Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally. You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.
Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.
> the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create
in common parlance, theft
Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
> Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
They are, however, deeply important to the transaction.
> I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions?
1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier?
2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?
> What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?
I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.
1. Not being forced to work in the cobalt mines, I suspect.
2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out.
1. You didn't answer the question. You said what they wouldn't be doing. What would they be doing that would be making them happier?
2. You didn't answer this question either. What specifically is stopping them from opting out? Who is putting a gun to their head and saying they can't live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or be a subsistence farmer?
The answer is nothing. People are largely making these choices themselves, because they're better options, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's read a bit of history.
Are you familiar at all with how China has "encouraged" people from farming communities to work in factories?
And this wouldn't be happening if Apple didn't exist? This is a problem created by capitalist companies, not authoritarian communist governments?
Capitalists make use of authoritarian governments. They go hand in hand.
What do you think slavery is?
Um, the police will put a gun to your head if you're homeless. To not be homeless you can build on your land or someone else's land. If you build on someone else's land the police puts a gun to your head. To own land you need to participate in the system, and then after a whole lifetime working the cobalt mines the system might just let you get a section of property by the time you die if you're lucky.
Very well put, thank you.
1. Maybe living as hunter-gatherers would make them happier.
2. You can't live as a hunter-gatherers because the land has been enclosed and privatized.
There's no choice involved here. Your - and my - freedoms have been taken away a long time ago.
They are working for money, often in jobs paying more than others in their local economy, when they otherwise wouldn't be.
It’s still exploitative.
The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top.
There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world.
But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth.
I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though.
> There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share...
Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact.
What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand.
> The disparity is insane right now though
The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions.
Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor.
In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want.
Exactly, thank you. I can't believe how many people like this there are on a forum that's ostensibly about startups, but I suppose HN has long since stopped being about startups now.
I'm genuinely curious whether HN's political turn represents generational turnover or a small group of vocal agitators. The anti-car faction I can safely say is the latter, the anti-billionaire people I'm not sure about.
I've been on HN for a long time, before this account on other anonymous ones. It certainly seemed that in the 2010s there was a more hopeful undercurrent of startup activity, even as external events like Occupy Wall Street happened, but that wasn't as big on HN as e.g. Reddit, but now it seems like people have brought that energy to HN in more numbers, even if some have stayed the same as the sibling says.
Some even have specific agendas as evidenced by their submission history and comments which all seem to follow specific biases too.
My account's from 2010.
What if HN hasn't taken a political turn? What if politics took a giant turn, and HN is roughly the same as it was?
The entire reason I disagree with the way wealth is shared is because I workedi n startups for years.
I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work.
You agreed to this when you signed up, maybe you should have negotiated more equity instead or went to some other company or started your own company which is the risk (and reward) those founders took. Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
> You agreed to this when you signed up
Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
That's not how it works. You can negotiate whatever you want. The deal can still change out form under you as new investors come on.
Not to mention, you're negotiating from a point of information asymmetry. They know way more about their plans for the company than you do and will often tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. You can make some attempts at discerning if they're being honest or not, but ultimately you're left to just make a guess.
They also enter the negotiation from a strong position economically. They aren't going to miss a rent payment without a Job. The company itself may be fucked if they can't hire, but not the investors/founders.
So the negotiation is inherently unfair from the start.
> Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
This is not relevant to whether their actions were moral, ethical or fair.
> Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
Yes, many in fact. We negotiated the terms up front and if I didn't like them then I went with another offering company. I never had deals change from under me, maybe you're some Eduardo Saverin but I'm not. That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does. I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company or even startups, or even in the tech industry. There are lots of jobs you can do.
> I never had deals change from under me
I sincerely doubt this. If your start up went through a funding round, the deal changed.
> That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does.
“Due diligence” is impossible because the negotiation is asymmetrical. You can’t know what their actual exit plan is. You can’t know what their financials look like. You can ask. They can lie.
> I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company
No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Just because you aren’t forced to invest your time/money somewhere doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of you
You can "sincerely doubt" it all you want, doesn't make my experience false. Again just because you got screwed doesn't mean others are, how many millionaires has SpaceX minted last week? In a startup it is the exception to have experiences like yours, the norm is that they make some, but probably not much, from a startup because most startups don't go anywhere.
> No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Yes, there was nothing unethical about being an investor in these, sometimes you cannot predict what a company will do but that doesn't make you an unethical investor unlike investing in say weapons manufacturers.
You can ask about all of these things during negotiations, and an increasingly large share of people do. I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Ultimately it's possible to get screwed, but you can also choose not to work at startups and get a traditional job with less risk.
And the existence of some bad actors and screwy deals in the startup community is not really valid commentary on the greater picture of "the way wealth is shared." That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
> That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
Except it's not. It's the norm not the exception. It's pervasive through the industry, and YC and pg have done it themselves to multiple companies.
