Europe, at that time) with zero-sum congestion. So more specifically, it was a rural style of land ownership (in "new" land) that was associated with virtue.

Of course, the frontier closed, and over time we became urban (suburbia is extremely-low-density and often dismal urbanity) like everyone else.

Land doesn't matter as much as it did, except in major cities. A landed gentry has been replaced by an educated (sometimes in name only) and connected one, and urban land is only worth so much on account of the people it is (implicitly through locality) connected to. That's why Manhattan and Silicon Valley real estate are so ungodly expensive: because ambitious, smart people move there, so they're good places to set up a business and tap local talent. We are the reason for the value that justifies the price, and for thanks, we get royally fucked-over by the landlords for it.

I have no issue with small-time landowners and the notion of owning one's own home, and any land reform policy that I'd support would have to have an exemption (around $500,000 seems reasonable) under which it doesn't apply. However, I definitely don't think the association of land ownership with virtuous stewardship applies to large-scale urban housing ownership. It's classic medieval rent-seeking, nothing more.

The Tax Foundations take (http://taxfoundation.org/article/fortunate-400) is a little different. Interesting that in the 18 years that the report covers none of the taxpayers were on the top 400 list for all years. & only 4 (1%) were on the list for 17 years. 73% were on the list for just 1 year.... Their take was that most folks were on the list due to one time event...sale of assets, etc

Also wages were flat for all 17 years (as a % of total income). Partnership & S Corp income was up ~400%, which could be because of the growth in publicly traded partnerships.

Sure, but my point was that, at its basic, value can be thought of as the following function:

    Val(demand, supply) = const * demand / supply.

Another point is that by "labor" we usually mean either physical labor or time spent, not mental effort exerted. If we add the mental effort exerted (multiplied by intelligence of the knowledge worker) to the definition of value, we will see a closer relationship between labor and value.

Something you spend a lot of time working on may have a lot of value to you (as in: it aided development of your skills, for example), but it doesn't mean that it will have a lot of value to everyone else. We ought not to mistake what we value with what an average individual from a large group of people values.

This has an important consequence. If you're smart, you ought to position yourself where you can have a lot of leverage. That would be somewhere away from being a labor provider and closer to being one who makes decisions on the basis of demand and supply. Also, you can have a lot of leverage if you're willing to incur risk. Labor providers usually don't incur a lot of risk (in worst case, they get nothing). In entrepreneurship, on the other hand, risk can mean losing a lot of money. By moving towards making demand/supply decisions and by willing to incur risk, you can generate not only more value for yourself, but more overall value, since in voluntary transactions both sides benefit.