Graham: So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.
Per his link in the article:
AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn
The real thing they have is a collective agreement that allows them to have the power to direct a bunch of capital toward production. If they ever just decided to cash in their chips and buy a dragon hoard of gold instead, the paper wealth would vaporize really quickly.
The problem that really exists here is that this small group of individuals has too much power. The feudal system existed for a long time, there's arguably a tendency to return to it, and this is the thing that truly makes people uneasy about the concentration of power outside democratic processes. How do we get rid of the despots? At least with democratic process there's a way to vote them out, their terms expire, etc. With hoarded wealth, and especially (as we see with cases like the Waltons and now the Ellisons) generational mega-wealth, we have zombie feudalism clawing its way out of the grave.
I don't think there's a problem with someone earning the trust of a bunch of investors and being granted a lot of power to direct resources in their lifetime, but the intergenerational transfer of unearned power is a place where a crackdown is certainly warranted.
In biology there's the notion of a growth curve. It starts out with the familiar "compound interest" exponential growth, but unlike Econ-101 textbooks, that curve then proceeds to resource depletion (overshoot), followed by "die-off", followed by extinction, where (N -> 0, where N is usually something like yeast-cell count, but if you're applying this model to something else, it could be stuff like well-being or money).
To pick just one example, infinite scrolling can be seen as a modern equivalent of cigarettes— a product that made people billionaires, and that consumers obviously want but are not free to stop using because of hyper-sophisticated dark patterns.
Is Elon a trillionaire because he created a trillion dollars of value from thin air, or is it because he created an information asymmetry flywheel that lets him allocate capital more efficiently than other actors?
It’s genuinely unclear to me whether the universe in which we incentivize this kind of scale is better than the universe in which we do not (because the counterfactual universe has massive externalities too). But this is obviously not just a matter of compounding value creation and becoming a billionaire fair and square in ten years.
There are exploitable gaps in the logic where loaning against owned collateral is not considered a realizable taxable event and it’s reasonable to attempt to close these.
But like most things I find that things fall down when actual policy needs to be written. The only example is the SEIU proposition in California which is backdated and requires many people to give up half their ownership in a company.
I can’t be brought around to supporting those outcomes.
She certainly frames it in a way that you have to personally cheat, or personally create the myth that you've earned it, or at least it can be interpreted that way. But I think it is the system itself that causes unearned[1] money to accumulate. Money begets power begets money, with or without any intention of the actors to exploit this is any bad way.
I don't think we know a better system, but I do think we can point to the level of wealth accumulation and say this is a bad property of this overall very good system, and we should try to do something about it.
[1] Or rather: Money to accumulate disproportionate to the earning. We can say that many billionaires have earned something very significant and ALSO say the accumulation is disproportionate to that, and that there is an opportunity here for improvement.
the ratio of the average individual's wealth to 'illionaire's wealth feels "wrongly asymmetric" for a lot of people (CEOs making ~300x that of average worker)
the question is basically about how that startup scaling at 94% translates to scaling up the individual's life (who faces alleged "stagnant wages")
or in other words, how can entrepreneurs create an approach for society that facilitates individuals scaling up their wealth?
There is for example a perception that a person working all waking hours on a low amount of pay - like minimum wage, and without investments - could never become a 'illionaire through their "honest hard work"; ergo becoming a 'illionaire requires something beyond this "honest hard work" (implying illegal and or unethical means)
The pg view seems to assume that if there is a causal relationship between your actions and a billion dollars appearing in your bank account, then it counts as having earned that money.
The countering viewpoint seems to consider the words "earn" and "build" as having a similar relationships to money and buildings respectively. If I tell you I built the shed in my garden, then you'll probably take my word for it. If I tell you I built a skyscraper, you'll either call me a liar or understand me to mean that a large number of individuals built it at my request.
I think the second version is more useful and more accurate.
That’s weird. I grew up around farming and farmers. A group also very proud of the work they do, in a profession where the wage is also indirect — sometimes negative, sometimes a fortune, always based directly on the work they’ve done. Year after year, the work.
That’s different.
I’ve always identified two sets in the realm of entrepreneurs: those that want to “be rich”, and; those that want to “become rich”. The latter group is perhaps more admirable as they acknowledge the process and the value creation whereas the former seek only the status. But neither are often interested in the work of it.
This is, sadly, a first for him.
AOC (the politician referenced) did not mean that earning a billion is "impossible". She, very clearly, stated within the context of that interview that Billionaires must be an extractive class at the cost of normal market efficiencies due to the rent-seeking behaviors of the monopolies that must exist to attain that level of wealth.
Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard.
To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G:
If it's the founders who earned the same monetary value of the companies they created ("because they're responsible for it"), they should bear the same moral and legal responsibility for the externalities.
So far, only SBF is in jail. Lots more of these companies have broken the law.
Let's throw the founders in jail too - they can keep their money!
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.
Amazon was first, then Uber went world wide, so did Airbnb, and now OpenClaw, so yes, the AI gold rush opened the gates for new opportunities but only a few will make it. We all can run the race for sure but most of us will only get tired at the end while the lucky few will take all the prizes and our corpses will be their podium, as it's supposed to be.
Still, we have to run because there is a chance, a very slim chance which is more than zero hope.
This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi drivers), so there is moral entanglement between creation and destruction. Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit just as it was part of the remit of earlier industrialists to figure out how not to discharge so much flammable goo into the river that it lit on fire. We neglect this at our peril, because society merely pinches its nose if the toxic byproducts are small, but they are increasingly not small.
This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.
Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally?
Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, did they earn that money?
I don’t think the cheating people criticize is necessarily criminal fraud.
Edit: and the second thing people seem to criticize is that just keeping your company growing often seems to involve some unethical things. Basically every company that’s manufacturing hardware is doing that in Asia under inhumane conditions, so they probably can’t really claim they earned their money and it’s just maths.
>AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”
there's some truth there in that PG is talking about capital gains as the owner of a company and AOC is talking about earnings as payment for labour which are different things both in reality and in tax policy and law.
The capital gains can be unfair in that most of them go to founders and VCs and not much to other employees and stakeholders who have contributed as well.
I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then? Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not getting 93% richer just cause her start up is.
This assumption is depressing. That the only alternative to "earn" is "cheat".
A system of diminishing work (i.e. where money makes money), especially combined with inheritance, means every dollar is arguably less earned than the last. That system is fine and actually very useful, but that diminishment becomes a big problem at large enough scales. We've been operating at that scale for many decades.
The hierarchy of wage looks something like:
1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary)
2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your earning potential. Sometimes the bonus can be huge, for traders, salespeople, etc.)