Hence why it was literally turned into a meme plot on a TV show.
You also ignored the bit about the negotiation being inherently unfair from the get go. And again, the deal can (and almost assuredly will) change out from under you because of the structure of the company which isn't really up for negotiation.
I disagree, and I've never seen any stats to support your belief that people getting screwed is the norm. But I've seen many, many stats of new startups minting millionaires.
> I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Just to be clear, we're talking about the same LLMs that were recently silently tuned to kneecap competitors? https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
Not sure what that has to do with LLMs helping individuals. Even if you don't trust American ones, there are other open weight ones.
> Why should they pay more than market worth?
That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
> When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion.
> The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology
The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
> What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing.
but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact.
> Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc.
Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
> That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
This system doesn't work because what people consider to be fair is completely subjective and arbitrary, and of course under a system like that, people with less money are going to just tell people with more money to give it to them. The only actual fair way to decide prices and wages is to let the market decide.
If you truly think that, based on your arbitrary, subjective, personal opinions, that founders should be sharing more wealth with employees, and that the market's pricing is unethically low, then what number would you choose? How do you choose that number exactly? What makes your choice for that number any better than anyone else's choice for that number?
And why don't you apply that thinking to other analogous walks of life, like charity, or taxes? How much of your income do you give to those less fortunate than you in this great project we call our country, or to people in other areas of the world? If you think our taxes are too low, how much extra tax do you pay voluntarily? What number is appropriate? At what point is it unethical?
There are plenty of billions of people who don't live in the first world who consider even a lower-class American to be living a luxurious, privileged life. America is a country built off the back of exploiting other countries. Are lower-class Americans not therefore unethical unless they donate much more to their even less fortunate counterparts in second- and third-world countries?
I don't think we're ever going to agree here, because a central part of your subjective opinion about what counts as ethical behavior is related to how much money/wealth/stuff some other other person has. Whereas that doesn't factor into my ethical belief system at all. At no point in my life have I ever cared how successful anyone else is, let alone wanted to tear them down or blame my problems on their success, nor expected them to give their money away to others according to my personal belief system.
It continues to boggle my mind that people care so much about others' success. It's almost the exact opposite of the teachings of pretty much every religion or book of wisdom ever created.
> The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history.
This is an unprovable claim, an extreme claim, and almost certainly a false claim. It's also extremely subjective and depends entirely upon what metrics you choose to follow, most of which haven't been tracked for very long.
Worse, in my opinion, is that it's a popular a meme of an idea spread by politicians engaging in demagoguery, which has succeeded in getting people riled up in anger against their fellow citizens, as all demagoguery does. People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.
I can't tell you how many people I met in San Francisco who believed wholeheartedly that the city should be taking more money from more people, but couldn't recount a single fact about how the city stewards and spends its budget.
> That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another time period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
I agree with you about the real questions, but I disagree that the other question is important. I agree with you about the latter questions, but I disagree that the former question is unimportant. In the US, we have an entire generation of people on both the left and the right side of the political aisle who are being brainwashed into believing that things were so much better in the past, for two very different reasons. And it's causing us to blame and distrust social and economic mechanisms that have benefitted millions to an unimaginable degree.
We live in an era of unprecedented wealth creation, technological progress, extreme poverty elimination, and quality of life improvements, and people are literally clamoring to tear it all down because they keep being told that it used to be better. It's important to understand that no, it didn't. Your actual quality of life, the thing that mattered, would not have been better in the past, for the vast majority.
But again, I do agree with you that we should try to make tomorrow even better. The focus should be more on allowing more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us.
I just don't see the focus being directed that way. I see far more people discussing how to tear down the rich than how to help the poor. Far, far, far, far, far more people. There's a strong and popular perception that somehow doing the former will lead to the latter.
> Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues).
I don't know what to say to this. By historical standards throughout all of human history, almost every human who ever existed would pretty much agree with me that the differences you point out are trivialities. If you zoom in on incremental 1% improvements, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, designer brands, and things like that, sure, maybe Bill Gates has a lot you don't. I'm sure he's eaten some fancy cheeseburger that you haven't. Maybe he's been in some exclusive room that you haven't. But if this is the level of inequality that we're complaining about, minuscule and artificial differences that would require an education in luxury goods/experiences to even notice, then I don't know what to tell you. How is that not a HUGE victory?
> Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
What a disingenuous statistic! The only reason the middle class in America has shrunk is because the upper class has grown! We are literally moving in an upward direction, creating more and more wealth to more and more people!
It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
So well said. I appreciate you articulating this. I am relieved to see that there are others on here who understand the unbelievable privileges we have at this moment in time.
