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
#2There'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 human history. It's not an isolated event either. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, but none became billionaires.
The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. It's just that if you do it, you rarely get the billion dollars.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#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”.
This is not a "motte-and-bailey", as the fact that you can't "deserve that billion dollars" is already part of the original "pair of arguments". In a true motte-and-bailey the second argument is implied, here both are given out straight.
Also, “all billionaires are cheaters” trivially doesn't include the baby which merely inherited the money as having actively cheated. It does however trivially include the parent who amassed the amount as a cheater. And thus, it makes inheriting the amount inheriting the fruits of cheating.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#4There'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…
>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 economic claim (which nobody disagrees with). The other is a ethical/moral claim, which many disagree about.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#5IMO, it's not the money itself, but how the money was acquired, and what is done with it. For example,
1. By delivering useful products and services or sabotaging competitors, making money by promoting hate or spreading knowledge (HN, take a bow)
2. By actually enriching the consumer or creating addictive/dark patterns or charging usurious interest rates, setting traps, obsoleting products quickly and so on.
3. By pouring profits back into the company, creating opportunities and just giving a fair share to society that pays for the products and services, or fattening up on stock buybacks. (Think AI helping people who lost jobs to AI using AI to get jobs from AI HR agents)
4. Money buys influence, and laws and regulations favor the concentration of wealth over its flow back to society; hence the insane concentration of wealth in static assets, mega-yachts, real estate. Legislative capture.
5. Ultimately conscience and the "golden rule". Beyond a certain amount of wealth, actual happiness is somewhat asymptotic or decreasing, [0] the point being that it all becomes symbolic at some point, and that you'll always have less (fewer of those symbols) than someone else, signifying unhappiness unless you're "the one at the apex".
6. The greatest treasures are arguably "Treasures of the Heart" [1] and call that "the spiritual aspect of life" if you will, but all is eventually lost except the good we do with and for others (The Dennis Ritchies of this world). I prefer not to have an army of bodyguards, though I could use some household and yard help, which I can still afford until those billionaires sack Social Security for an even lower tax rate. (than zero?)
[0] Elon Musk: "I'm not happy"
Elon Musk gave ordinary people access to the biggest hate machine (and nufidier) in human history.
[1] Nichiren
Nichiren gave ordinary people access to the treasures of the Lotus Sutra, which opens the door to the innate Buddhahood/divinity in each person, and therefore, to happiness.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#6There'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…
> 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...
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#7The thing that bugs me is like, how tone deaf can you be in the moment?
Mandatory disclaimer - im not a socialist and dont have a problem with wealth accumulation, but it really feels like in 2026. I would spend a lot of time thinking about how to thought lead around the good old traditional “business owners create jobs” and not “billionaires=good”. Also, in our regulatory captures, giving companies $60 billion dollars - it’s not the hardest working founders that win, it’s the best capitalized.
Sure Uber made a better product, but was it that or the subsidized rides that truly allowed them to capture the market.
So, I want people to dream big, but what happened to medium sized businesses where you could make $20 or so million dollars. Why advocate for consolidation in this scale?
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#8IMO, it's not the money itself, but how the money was acquired, and what is done with it. For example, 1. By delivering useful products and services or sabotaging competitors, making money by promoting hate or spreading knowledge (HN, take a bow) 2. By actually enriching the consumer or creating addictive/dark patterns or charging usurious interest rates, setting traps, obsoleting products quickly and so on. 3. By po…
The fact that SCOTUS fallaciously equated money with speech, billionaires have an outsized advantage in influencing the political landscape.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#9Most of those people are actual viruses. Just like agent smith said in the Matrix. They gather exorbitant amount of money and what do they do with it? Muddy the waters, making sure noone comes close to them, feed absolute hogwash to the masses, even write books about it (This is the secret how you will succeed as an entrepreneur etc etc.). And more and more and more people fell for it. And they spend more and more time trying to untangle the bullshit. And that takes time and then they gave up. Viruses, nothing more, nothing less. There are exceptions, but very very few.
Re: Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires
#10There'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…
A longtime friend of mine celebrated his 60th birthday, and the party was at a large venue that was packed with family, friends, neighbors, and (ex-)colleagues who all showed up to show their love and care for him -- he is undoubtedly the richest man I know.