3. base pay + stock options (the stock options can outsize your base pay by big margins)
4. stock ownership (almost all your wealth is tied up to the stocks)
The vast, vast majority of people are stuck at (1), and will never move to (2). Nearly all billionaires are at (4).
The average worker will work around 100k hours in their lifetime. If you started working today, with a 2% inflation rate, you'd have to start getting paid close to $6000 / hour in order to reach a billion dollars (pre-tax) in total income by the time you retire 50 years from now.
Another factor to consider, is that salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings. A startup founder can find investors and raise money, which works as rocket-fuel for their company. You can practically outspend your competition. That is simply not possible for regular workers, without breaking rules (as in outsourcing your job, taking on several jobs and outsourcing those, while collecting).
Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
Linus Torvalds created Linux which allowed companies to use commodity hardware. Before Linux, every company had to pay massive taxes to Sun (Solaris) or IBM (AIX) to run a server. With Linux, commoditty hardware ecosystem blossomed, and the first companies like Google built massive datacenter. This wouldn't have been possible if they had to buy Solaris servers to run their datacenters.
The value created by Linus is probably tens of trillions of dollars. I don't think he is a billionaire. There is a guy who is a trillionaire today. It is hard to make an argument that Musk created more value than Linus. Tesla is a trillion dollar company with negative YoY growth.
Linus Torvalds is not a visionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-YL0BeWZyU
The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it. They have either inherited wealth or in the right networks. The example PG gives of starting with 2 million USD is someone who is already incredibly wealthy and in the top 1% (1% globally, not just US). As always, there may be some rare exceptions where the founders actually created value and became billionaires.
So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie.
If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that manipulates politics and literally cuts government funding to the poorest and most vulnerable groups to get there.
And since this post has a numbers focus, zuck is worth 195 billion. Would Facebook’s negative influence be noticeably less if they spent 194.9 billion on reducing the harms of Facebook, and zuck remained a millionaire? I believe so.
That's not the problem.
The problem is even simpler mathematics. Proportions. How much do we give to first employees? How realistic is that John Smith, first salesman of the company is getting 2% and should consider himself lucky, while I, Peter Boss retain most of the company?
We always talk about the dilation of the founders' shares and its relation to the VC portion.
What is the usual proportion of the shares held by the founders and the first 10 or 100 employees?
Is that proportion usually realistic with regards to the effort put in and the risk assumed?
Is that risk usually really that heroic or most of us in the "can found a startup" caste can usually go back to jobs that already pay well over average?
I am the founder of a company. I want it to succeed. I don't want to become a billionaire, but I want the people that help me build it to have similar successes to mine.
If we succeed, I don't want my car or house to be 10x more expensive than of those people who joined me first.
There's something seriously rotten about telling university students about billions. The issue isn't whether anyone can earn a billion dollars. Nobody actually needs a billion dollars.
The question they should be pondering is given the excess of talent and opportunity they have, how can they help the people around them and give something back to society.
That’s cool and it’s a cool post, sure, but it sounds ridiculous when you look at how many dumb GPT wrappers there are in YC batches nowadays.
> Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.
Seems to me that right off the bat he completely undermines his own point - less than .5% of the founders being funded at basically the best connected best financed incubator become billionaires. Easy, right?
I won't even go into the embarrassing math that follows... pyramid scheme salesman levels...
Call me cynical but ...
I don’t know where “the politician” went with that comment, but for me the more pressing conversation is whether we want a society where many are struggling and some make a billion dollars.
You benefited from society, clearly, which is not to say you didn’t work hard. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to ask you at that point to give back. We can knock plenty of people back to mere “hundred millionaire” status, they’ll be fine, and we can do a whole lot with that money.
Not all companies are growing because they are making their customers happy. Some are fully exploiting their customer, users, environment, etc.
This mindset is what makes capitalism very ugly, and im not sure how one backs off the throttle a bit to grow responsibly?
(Great essay on how to be a billionaire though. Could billionaires give back more? Yes. But creating market value like that is both worth celebrating and evolving.)
and depends on factors outside your control.
This last is a critical caveat, and really the crux of the argument. It's not about cheating, but the limits of predictability in complex dynamic systems.
How do we determine that limit ?
Most Americans ( middle class and above ) are richer than most people in the world.
Way richer than most people in Africa or poorer parts of Asia can ever aspire to be.
Consider that when competing for resources these poor people are competing with wealthy middle class Americans.
Add to that the USD being world's reserve currency makes life easy for a small part of global population earning in the USA and makes it harder for people in every other country whose currency might not be competitive compared to the USD.
Me too, honestly. I'm also kind of shocked. I want to expand on your last point.
Uber became a billion dollar business by running an illegal taxi service. Now I like the ability to book a taxi from my phone with seamless payment. I also dealt with the yellow cabs in NYC in years gone by and it sucked. Shift changes, annoying looping ads you couldn't turn off, card skimming, the process of hailing a cab sucked and the cabs themselves tended to be bad. All that is true but it was still illegal.
AirBNB became a billion dollar company by allowing people to run illegal hotels in residential neighborhoods. This was value extraction from all the neighbors who had to live with the externalities created but gained nothing from it. That value was extracted by people who usually didn't live there. Agree with it or not, it was generally illegal, particularly in their large profit centers like NYC.
There is a lot of this that goes on and, honestly, is the entire basis for private equity. Private equity looks for companies that have what they call "pricing power", which is a form of "inelastic demand". Housing, for example, has inelastic demand. But it also includes creating regional monopolies like buying up all the vets or medical practices in an area and then jacking up the price of all of them. You're not going to drive 5 hours for most medical treatment.
This can sometimes go wrong. KKR bought Envision Healthcare, an amergency medicine contracting company, and unlocked "pricing power" by intentinoally using out-of-network services wherever possible to charge a lot more. Lots of medical practices do this actually. Anyway, their business was effectively killed when the No Surprises Act [1], which interestingly was signed into law by Donald Trump in his lame duck period after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-the-no-surp...
Rewarding entrepreneurship for example a good thing, but I'm also very much of the opinion that a single person controlling a billion dollars is extremely bad for the society while spreading some of that wealth out would do a lot of good.
The big problem we as a society face right now (in my opinion) is that a lot of political energy (votes and discourse) is spent on things that don't fix the economic imbalance right now. Poor poeple vote for politicians making the poor poorer and rich richer.
Eventually it becomes rational to start buying politicians, and subsequently laws. The next obvious avenue is to then control entire government agencies like the FAA or the FCC and just write favorable laws and regulations they don't even have to circumvent.