The demagogues have been shockingly effective at telling people that the size of the pie is fixed, the game is rigged, and the only way to get a piece of that limited pie is to steal it. And the people that are most susceptible to this message are the ones that live in the countries that people are literally dying to get in to.
>People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.
While I believe the spending habits of the ultra wealthy should be monitored, it is astounding how people don't seem to pay any attention to the spending of the government. There are unfortunately many people taking advantage of the system, lining their pockets using funds for programs meant to help the people.
>It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
This is one point I really wish was more emphasized, in fact it should be taught to everyone in school. We are constantly being bombarded by negativity on the internet, even here on HN. I've noticed myself stepping away from here more often due to it, since I find myself and my thinking falling into a negative spiral from its influence.
However, when you take time to step back from the constant bombardment of negativity, you actually begin to better appreciate the blessings you have in life, and the opportunities present. Of course, there are problems and issues to be solved when it comes to our current system, but by taking a step back from the constant negativity from the news, social media, etc, you can better glimpse the real issues at hand.
Indeed. I think I've spent way too much time arguing with people on HN like you replied to, it's simply not possible to convince them that the world has improved, and so I don't try anymore, I've been getting ragebaited too much in this thread with takes like theirs, about how they apparently can't get into some designer clothing store or another, wholly counting the fact that clothes as a whole have gotten cheaper precisely due to capitalism.
Yeah, there's almost a religious belief nowadays that the world is worse, people are worse off, things are sliding downhill, etc. People are married to the idea and get upset at any evidence to the contrary. It's such a shame.
It's very poetic though, in a tragic sort of way. Very human. I can't think of anything more human than to live in the best age of all time, one others could scarcely have dreamed of, and yet to complain about it incessantly because some have more than others.
Arbeit macht frei!
Ah yes, people working for money, often more than they could make in other jobs in the local economy, is now slavery or concentration camp level conditions. I wish people here would actually live in a second or third world country before saying things like this from the comfort of their air conditioned house.
Slavery would still be slavery if you got paid $0.01/day, so there's clearly some kind of threshold we all have for "good, fairly compensated work".
If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much a dollar is worth elsewhere in the world, because purchasing power parity exists. It's like me being mad that on a hypothetical Mars people make a million dollars a day, that does not affect me whatsoever.
Let's make a concrete example. I'm from Italy, currently living abroad. The salary I was getting where I am now, was almost double what I was offered in my home country. We're told that the cost of living in Italy is also lower than other EU countries. While this is true, it isn't half of the rest of the EU.
I'm now in a situation where I could go back to Italy, but the above is one of the reasons that makes me doubt wheter it would be a good outcome or not.
This is to answer your point about purchasing power. With an Italian salary (considering the same tech job), my purchasing power there would still be lower than my purchasing power here with a local salary.
Yes, it can go both ways depending on the specific purchasing power, I never said otherwise, just my point that in many areas of Asia where factories are, people make way more than their local economy even if it might be less than the US.
> If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else.
Sure. The kapos at concentration camps got better food and treatment, too.
That doesn't make it a fair, happy, or good arrangement.
I'm not going to continue with someone like you who'd equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory. It is simply highly disrespectful to those who've actually lived through or died in them. Have a good day.
> equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory
Oh no, not accurately stating history!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rul...
> The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe.
Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has.
Not sure what you're talking about, I explicitly said those are concentration camp conditions, so obviously yes Nazis murdered many people while making them work in factories. Seems like you think I think they didn't.
But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory.
Do modern factories hire enough people to absorb the whole population as workers?
> But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253
> Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap.
> China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education.
China is a different story altogether. They're not democratic so of course you'd expect to see things like that.
China is where all our billionaire companies have outsourced their factories to, to take advantage of those conditions for profit! They are an integral part of the story.
(We're not above doing a little bit of it ourselves, as a treat, either. We left slavery legal in the Thirteenth Amendment, even. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...)
You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler.
> The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor
This was also bad, yes.
> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler
Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.
A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.
This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal.
Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.
"It's fine if we mistreat this subgroup, they should be grateful for what we let them have" is a shared theme between the two.
And as noted elsewhere in the conversation, American companies are benefiting from actual concentration camp labor (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/aug/30/revealed-major...) that some deem genocide (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55973215).
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/poverty-and-pers...
> Jewish institutions sought to grapple with the consequences of a process of structural pauperization as driven by deliberate policy
This isn't the question.
The question is how much value do they add? If it's more than the money they're making, the people paying them are stealing. You don't like this because it makes it impossible to make money as a capitalist, but that's the entire argument. Making money as a capitalist is always unethical, because it necessarily involves stealing the value of someone else's labor.
Just because you can pay someone $1 to do something that makes you $10 doesn't mean it's ethical. It isn't, ever.
Not everyone subscribes to the labor theory of value, so I question your premise fundamentally.
There is no labor theory of value, only a value theory of labor.
It's funny though, I hadn't read a word of Marx but the first time I understood that I was being paid $15/hr to make websites for a guy who was charging his clients $100 for that same hour of my work, I immediately understood everything about it and its innate truth. I got into the business myself and figured out exactly what value the CEO and the salespeople were bringing, and let me tell you, brother, it wasn't $85. It wasn't even $15. You can call it whatever you want, but you will never convince me that guy wasn't stealing money from me.
It is an economic term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
> I got into the business myself
Exactly, as capitalism intends. If you don't want to make employee wages then you take on the risk and capital and do it yourself, and are thus rewarded for it. Ironic, if you were actually a socialist you would've tried to help your fellow workers but you instead are the capitalist now.
No, I've never been a capitalist. I don't make money on speculation or other passive deployment of capital. I work for my money. I am no longer in business as a solo operative, but I was never interested in hiring other people to exploit and I don't think I ever will be. But at the time it made more sense to remove the useless leech from the equation because that asshole didn't add any value, and none of the owners of any of the businesses I've worked at since have, either. They've destroyed plenty with idiotic decisions, though.
You went into business as you yourself said. Therefore you are a capitalist. That you didn't hire or "leech" doesn't make you less of one, as you were literally the capital class in your company.
[flagged]
I will accept that, in context (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48531429), as high praise.
[flagged]
Say Nazi shit, get compared to Nazis.
Per Godwin himself! Call it his second law. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/19/godwins-la...
Before the chokepoint capitalist: you go to a store and pay $20 for an average-quality product. The value chain benefits by getting $20, you benefit by getting the product. Mutual exchange of value.
After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value.
This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah?
This is the key insight.
Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.
Every time my mom comes to visit me, she insists on going to the store to buy things just like she always did. There are plenty of stores. In most cases, these brick-and-mortar stores have significantly fewer options than online stores, for obvious reasons -- because they're physical and have limited space. The online stores are often competitively priced, often cheaper, even with shipping, because they have the benefit of scale. I can get an incredible amount of high-quality goods off Amazon at blazing speeds, often the same day, without having to leave my desk, drive my car, burn any fuel, or clog any roads. It provides tons of value.
Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.
I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.
I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft.
Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment?
Everything is a rich man’s trick.
- Documentary
You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?
No they aren't overlooking it. They literally call out the additional net value created (i.e. iPhone hw sales), and then call out that to make the enormous amounts that they do make, they also crib value from others (i.e. app store).
You can argue that the app store and vetting process itself is worth up to or over 30% (i.e. they are giving value away, not extracting it), but they make a clear distinction.
Overlooking was the wrong word. I meant more like downplaying or underestimating. Uber completely changed transportation, and the legal saga that follows shows just how big of a change they made on the world, for better or worse. Likewise with Apple and the iphone. They created (or popularized depending on how you want to frame it) the platform that now dominates the human condition. We are literally fumbling, on a global scale, with how to interact with our phones because of how much influence they have over us.
The issue isnt that theyre overlooking new value created it's that you're overlooking the enormous power imbalance some parties are using to exploit others for material gain.
Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers and less well capitalized competitors.
Whether somebody acknowledges this reality or not tells you where their political allegiances lie.
The entire "app-based rideshare market" was created by Uber, and in 2026 they don't capture anywhere close to 100% of it. An Uber driver's share of profits without Uber existing is $0.
Back before Uber existed I was ordering a taxi on a website and they even had real time tracking. Yeah it wasn't an app, but most things weren't at that time.
Why is that relevant to what I said?
Because what you said is nonsense. They are capturing a fraction of the value they created with the invention of app-based ridesharing. They are not dipping into some magical pool of "exploitation" to juice that. Anyone that is unhappy with being an Uber driver can literally do anything else. Nobody is forcing them, there is no exploitation.
Absolute horseshit.
They maintain an app and some servers and do some cursory checks on drivers. Those things are pretty easy to do.
In a properly competitive market for ridesharing apps those things would be commoditized to the point that they are pennies per ride.
The vast, vast majority of the value is getting you from A to B whether you are in denial about that or not.
> Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers
That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.
The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
The word "create" is too fuzzy here. If the thing that your company is selling wouldn't exist if you hadn't started the company, did you not "create" it?
Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.
It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.
Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.
Sure, if you extend time horizon to infinity, everything would probably be invented eventually by someone else. Two people filing patents on the same day is an exceptional case though, not the norm.
There are also products that seemingly should exist but don't because no would-be inventor has found capital, eg. a decent bluetooth keyboard+trackpads with the same layout as a laptop. I know because I spent an hour trying to find one yesterday, and they basically just don't exist.
You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.