But even that isn't the end because they're growing too fast, they actually outgrow the law, so breaking it becomes a rational, profit-driven choice. Huge fines? Regulators breathing down your neck? No worries! Just spend more money then has ever been spent in an election to their favored presidential candidate, and then they get to just shut down investigations into themselves!
But even that isn't enough -- soon it becomes a rational business-forward goal to take over the entire government; or even better become the government. First a city, then a state, then a nation. Guess what folks EVEN THAT won't be enough. Not even everything on this entire planet Earth is enough for them; they also want the Moon and Mars and the entire solar system. They will have to become God at some point for this growth to keep up, and that will still be too little for their egos to bear. Something has to give.
Airbnb/Bed Boat, Neighbor, Swimply, Uber/Lyft, Bird/Lime, BlackJet, Waymo/Cruise, Splacer/Peerspace, Zenefits, Tilt, Loomis/Stablecoins, Coinbase, Worldcoin, Stripe, AngelList/Sydecar, Polymarket, Uniswap Labs, Doordash/Instacart/Postmates, CloudKitchens, Shef, Done Health, Forward Health, Cerebral, Pacaso, Sonder, 23andMe, Ro/Hims/Hers, Viome, Juul Labs, Oura Ring, Particle Health/Moxe Health, Roblox, YouTube, Popcorn Time, Kickstarter/Indiegogo, Republic/Wefunder, Deel/Remote, Lambda School, Make School, Mission Bit, WeWork, Oyster/Papaya Global, HiQ Labs, FlexPort, Katerra, Zipline, Starship Technologies/Serve Robotics, 3D Robotics, Anduril Industries, DraftKings/FanDuel, Cydia, Eaze, MindMed, Odin, Swarm Technologies, Starlink, Convoy/Uber Freight, Carvana, Tesla, VoltShare.... oh yeah, and OpenAI.
What do all of these companies have in common? They all manipulated markets, bent and broke laws in order to get that "exponential growth". They didn't want to wait around and find out if their businesses would be legally allowed to grow. So they just broke or worked around the law, with the intention of becoming billionaires. But that's okay, because growth rate! We're not doing anything bad, people want these things! Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do? Money!!!
This is just one of the reasons why becoming a billionaire requires you to cheat. There's also the tax loopholes, the inducement to harm (both of the customer and by the customer), anti-competition, etc. In order to get these gains, you need to cheat, because if it were easy to do legally, ethically, and quickly, somebody already would have. It's corporate doping.
It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it?
He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?
Fine, show me the average person who can come up with 2 million dollars. I sure as hell can not. I even went to banks and founders with my ideas, cash flow sheets and customer list looking for a loan.
No, I am convinced, the rich already have 2 million dollars, and make themselves a billionaire. The system is rigged against "normal" people.
Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
However, his only response for how you should achieve exponential growth is this hand-wavy "make something you yourself want". His only acknowledgement of the concern that maintaining exponential growth may require cheating is a casual dismissal, and his only acknowledgement of the concern that the growth rate will drop off over time is "you'll still get there eventually".
So, while the original concern was that you cannot earn a billion dollars without some wrongdoing, PG's response can be boiled down to "nuh uh".
Nobody who illegally make the rich richer goes to jail, they get a promotion usually
But the meat of the point is: if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years?
Look, I’m a startup guy, I buy into the premise that it’s an intensely value-creating activity. But I think it’s self-defeating to pretend like the monopoly and regulatory arbitrage problems don’t exist.
I get that PG and his customers need to be able to cash out, but also, the monopoly rentiers make it more difficult for startups to compete by buying up competitors early and offering crazy salaries that make startups uncompetitive.
All that said, the subtext here is that PG is providing politicians with stories they can tell, nobody in this conversation is trying to describe reality in the most precise or honest way.
I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth.
Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
She meant it was unethical to do so. It wasn't about working alone or not.
I know we like AOC but the way people bend over backward for her is off-putting.
Paul if you are so rich why aren't you smart? Or is this the age old problem of getting a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it?
The assumptions are:
1. A uniquely special class of people do all the work that matters. They're astoundingly gifted, talented, and insightful, and have a rare ability to make profits happen by having very special ideas, owning Important Things, and telling everyone else what to do. These prodigies deserve everything. They are not to be criticised or judged by their inferiors. Ridicule only proves their superiority.
2. The work everyone else does is far less important. Most of the people doing it are interchangeable and literally disposable. Sometimes they deserve nice things, in a limited sense, if it's hard to make things happen without them. But mostly no.
3. Negative externalities - pollution, ecosystem collapse, spiralling asset prices, financial and political instability - aren't real. If they are real they don't matter. If they do matter they're someone else's fault.
4. It's absolutely fine to treat other humans with aggressive indifference and outright contempt as long as Number Goes Up. In fact it's expected.
He specifically says it isn't.
Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary measure of a company’s moral standing.
(Market cap is estimated based on transactions that are a small percentage of market cap.)
But this kind of person isn't rare either, even in Italy or Poland where I live I know many multi millionaires.
Some are farmers, some have restaurants/hotels, some work remotely for US tech companies, some were early engineers in startups.
What did George Lucas do?
LeBron has to be worth a few hundred million. What did he do?
Worse, it's just a long post trying to show that doing math with a calculator somehow disproves real-life ethics.
At becoming billionaires. Many more than that succeeded at making a good chunk of money that was life-changing for them, their families, their early employees, etc.
So I think your reading of the chance of "hope" are overly cynical. Of course it's not easy to make millions, but it's not so bleak and the market isn't so ruthless that it can't be done for those who try intelligently and persistently.
And of course, even below that level of wealth, there are tens of millions of people who work regular jobs and are able to afford pretty high standards of comfort and living by any yard stick that's ever been used to measure.
My take: they don't; nobody does. But when you aren't successful and don't have a lot, and when "success" is marketed to you as "big SUV; fancy big ass house; private jet; fancy vacations", you get trained into think you need much more than you actually do to be happy.
The good news is she can be a trillionaire in another 10 months.
[0] Big "if" obviously but so is a 15% monthly growth rate in revenue.
Graham's admiration of scammer Austen Allred is evidence for this.[1]
Give me a break. Elon has created a huge amount of value. Every third car I see on the road is a Telsa and the US was relying on Russia to reach the ISS before SpaceX.
Why are you presupposing the world is just when EVERY skill and opportunity is distributed non-linearly?
- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!
- Inelastic labor supply mismanaged into increasingly soggy demand, mathematically tanking wages
- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital
there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
But that’s obviously not their point.
Does this mean you haven't been following his twitter the past several years?