But you do need to project to the heat death of the universe to get high speed rail in California, which is the counterfactual worth considering since the entire system of capital is what is under criticism
> Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone
Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...
(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)
Even before Apple existed Steve Jobs was stealing wages from Steve Wozniak who did the actual work.
We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.
I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.
[dead]
I mean Apple only survived because very exploitive Microsoft kept them afloat so that Microsoft had someone to point to as competition when the government came around talking about monopolies. So yeah, Apple only exists because a very exploitive corporation propped them up as protection from consequences of that company's exploitation.
It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market operated. Profits only come from exchange. It is more accurate to say profits are given than extracted.
What you are describing is exploitation. And to be fair, you probably also mean exploitation. I’ve never really understood the distinction, nor do I believe there is any meaningful distinction. Externalizing costs is just one of many ways capitalists exploit workers. But externalities doesn’t sound quite as bad so maybe capitalists can justify their obviously evil behavior by using a fancier term for their exploitation against their workers.
"Extract" here has two meanings:
1. Extracting from the market or the economy. It seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is what you're reading it as? Here you're generally exploiting what private equity calls "pricing power" or what economists call "enclosures" (or "rent-seeking") so inelastic demand (eg housing) or market protection (eg making municipal broadband illegal); and
2. Extracting from labor. This is the basis of the labor theory of value [1].
The point of comments like AOC's is mostly the second one, which is to say that you only become a billionaire by extracting it from your workers. And yes, this is a fundamental disagreement with many people. Some will say that the startup founder who makes a billion dollars deserves it by taking the risk or being the leader or however you want to frame it.
The counterargument is that that value simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those workers and their work. Even Instagram, which famously had only 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion, still needed those workers. It would've been nothing without them.
Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
The term for this is "surplus labor value".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way? I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
Google ads "extracted" value from traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines, so the "exploitation" (or efficiency gains, if you're charitable) came at the expense of employees at other organizations worldwide.
> As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
"Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It didn't "replace" LTV. Marginal utility is simply an an ideological rejection of it with the confusion of price vs value that ignores class exploitation. The proponents of this were the gensis of the so-called "Austrian school" [1] and thus the fathers of neoliberalism [2].
> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
Yes, objectively, as measured by profit. The counterargument is that many were well-paid compared to their non-tech colleagues. While true, they still created way more value than what they were paid.
> I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
I'm all ears.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
> > I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
> I'm all ears.
Ageing whisky.
There's a great deal of labor involved in building+preparing casks, storing them, monitoring, maintaining the temp/humidity of a space. Additionally, a good chunk of the price of aged whisky is just due to the fact that the product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input. Price increase != value created
You're missing the point. The difference between three-year-old and fifteen-year-old whisky is mainly due to capital costs, not labour costs. According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.
> product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input
This so-called 'angel's share' accounts for ~2% per year, not 10%.
> According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.
Capital costs are not real in LTV?
A carpenter takes wood, nails and hammer and creates value making tables.
Hammers are a capital cost and are made the same way - workers are a factory xreate value by assembling steel and other components making a hammer.
Steel workers un a steel mill create value by turning iron into steel.
Iron miners create wealth by mining iron.
And so on.
Capital costs are accounted for. Not turtles all the way down, but labor - newly created value comes from labor. The value in a hammer comes from the labor to make it a year ago when you bought it.
Some laboror has to cask it first.
You're missing the point
I see your pooint and disagree with it.
> "Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.
Surely you can see that not trusting mainstream economics shouldn't be as controversial as the hard sciences. Mainstream economics consistently fails to make correct or replicatable predictions.
economics isn't a hard science though; and there is a lot of politics underlying a lot of theory there (see the laffer curve/trickle down etc)
Soft sciences are not at all the same thing as hard science.
Neither is medicine, climate science, nor the marxist interpretation of the labor theory of value I was replying to.
The word "extracted" does not betray a belief that value cannot be created. You can "extract" value that is created just as you can extract value that was there already. The question is not whether or not value was created, the question is who deserves to control the value that was created.
The fact is the billionaire managed to extract value from the market. The ethical question is: who deserves to get the value that was created by the market? The answer could be "the founder" but it could also be the funder, the worker, the customer, the political structure that enables the market economy, the mother of the funder who raised them to be hard working, the nurse that treated the founders minor illness in an early stage and prevented it from causing a physical disability, etc.
You're asserting a dichotomy that doesn't exist. One can both create and extract at the same time.
That's why we're here debating, because one can create value, and one can extract value. Both statements are true and easy to argue for. The synthesis is that creating value also grants licence to extract since it's impossible (possibly even theoretically impossible) to define exactly where the line between the two is.
[dead]
Based on this article at least, he is not disagreeing with those claims, he is not even acknowledging they exist.
The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.