But you probably need >$10M to not HAVE to work and live a low-risk comfortable life in even modestly expensive parts of the US.
The funny thing about money is, it's really hard to save $1M and $10M, but once you get there, it's pretty easy to grow that substantially.
The fundamental problem in the West, IMO, is that we make it so hard to save even small amounts of money, and so easy to compound huge amounts of money (and no the EU is not much better on this front than the US).
It should be the opposite.
Amazon is famous for being a terrible company to work for, on the logistics side.
Airbnb has caused all sorts of social problems.
Uber results in people working for peanuts and has circumvented labour laws.
I think there are some startups that have created large scale value without doing something malevolent, but not those ones.
Things like Linear. Good tool for software dev, no one harmed.
I don’t think a definition of “earn” that excludes cases like that captures the generally understood meaning.
If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. If the employees think that what they agreed to work for is no longer sufficient, they are welcome to renegotiate their compensation or, if they feel they have been wronged and are being paid less than they are worth, to take their talent to a different employer. After all, everything so far has been consensual. The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.
Interesting, by that logic every participant in the economy should also be required to bail out any startup that fails otherwise we’re exploiting the founders! They’re taking all the risk and we’re getting all the benefit of the services and goods they create!
The simple truth is that many people don't want to step into that kind of intensity and uncertainty, or lack the skills to succeed in a cutthroat industry.
The idea that founders are somehow "cheating" is hilarious to me. Anyone in the developed world can easily become a founder, why don't you try it?
Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and achieve its various strategic aims—largely set by Elon and its other preexisting owners.
You can take that away either proactively by making such ownership structures impossible or retroactively through taxation forcing current ownership to sell, but the end result is the same: No incentive for folks like Musk or Bezos to use their skills on big, ambitious, capital-intensive enterprises. Control is what matters, not $.
LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.
I can literally think of a million ways.
1) lie to your customers about what your product actually does; this seems inevitable, once (if not before) private equity gets involved.
Using AirBnB as example: all the excess fees which have slowly crept into the final purchase price, while still requiring guests to clean &c
Sadly this is the actual advice in the post.
There's a huge social element. No one wants to throw their buddies in jail.
It looks bad on the golf course (or at Burning Man / Sun Valley if you're in tech)
US GDP is $31.82 trillion dollars per year. Taking the 2.5% growth rate, that's nearly $800 billion dollars per year in new GDP.
The economy very obviously does not progress as a bunch of soldiers marching in a straight line. Some firms will shrink 100%, some will growth 10,000%. This much is obvious by just looking around. But even if no businesses shrank, no wages were docked, nothing bad happened... even still there would be $800B in more GDP.
So if the economy is growing at $800B per year, it's extremely obvious how a company could even grow from $1M to $1B in revenue per year without doing anything shady... Just capture some of the new economic activity that cropped up this year!
And it's even easier when we're talking about an entrepreneur's net worth. Their net worth is going to be mostly holdings in company stock. The value of company stock is some multiple of the company's theoretical future financial earnings.
So if a company is making $1M revenue today, and growths to $5M revenue by the end of the year (15% MoM growth), at let's say a 30% EBITDA margin, they have made $1.5M EBITDA. And let's say that fast growth is rewarded at an extremely rich 50x EBITDA multiple. That company is now worth $75M. If this founder is lucky and owns 50% of their business, they now are "worth" $37.5M.
If they were only at $1M * .30 * 50 * 0.50 = $7.5M net worth at the beginning of the year, and then were at $37.5M at the end, their net worth increased by 500% in one year! And all they had to do was capture $4M / $8000M = 0.05% of the increase in GDP.
Like, none of this is either shady or complicated.
While at Amazon Jeff Bezos considers his worth to be 80k a year hence he was paid that much, and paid taxes in that salary.
If someone becomes a billionaire by being paid 50m a year for 40 years and paying taxes on that income then congrats.
She captured the truth, that our current system vastly favors capital over labor (etc etc etc), and did that in around six or seven words.
You can't really do better than that when communicating ideas at scale. What she said is true, it's for essays, economic papers, and laws to provide the nuance.
I'm of the opinion that this skill atrophies substantially for billionaires.
If someone has an idea that 'only' makes them 20 million, I would call that a great success; even if it takes dozens of years to get there.
Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
They aren't paid millions based on tickets to see them play, it's the advertising.
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.
(Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic, at present.)
Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of people.
Regardless, can we talk about the danger to society of having these resulting billionaires and how we ought to address that? I think that is in fact what "the politician" mentioned in the article was trying to address.
(The new American Dream appears to be: be one of the 30 people every 21 years that finds themselves the head of a startup that succeeds.)
Nobody is mad about the billionaires having a lot of money - they are mad that people are pissing in water bottles to make their route, or having the city’s public infrastructure privatized, or the many other fantastic real world changes that are on the other side of these fantastical market caps.
To get a billion from a million you need to do 15% for fifty years, and that ignores inflation. Or 25% for thirty-one years.
These numbers are ludicrous.
Growth comes from innovation, and innovators get rewarded with faster growth as non-innovators decline.
By growing better than the average?
> if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years
My family of five is getting taller at say 1% per year. But my 4 year old and 7 year old are growing at 10% per year. My wife, my teenage daughter, and I have topped out. What exactly is inconsistent about this?
> 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.
In other words, he's saying that rapid wealth creation can (and often does) come from creating and selling things of value to willing buyers, at scale, and that that's not unethical to do.
I do agree with you that AOC's point is not particularly strong, though :)
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.
Uber was not a YCombinator company. For some unexplained reason, many mistakenly think it was a YC startup but it's not correct.
(The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)
His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.
The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.
Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Is that skill?
Don't >95% of tech companies offer stock options or equity, from startups to FAANG?
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
While many don't necessarily value pay as #1, it is important to people. If a regular worker receives a 20% pay increase, that's huge compared to not getting anything, or something which barely covers inflation. Even though the dollar amount may not be much compared to others.
1. Coming from a relatively affluent background (eg Bill Gates's father was a successful lawyer);
2. Social status. For example, Sundar Pichai came from a relatively modest socioeconomic background but he's also upper caste;
3. Even having access to a top-tier education (eg Stanford) generally shows a lot of privilege, Social connections, financial security, probably access to a quality education prior, tutors and so on;
4. Even just being white in the US means your family had access to create generational wealth that minorities didn't. The post-WW2 GI Bill famously discriminatory in providing cheap mortgages (as well as subsidized college eduation).
One cannot overstate the opportunities available to you if you are "free to fail". If your family can support you or even you can live at home then you have the option of starting a company and being unpaid for a long period.
As for founders "cheating", well that's a different story but also objectively true. Many companies extracted value by essentially breaking the law and getting large enough before enforcement caught up with them, which allowed them to buy those changes. AirBNB and Uber are good examples of this.
The myth of meritocracy has been so successfully propagandized it's no wonder that so many people see themselves as "temporarily embarrrassed millionaires".
The distribution of the wealth created by the massive increase in productivity has been trending towards the organisational top for many decades now.
I don't think that the management has gotten exponentially more efficient and better at their job to justify their increasingly bigger share of the profits.
It’s also true that these companies raise and spend money and that results in physical changes in the world, but angry people on the Internet aren’t necessarily well-informed about what those changes are. There are lots of myths.
PG just completely misunderstands and hand-waves over this basic concept and makes the excuse that "hey we worked really hard and made an amazing product that people loved, we aren't harming anyone."
For one thing, founders and employees don't share equally in the high growth rate of the company even though at most a founder is working let's say 2x longer hours than a salaried employee. You can do nothing wrong but you're still taking more of your fair share by the basic structure of how the business is setup.
I think anyone who is running a successful company and doesn't have a path to converting to an employee-owned enterprise is immoral, especially if you have managed to capture $1 billion just for yourself while your median employee is just making market rate salaries, or maybe they happened to gamble on your stock options and have a modest nest egg about 1/100th-1/50th the size of your wealth as a founder.
So yeah, Jeff Bezos made $260 billion dollars, but an alternative that could have happened was "Jeff Bezos makes $50 million and every Amazon employee gets a much more fair share of the happy customers' money."
More importantly, if you have $1 billion in net worth, that means that you can choose to do anything with your life on a daily basis.
When I'm over here working my job in my cushy upper middle class life, it's still an objective truth that I need to be selfish in order to secure the future of my family. Nothing is guaranteed and we need to fend for ourselves. I can't stop working or the home finances collapse within months or a short number of years if I'm very lucky and have something significant saved up or my house paid off. I legitimately don't have the time or money to help many other people outside of my nuclear and extended family.
But when you have a billion dollars (and some people have hundreds of those and one person even has a thousand of those), that means you have no limit to what you spend your time on. You can do anything, and deciding not to work on capitalist endeavors anymore has zero chance of turning you destitute.
In other words, when you are a billionaire, what you choose to spend your time on says a lot about the content of your character compared to someone who is not that wealthy.
Paul Graham is out here giving speeches to rich kids at Oxford Union, but he could be spending his morning in the local soup kitchen or building homes with Habitat for Humanity. He could be mentoring people who are struggling to escape housing insecurity, or he could be working with advocacy groups to expand healthcare access and end childhood hunger.
He doesn't have to go to work every day like I do. But he is one of the people who has dedicated his life to capitalism, even after successfully taking care of his family for many lifetimes, and that says a lot about him.
"You're young, and usually young founders should make something that they themselves want. You don't have enough experience yet to know what other people need. But at the same time your own needs are uniquely valuable, because your needs predict future demand. You're the age when people start using new things. Whatever you and your friends start using now, everyone is going to be using in ten years. Since your intuitions about other people's needs are usually a crap signal, and your own needs are an especially valuable one, you should usually listen to the second signal; you should make something you and your friends want.
Making something you and your friends want doesn't mean you have to build a consumer product. Maybe you and your friends are molecular biologists, and there's something cool that could be done now to DNA that everyone else has overlooked. Maybe you and your friends are into drones. The idea doesn't have to have a wide appeal. It literally just has to appeal to you and your friends."
If she meant "impossible" completely literally, then she is wrong.
Once a company starts operating, but before revenue (and hopefully eventual profitability), the valuation is trickier. The share price _should_ be the number of shares divided by the sum of all future profit (minus current debt.) Which is hilarious of course, because no one actually knows the denominator.
That original $2M equity stake can grow to billions if the company ends up making something that a lot of people want or need, so the sum of all future profit is large. Or, much more likely, it will be worth nothing, or a modest amount.
Graham's essay kind of avoids the point of whether ownership of a vastly appreciating asset is "fair", if a bunch of other people help that asset to appreciate.
"The purpose of capitalism is to pay rich people for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, thereby establishing, reinforcing, and perpetuating a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist."
Dear reader, if you bristled at how casually this statement ignored that compounding returns are a feature of the real world that we want our economy to model and encourage, now you understand how a normal person feels when a megacorp or megacorp cheerleader casually fails to account for everyone they displaced and stepped on in order to capture the value that they did. "Negligent accounting" is a strategy that points both ways.
They are also speculative, not real. They are based on the notion that the company would be worth that much based on projected cash flows, expenses, etc. If you actually tried to cash it all out at any point in time you could not get anything close to that because the very act of selling will lower the value by destroying confidence in the speculative valuations.
None of these SV billionares have billions in cash or cash equivalents. Maybe a few of the largest companies do.
I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "innovation".
Lots of companies grow because of, among other things: regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage, questionable use of other people's IP, offshoring, misclassification of employees/contractors, profit shifting and transfer pricing, subsidized predatory below-cost pricing, dark patterns, aggressive collection and monetization of user data, acqui-hires to stifle competition, implementing high-switching costs to create vendor lock-in, round-tripping, channel-stuffing, business models that intentionally externalize costs, outright fraud.
Assuming invariance of scale between how growth works between a family's height and how a company worth a billion(s?) operates relative to the environment. It's the same error Paul makes when he has the politicians calculate the log base and form that connection about exponents in their minds.
If we take this analogy further, your kids would be the ones working the hardest to bring the food on the table required for this growth, and the adults would consume like 90% of it.
You will note that PG does not provide such a mechanism for how a $100m company grows into a $10b company (thus producing $b wealth for founders).
Just to be clear. I am not saying at the object level that such growth is impossible. I am saying that at the meta/causal level, PG did not adequately characterize it it.
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.
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".
()
> 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.
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.
Looooots of caveats here.
Look, I know this is a tech forum and we don't claim to be good at the social sciences, but this is a central debate and r>g, the idea that the rate of return to capital tends to exceed economic growth over the course of history, is a major result from Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century that people interested in "grow the pie" vs "trickle down" really ought to be familiar with. Even if you disagree, you ought to be able to articulate why, and "the average includes winners and losers" ain't it.
"But life has improved, r>g couldn't have been true forever" -- last time the inequality bubble popped because of a great depression and two world wars. The capital was incinerated, metaphorically and literally. It's a cautionary tale and we should aspire to do better.