From an HN comment recently:
> There are three ways to make a living:
> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
He explicitly and clearly disagreed with the claims, and argued against them:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
To any honest reader, it's clear he's saying the system isn't necessarily dishonest, and that it's possible (if not common) to rapidly earn money in the system by simply creating things of value and selling them to willing customers.
Except he says nothing about the system, he only talks about the founder.
I don't know what you're reading, but he's talking about the fact that her startup is growing, and has happy end users, who are purchasing her product, and telling their friends.
That is the system.
The system is a lot bigger than her product and users. Also no one in that anecdote is a billionaire so it's not even relevent to the claim.
> The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.
The original claim is stupid because it is applying a personal moral judgment to a legal system at the individual level, usually for the purposes of justifying theft or other punishments for the person being talked about. it is irrelevant whether the person is honest or dishonest by your own personal moral compass, what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under. The criticism needs to be leveled at the legal system and its ability and desire to change to accommodate the criticisms is the measure of the total system. By this correct measure what we have is amazing vs what has come before and alternate systems tried in the 20th century (looking at you *isms, which have all been terrible in the long run and usually also in the short and medium run).
The marxist nonsense about exploitation is getting really tired and needs to die already. Yes, we get it, marxists don't value anything that grows total output, don't think it should be compensated and are totally fine living in the stagnation that view creates. If they could all just skip a few steps and go to the end game of their philosophy that would be great because I'm tired of hearing from them.
> what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under.
Last election cycle, the world's richest man made the nation's largest political donation to the most expensive campaign in US history. In return he was given unprecedented (and arguably illegal) access to take a figurative chainsaw (his imagery) to our institutions.
We're all under the same laws, but we are not all operating under the same rules. To quote the President, "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
This doesn't contradict my claim at all. This is and should be a criticism of the system because the system has an ambiguity of outcome built in. If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules. I do agree with you that it would be nice to fix this so that the only difference between hiring the 50 dollar an hour and the 2000 dollar an hour lawyer is spending an additional 1950 dollars. I don't really see a way to fix this without also losing the ambiguity that makes other aspects of the system work though (i.e. the ability to do illegal things like same sex marriage/relationships enough that the overton window moves in the population enough to allow a legislative change to allow those things).
> If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules.
First, this the same logic as "the law is equal because the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges." Moreover, no, you cannot hire the same lawyers and that's the point, because what Musk got wasn't through the law, but throwing $300 million dollars at an autocrat. This isn't about $50 vs $2000.
Can you do that and buy your own government agency and a pseudo-cabinet position that circumvents senate confirmation? No? Neither can I. We're not under the same rules they are.
Your point same sex marriage doesn't make sense to me you'll have to explain it better.
You missed my first point. You get a different outcome because you can hit a different price point securing your outcome and that outcome is still constrained by law. If you make a few hundred billion like Elon did you too can do that. My point was that this mechanism is a criticism of the system, not of Elon. Elon is not doing something wrong here (at least not provably wrong yet in a court of law, see what happens as the horse he bet on loses political clout and the various institutions take a look at what was done with a different political foot on their throat).
The second point was the ambiguity in outcome is what allows societal change and I don't want to lose that because there is still a lot of stupid enshrined in our legal code and institutions. We need enforcement to be lax enough to allow people to break stupid laws and the legal code to be ambiguous enough that, when enough people's opinions have changed by the law breakers breaking the law and nothing bad happening/ the law breakers being closer friends and family of enough people that you can get a big change to the law through, either via the courts deeming the law unconstitutional or the congress critters changing the law. It's a fine line on multiple fronts there between effective changing to suite current needs and too much corruption and I don't see a way to change the system that decreases corruption without also decreasing flexibility for change so I am very cautious on that front.
If the rule is that you can get extraordinary access to state power if you are rich enough, then no, we are not meaningfully operating under the same rules. Saying “like Elon, you too can do that” is like saying anyone can influence housing policy by buying every apartment building in town. Hypothetically yes. Practically, not true and also not desirable as a system.
The problem is that wealth can buy a level of political access that ordinary citizens cannot realistically obtain at all. Once someone can spend hundreds of millions helping elect a president or pay people a million dollars to vote their way, and then get a quasi-governmental role with influence over federal agencies, then the system is no longer a system but instead a service.
Saying the system allows the ultra-rich to do this because of builtin ambiguities does not mean therefore no billionare is blameworthy for using it. If a loophole lets billionaires buy political influence, them exploiting that loophole is still part of the problem.
Your defense of him seems to reduce to: the system is corrupt, and if you were rich enough you could exploit it too. I agree that this describes how power works, but I just do not see how it defends it.
Can he provide evidence of one that has?
Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore
Actually I'd rather start from a mud hut and then upgrade it myself than live in the current rental system, but I don't have that option because landlords own most of the land.