How many is "many"? If you meant 100 million people, then that's still just 1.2%.
And in my opinion to claim that 100 million people have the opportunity to become a billionaire is laughable. Even if you're a super genius and you do everything right, there are just WAAAY too many happy accidents (opportunities) or just lack of unfortunate events stopping you.
Like you could be born to the best parents, who can afford the best school, growing up with the best opportunity business partners, and you work your ass off and are very smart… and then there's STILL a 20% chance you're in a car accident before the age of 30[1], potentially derailing your whole trajectory.
So car accidents ALONE could take away the chance for 20% of people. Not saying a car injury is terrible, but it could be sufficient to derail the billionaire plan.
That said, you work with what you got. And become a millionaire? Sure, doable. Billionaire? You need to win several lotteries AND have skill & contentiousness, I'm sorry let's not pretend otherwise.
[1] 2.44 million people injured in traffic in the US every year (2023 data, and US traffic injury and death is skyrocketing UPWARDS thanks to the car lobby's light truck loophole, while everywhere else in the world traffic deaths are going WAY down).
Furthermore, the company motivated by profit that does not have to pay for polluting the environment will also pollute the environment. Regulation is also necessary to pay for long term externalities and other boom and bust cycles. There is nothing new in PG take except COPE and blame shifting about the increasing inequality and other societal and environmental issues.
The actual comparison would be to look at all the startups with billionaire founders (so likely $10B companies) and then analyze the market dynamics that enable them to keep growing so fast.
in common parlance, theft
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)
We're now applying LLM anthromorphism back on people...sigh
There are many assumptions around this you could argue about, but he’s directly addressing the original statement (which was also simple, and did not explicitly include the assumptions either).
I agree they are talking past each other - a lot of this is more related to marginal cost differences than anything else imho (basically how leveraged the value of my labor could practically be).
> 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.
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.
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.
That sounds like a pretty impoverished world to live in. No music, no art, no communication with our friends and family beyond speech…
Most people with millions do not become billionaires. So yes, there is an exclusive pool of players who can play the game. But within that pool there is incredibly different outcomes.
A better analogy is being born as a child of D1 basketball athletes and then making 100 million in the NBA. Being born into a family with no interest in athletics makes it almost impossible to be a professional athlete. Life isn’t fair. It’s still impressive to become one.
> 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.
We've been pushing all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and this can't go on forever.
The thumbnails often just tell the welder story, for instance. It’s very clever (misleading).
Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school.
https://dailyorange.com/2026/03/opinion-amid-u-s-doctor-shor...
>In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.
Jeff Bezos famously took an $80,000/yr salary. Bezos didn't make $260 billion, or anything within 1/1000th of that. He built a company, that through some inane estimations his share of which might be $260 billion.
For him to not have that imaginary $260 billion would be for the company to not be built at all. So, if that's what you want, you're at least consistent... but no one else would think that a particularly good idea. Quite a few people like being able to order things online and receive them quickly. They don't want to have to go back to stomping through Walmart, hoping that the store has what they need.
I think part of the problem is that if you can slap a label on someone of "Eleventy billion dollars", everyone's brain malfunctions and treats it as a literal fact, regardless of the truth of the label. When you don't want billionaires to have billions, what you're saying is that you don't want them in control of those billion dollar companies. But do you not want the companies to exist, or do you just want someone else in control of those companies? And who?
It tends to filter out trite topics and lower-quality submissions, though I have the feeling that it has become less effective for that in recent times.
Another far more sensible model I've found is slicing pie. Each founder's input % of the pie pre-'bake' is their % of the rewards. And what makes up for one's slice of the pie? The dollar-value you would've earned if you worked somewhere else, times the period of baking. These can be tweaked accordingly to the type of investment put in. IMO, it seems far more grounded compared to say a flat 10%.
Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks
I mean, maaaaaybe a Jevon's Paradox kicks into play with human labor and replacing people with robots somehow creates even more jobs, but whenever someone says this your immediate response should be: "ok, now put your money where your mouth is and bet on it by strengthening the social safety net."
How does he get the money to do that?
Well there you have it folks case closed.
Slavery is illegal therefore there is no slavery. Geniuses at work indeed
Im not from the US so I’m probably not doing a good job at the devils advocate thing but I could imagine that you just tax the people that start the business so they still get some healthy personal wealth by redistributing the truly extreme wealth back to the workers/society.
There’s probably some motivation problem to grow the company further at some point but maybe you could limit the percentage any individual can earn by holding the company or something like that?
"No I didn't mean this [virtuous example]. I meant the vast majority of [unnamed nefarious actors] which I don't need to elaborate about as their existence is obvious."
Once you say it's just hyperbole and you don't mean it literally, then the only way to prove it is a statistical argument.
"The overwhelmingly share of company founders and companies are bad and don't earn their money." is a big claim that requires more than vibes.
You yourself are using an expensive phone or computer to type Hacker News comments, presumably not at gunpoint because you choose to do so. Which means you think it's better than the alternative that you're apparently glorifying.
What is fair? Obviously hours worked is one metric to determine what is fair. But another way to arrive at what is fair is through negotiation. Neither the founders nor potential hires are obligated to work with one another. The only way it happens is if an early employee believes the compensation they are offered by the founders is fair. If it was unfair, they would presumably reject the offer outright.
Which of those would provide the most benefit to the world?
Grombobulous says "But he is one of the people who has dedicated his life to capitalism, even after successfully taking care of his family for many lifetimes, and that says a lot about him."
You're simply anti-capitalist. Please post about that instead of mounting personal attacks on people who make more money than you. And please cease telling other people what to do and not do! Try to put yourself into their shoes and think harder about their situation.
The plot twist is that the 'rightie' and the 'leftie' are both entirely correct. Which is why most developed economies try to remove sources of wasteful, unearned rent and also include significant amounts of redistribution/social insurance rather than relying on pure market outcomes. This doesn't erase the compounding dynamics altogether, but it hopefully ensures that folks at the lowest end of the distribution can keep a tolerable standard of living that doesn't have them 'paying' too much.
Now, if that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is! Some of my rich buddies got to be super rich following my advice!
I really don't know why the average person hates the rich. Those poors are so out of touch!
Which one is the better allegory of modern capitalism?
Why is it a cautionary tale? Sounds like we should have a bunch of incinerations of capital, ideally let the capital mobilizers that are actually competent survive.
worth mentioning that our current system is setup by and for the people who own the stuff so its no surprise that we need them to make new stuff.