It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.
Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123
Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable
And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?
The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.
It's performative because resolving it would require the end of the governments within the "West" and replacing with reindigenizing governance. Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play. The racism is systemic and cultural. Sensitivity isn't sufficient; there needs to be actual systemic shifts that help drive cultural shifts and vice-versa. Not simply language changes, either. Rooting out binary thinking is key to it all. Nondual animist views are more aligned with how things work in the cosmos than dualism/nonanimism.
> Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play.
If this is indeed the case, then it is very much not unique to the West, nor is it most tightly ingrained in the West. I'm not sure in how many different countries you'd live, but I can tell you this from lived experience. It could well be that most of the West is above average on a global scale in terms of belief in supremacy. I too have not lived in a 100 countries so I can't place "the West" as a block with accuracy. What I can tell you is that it does not land at #1.
Unless you call any vaguely US-aligned high-HDI country "The West" regardless of ethnicity, but that would be completely opposed to how any reasonable person would interpret your stance given the mentions of racism.
I'd say Greek culture heavily influenced colonization of the world & this has, in large part, led to dualism being implemented systemically , which drives supremacy-based thinking. Not saying ancient Greece invented it, but definitely helped in formalizing the basis for it.
That's a very different claim, and no one reading your first comments would've interpreted "The West" as "The Western style of thinking" (which is hardly tractable) rather than "The bloc that is the West in 2026".
It would be in a sense Eurocentric and patronizing to suggest that supremacy-based thinking all the way from the Middle East to East Asia stems from Greek culture. And if you're trying to say that dualism is universal and arises everywhere, then Greece becomes almost irrelevant and there's no real point to be made that the West has particularly relevant unique or exaggerated characteristics when it comes to the pervasive supremacy-based thinking.
You might be mixing my comments with someone else's. I'm not focusing on the "West", just addressing what someone else brought in. And it's neither all "the West's" responsibility nor is its responsibility irrelevant. The educational indoctrination used by European/American colonization practices has focused around teaching "Greek logic", and this includes how academic science and math has evolved and spread. The comment this one is in response to even presents a binary as a misrepresentation of what I've written before.
Dualism is not universal. And its wide spread in this world was brought about in large part through brutal colonization carried out by Europeans and their descendants with the help of various Christian denominations. They used Christian spirituality and forcing their own languages on people to disconnect them from the land (which includes the people themselves, as we are all land).
[dead]
Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion
The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.
The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.
But it's extractive, i.e. the housing costs what you can pay if you sacrifice. Those who got housing first need to get paid by latecomers. If the cost of building magically went to 0, the soft costs would inflate.
Sure. The extractiveness of housing costs can exist alongside the fact that constructing a building on land creates value.
Always the same straw man argument. Nobody here is arguing that wealth can't be created.
Did you not read the comment chain above? That's precisely the point that was being discussed, then misunderstood.
I read the comment chain above. I just went back and read it again. I question whether you've done the same.
I can't understand the writing for you. But I can present it.
TheTayTay said "wealth can be created". Avicebron asked for an example of wealth creation. cm2012 provided one, housing. saghm misunderstood the intent of the example. I pointed out the error, and then you came in and have apparently repeatedly failed to understand again multiple comments, both the people who literally are saying that some quantity of wealth cannot be created, and myself.
If you didn't get that after a reread, all I can suggest is that you seek out a literacy class at a local community college. It will improve your life, because this certainly won't be the first or only time you misunderstand written words.
The argument that you seem to have had trouble parsing isn't that it's impossible to create wealth, but that the rewards are not distributed according to the role that people played in creating it. If a company sells for a billion dollars, there isn't a single "correct" way to decide how much each person in the company deserves to get. Some people (likely including yourself) believe that the way it's currently done is the best way, but other people (like myself) disagree and think that the current system gives rewards that are not proportionate to the amount of work each member does in reaching that point. There are plenty of coherent counterarguments you could make against my viewpoint, but asserting that it's equivalent to claiming that wealth "can't be created" is not one of them; I'm arguing that how much each person contributed towards that wealth creation is different than you are, not that it's literally not happening.
I'm sorry to say that you don't seem to have read either the thread or my comment.
What you bring to the discussion is the straw-man argument that "wealth can be created, not only stolen." Nobody was disputing that. Nobody is disputing it now. It's common ground.
Saghm tried to return to the actual topic, but you don't seem to have understood (or you aren't willing to acknowledge) what that topic actually was. People were talking about how to fairly divide wealth, not about whether it can be created or not.
No, I don't believe that you are sorry. And discussions can diverge; making a comment that follows only the original discussion but is a non-sequiter to the comment it actually replies to, makes the comment nonsensical, not "a return to the original discussion".
The thing you say was not claimed, was claimed by multiple commenters.
Considering you are neither truthful nor literate, I won't be replying again. Feel free to get the last word in if you like.
If anyone else is unlucky enough to be reading this, please just scroll up to see what everyone actually said.
Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.
No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.
Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.
But he seems wildly oblivious to the fact that there even is an argument to be had here, which there emphatically is.
Reasonable people can disagree as to the nature/extent -- or even the existence of -- exploitation, but this guy absolutely has impermissibly strong blinders on, rendering most of this article a waste.
Seriously, the paragraph is bad enough to warrant an accusation of bad faith.
Like, does PG really not understand that nobody is arguing that a company can build a billion dollars worth of value? Has he not read Adam Smith? Is his definition or understanding of rent seeking so limited that he can't see the grey areas between "extraction" and "earning" money?
Anybody who earns significant income from investment, including VC money, should recognize that they are at some level extractive, not the hard won dollars that the folks at the ground level are generally putting in.
For guys like PG, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, Thiel their very identity is tied to winning this as a game, and thus, any actions they take must defended at all costs, and the score must be seen as righteous and deserved and free from interference.
I think most people who make their living by owning stocks sincerely don't believe their way of making money is fundamentally different from ours.
no one is doing it honestly in the disparity
musk isnt a trillionaire because his assets would equate to physical product. his valuation is an inflated target of market manipulation.
when you add up all the physical goods in the world that directly benefit people, that comes nowhere near these valuations.
and externalities are one way wealth is taken from the environment. then theyre parlayed.
Why should we only count physical goods as benefits?
That sounds like a pretty impoverished world to live in. No music, no art, no communication with our friends and family beyond speech…
I don't think that was the point, you can add those to the physical goods list as well, as well as many other human services (education, cutting hair, open air games, etc).
The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.
Why should we believe that your opinion is more objective than other market participants?
Which opinion?
Percievable goods and services, then.
What’s imperceptible about what, say, Meta produces? It seems to me everything they sell is perceptible and valuable to the corresponding buyer.
And no nfts and crypto
You can have a system that generally isn't one of zero sum games that was that at the same time can become one when it becomes extremely unbalanced (e.g. when billionaires exist).
There is a finite amount of land on earth, and a finite amount of most natural resources. We currently have no indication we will EVER develop faster than light technology.
Any discussion not grounded in those facts is a dishonest discussion. It is a zero sum game until those externalities change because ultimately our species is built upon extraction resources to produce wealth. It IS a zero sum game until you or someone else invents a means of solving the first order problems.
Isn't most of our economic growth based off inputs of energy (in the form of labor, electricity, etc) that ultimately derive from the sun, though, rather than primarily non-renewable non-recyclable resource extraction? The sun is technically a non-renewable resource, I guess, but only on cosmic timescales.
Where do you get photovoltaic cells? Where do you get copper wire to transport it? Where do you get transformers? Where do you get batteries?
Anyone downvoting me because they think renewable energy overcomes the finite resources on planet earth are absolutely delusional.
We literally have evidence of the scarcity of resources when China started threatening to limit access to rare earths. CaN other countries build capacity at some point? Sure. What happens when you’re in a country that has none naturally and the countries that do have access don’t feel like selling you any?
What’s that? It’s a finite resource that results in a zero sum game?
On a trillion year time frame, sure.
How much of the land on planet earth is currently unclaimed by a nation state or individual?
You don’t need a trillion year scale for the average man to already be dealing in finite resources and ability to create wealth.
It takes 30 seconds of research to see the cost of an acre of land has far exceeded inflation over the last 50 years. That’s finite resources at work.
Money is not a representation of value. It is a representation of desire. I agree that, in principle, an economy does not have to be set up as a zero sum game, and at smaller scales (many of us don't realize that 1 billion is relatively small for global scale economics), it really doesn't have to be. I agree that value can be created. But value doesn't run this economy, desire does. And sometimes desire runs totally counter to what is _actually_ valuable.
Not to mention that, especially in a fiat environment where currency is printed out of thin air, it is literally a zero-sum game by definition. When the printer winds up, the bankers win big at everyone elses expense; setting the tone for the entire market. Anecdotal success stories of hard working, honest billionaires is a nice distraction, but that's all it is.
The substantive reality of the status quo is one of unprecedented levels of extraction, and as we continue down this AI power consildation story, that will be harder and harder to deny as we go forward. If you happen to win big as an outlier, more power to you, but the article even admits to the rarity of this story implicity. 20 years. thousands of companies. 30 billionaires.
Even if every single one of those people are honest to goodness saints, that's only slightly better odds, perhaps, than winning the lottery.
Don't forget this is from the group of people who get an extraordinary helping hand in the form of YC and all that represents, and of businesses hand picked to be the most likely successes. And even then, it's still just winning the lottery.