Without regulations (just a fancy word for "laws"), few people would bother to do any of these things. As it would be much more profitable to simply sabotage competitors, form cabals or monopolies, oppress and steal from the populace, conquer and loot your neighbors, lie and deceive and trick your partners, etc. And even if it weren't, anyone who did want to truly innovate or produce something useful would be discouraged by the fact that, due to others engaging in the above activities, they wouldn't see any profit.
So, to answer your question…
> How often does this actually happen?
All the time! Hundreds of thousands of times per year! Because we don't live in an unregulated free market, because there's no such thing and the concept is absurd on its face.
There are plenty of gaps and inefficiencies where new businesses can provide value to customers at scale who will happily part with their money in return.
Not to mention the fact that the constant march of technology (as well as changes in policy, culture, environment, knowledge, etc.) are constantly tearing open new holes in the market.
- Documentary
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.
2. If you don't have an unfair anticompetitive moat, you'll have competitors, driving your profit towards zero as usual.
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."
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.
By comparison, many people out there are trying to get rich playing the lottery, gambling on stocks, etc., which often have far less likely odds. Is it not better for them to hear about what PG is preaching?
Which is something that is not an option for most people.
Look at where y combinator founders come from. It’s 99% people from elite institutions
That is a core part of AOC’s point
Getting a startup funded is just not something that is possible for most people. They just aren’t in the right circles. Does not matter how good of an idea you have
However, if you’re in the right circle, you’ll get shitloads of chances even after repeatedly failing. Just look at how many of these founders that “made it” drove multiple companies into the ground before making it. It’s a lot easier to find “good fortune” when you have a lot of chances than when you have 0 chances
She has made vague, handwavy, and (depressingly) oft-repeated statements that "there are no ethical billionaires" and that "it's impossible to earn a billion dollars," but she has rarely supported with these statements with any facts or evidence whatsoever.
Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123
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.
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.
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.
"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
(And in California where the most profitable crops are perennial fruits and nuts, probably outright stealing water from the aquifer or state irrigation system.)
It’s an industry of low-grade exploitation, generating products that people mostly don’t need. It’s bizarre. It fits squarely into the category AOC is trying to define here.
This is the most ironic comment I've seen in a while.
The transactions are just as real for Bitcoin or a meme stock.
gains = investment * rate_of_return
Right term: capital allocation decisions are made with skin in the game. Every chunk of the economy has a responsible owner who is rewarded/punished and promoted/demoted for good/bad decisions. Capitalism is a Q-learning algorithm.
The non-explosive way to do this is simply to set the heel above the megacorps today and let inflation push them into it. They will be able to avoid the heel by splitting at their leisure, slowly remediating the consolidation we have seen and restoring competition.
It's about how a utopian society could and/or should respond to changes in resource distribution, and how entirely consensual behavior and exchanges between people can still lead to situations that are problematic.
(Eg agricultural revolution in the US)
I do believe in good safety nets as well and I think that shows in my voting record, so I’m not sure what else you would expect from me, if anything.
You think she's doing the heavy lifting there? Creating the billions? While the underperformer at VideoBuster / Radio Shack is responsible for tanking the business? That's just not true.
In another world, LeBron is still a millionaire, getting a nice $1M a year. The rest, a mere $39M, which in Paul Graham terms is just a couple months from turning into a billion, goes to the hopeless kids actually churning out the god damn shoes.
LeBron did nothing wrong. The system is this corrupt.
We might as well just say “I exploited my structural power over my employees and got a better deal for myself.”
Of course the employees agreed to the deal presented to them, what other option did they have? They aren’t like all these founders that have the luxury of being unemployed because their dad will pay the rent.
That’s another point I forgot to bring up entirely: PG also hand-waved over the quantity of billionaires from his accelerator that came from families of very decent means where they have the luxury of risking failure. The quantity of true rags to riches billionaires is extremely slim.
Yeah, I don’t believe you. It sounds like you’re making a just-so rationalization for why taxis are good and Uber is bad.
In pretty much any mature taxi market Uber is as expensive (if not more expensive!) than the conventional alternative. And yet Uber survives.
But PG is literally addressing the billionaire question. He's literally replying to a statement about billionaires specifically.
We're not reading too much into it.
Like I said, millionaire sure. (You could see it as another word for "successful"). Billionaire? Absolutely not, and it just sounds like you and PG are trying to change the subject, because the actual topic can't be refuted.
But his example doesn’t demonstrate anyone earning $1b. It just demonstrates a very high growth rate at $1-2m.
How else should it work?
Should investors give funding to people who haven't built anything, whose startups don't have any users, who had bad test scores and did poorly in school, and who have no references? If you think so, why? And how is that fair?
If you believe that, should professional sports teams draft mediocre players? Players who didn't play in college or even in high school? Players who didn't make the JV team? If so, why? If not, why not, and how exactly is that so different?
We all know there is no such thing as a perfect meritocracy. There never will be. Things will never be perfectly fair. That's life. But we can try to come as close as we can. And that obviously requires offering more opportunities to people who perform the best. Otherwise, what incentive is there to even strive and try to do well? The alternative isn't fairness, it's randomness.
Edit: I’d like AOC to publicly say Taylor Swift is unethical and immoral too. Heh the swifties would have her head over that.
He said nonsense! If you start as a two millionaire and grow 95% every month you can be there in 9 months!
I say if I start with one cent and grow 10000000000000% every millisecond I can be there in a millisecond.
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.
That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.
The most poignant example is tobacco. Tobacco is a net-negative product for the world. But many people find it very valuable, because it helps them with the stresses of their life and they have a biological dependency on nicotine. And so, it’s a multi billion dollar industry. But, for the world as a whole, it generates negative billions of dollars. Because of the health cost and the cost of lost work. If you did 10, 20 years early then that’s a lot of human productivity burned.
Of course, most products are not tobacco. But every product is tobacco a little bit, I think, in the sense that they merely move some money from externalities into the product. In that sense, it’s not all value creation, it’s value siphoning or moving.
There are less than ~5K billionaries in the entire world. Not quite like winning the lottery sure, but still unrealistic for the majority of people.
The fact that her detractors have spilt gallons of ink arguing against her point without providing such a counterexample speaks volumes.
The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.
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.
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?
That is the system.
> I'm all ears.
Ageing whisky.
As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.
>In 2019, Nike received the worst rating in the Tailored Wages UK report, published by The Clean Clothes Campaign. The report stated: "The brand can show no evidence of a Living Wage being paid to any workers"
Turns out paying more money to an already corrupt government doesn't turn it less corrupt. Go figure, hm?
Whether my comments constitute a motte-and-bailey depends on whether a reasonable person would assume the "impossible to earn a billion dollars" statement to be hyperbole.
If you're negotiating from a position where you've taken on debts and rent that you can't afford to pay any longer because your time has run out, to the point where you're desperate for a pay check as soon as possible, that's very likely due to your own mismanagement and poor planning. (Yes, I'm aware there are exceptional cases.)
Why should it be your fellow private citizen's responsibility to directly bail you out, offer you a job, etc.? Their responsibility is to pay taxes, which funnel into programs like unemployment, which many people use successfully. That's how it works, and how it should work, is it not? What's unfair about that, exactly?
A big portion of my family is lower class and even have health issues, yet have been able to find work without that level of urgent desperation. On the flip side, I know kids who were born rich who've been in that situation due to lack of responsibility. I myself was born middle class in America yet mismanaged my finances in my early 20s to the point where I almost failed to pay the rent while applying for jobs.
Your definition of "fair" is questionable. It absolves people of personal responsibility for their circumstances, and ignores that we have institutions and safety nets for just such circumstances. (As we should! I fully support them.)
What? The employees had infinity other options! They could have negotiated harder. They could have declined the job. They could have taken a job somewhere else. They could have taken the risk to start their own startup, and been in the founder position, instead of choosing to be in the employee position and getting the security and reduced stress that comes along with it.
> That’s another point I forgot to bring up entirely: PG also hand-waved over the quantity of billionaires from his accelerator that came from families of very decent means where they have the luxury of risking failure. The quantity of true rags to riches billionaires is extremely slim.
Over 200M Americans come from middle class backgrounds are above. YC also provides founders with the funds to pay themselves while they start their company. I did YC when I had almost $0 to my name and no well-off family to rely on.
But here's a quick list from the top of my head: Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, Hamdi Ulukaya from Cobani, the founders of Canva, the founders of Stripe, Tobi Lutke from Shopify, Paul Graham himself, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, George Lucas, Roger Federer, J.K. Rowling. Probably dozens/hundreds of others.
If you do something that somebody likes and they give you $1000, that's ethical. But if you do something a million people like, and they give you $1000, then you're a billionaire, somehow you must be unethical?
A million is hardly buying mansions, yachts, and champagne-filled swimming pools in the current economy
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.
Im not going to disagree that externalities are everywhere though. The question is to what extent and if, after correcting for them, there are still products which create so much value they make their founders billionaires. I think the most obvious case for this are artists. JK Rowling sold her writing for over a billion dollars. The work was, as far I know, created pretty much solely by her. You can point to the book publishing system as a whole, but she has nothing to do with that. All she did was write some books and sell them to an already existing system.
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?
It was made by someone who cannot afford healthy food.
Meritocracy my hairy ass.
I’ve only read the article, not the full book, but I’m not sure I buy the premise.
Maybe we can’t see what the new post-AI society looks like yet, but I tend to believe society progresses as it evolves.
It doesn’t mean it won’t be rocky for many people, and good social safety nets will make this easier, but I generally don’t think there will be some kind of dystopian future where society runs out of work to do for humans.
There's a cost to perfection. In our computing world, every extra nine of reliability is more expensive than the last, often with diminishing returns.
See also: Florida drug testing welfare recipients cost more than it saved. https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-fl...
My first startup was one where I was hired because I was young and cheap. I could be paid in free lunches rather than 401k matching and decent healthcare plans.
Big companies often pay better salaries.
Most of the drivers providing that service split their time between Uber, Lyft and traditional corporate black car service.
Lots of posts on this topic in the UberDrivers subreddit.
You’re moving value later to value now, in the form of enjoying smoking.
Consider: if the conditions of our work were different, many people would not smoke. If nicotine didn’t happen to have a biological effect on the human brain, then nobody would smoke. The value created is only in the context of those constraints, and many more (including regulatory ones, which is why we see less smoking today).
I view it as a type of loan. Is loaning money a productive activity? Of course not, because no value is created, it’s merely moved. If the entire economy was just loaning money, then GDP would maybe go up but no value would be created. Smoking is a loan from the tobacco company. You get immediate relief, in the cost of more value paid back to society at a later date.
Consider: if the tobacco industry has sold 5 billion in tobacco products, but tobacco as a whole results in 20 billion dollars in lost productivity and healthcare, then the value generated is -15 billion dollars. In actuality the estimates are much worse, because typically models only consider healthcare cost, not suffering or lost productivity due to death. Suffering, too, has a cost. How well do people work when a loved one dies?
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.
I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.
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.
In a world where AI has not yet taken all the jobs, when a company provides lousy service, why do its employees deserve to keep their jobs more than the customers deserve good service?
The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.
Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
If I’ve already found with a poor justification or better yet, someone is proposing a new one. Shouldn’t we remove it?
It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.
What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
For example:
https://x.com/NEWSMAX/status/1937470443168182386
> A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
A year later:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/what-consumers-shoul...
> Grocery shoppers could get hit with higher prices if the screwworm cases turn into a full-blown outbreak. That could cost $3 billion across the Southwest, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Good tax, or bad tax?
Returning to your question, though: Yes, I assert the cost of troubleshooting a "bad tax" may exceed the benefits of having addressed it.
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.
Your last sentence you’re saying it’s fair to make this assumption that most other jobs are worse.
So that means if a non-startup offered you a better pay package your assumption and bias might steer you away and take worse compensation to do the same job.
I ask you this question because I made a similar mistake in my youth. I took a pay and benefits cut for a startup because it sounded a lot more fun. 6 months later and the company was going under and I was out of a job.
Ghost kitchens might since that’s the only sales channel they are utilizing.
We don’t have to treat taxes as a pool we can look at the pros and cons of each one. Taxes are not benevolent and good by nature.
You seem to be suggesting here it’s impossible or too costly to weigh pros or cons. So I would not consider you for an administrative position
"Look at the pros and cons of each one" is an enormous handwave; I've provided very clear evidence of our inability to do that successfully in a very topical and concrete case.
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 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.
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.
All those times that startups you and I worked for failed, we could have been working for a bank getting 401k matching plus pension plan.
I am not saying either of us would rather work for them but I think there’s a non-zero effect there. Someone sees a job posting for a YC company and they imagine themselves as the next Airbnb employee.
I remember the time I was awarded stock options for good performance. I really didn’t understand at the time that this award mostly benefited the company. I had to spend my own money to buy shares. A decade later, the company is still struggling and has yet to exit.
Sounds like you agree.
We are tweaking a multi-trillion dollar system impacting hundreds of millions of people directly and billions indirectly. The impacts of those tweaks take years or decades to (imperfectly!) assess. Many of the tweaks and their impacts are a matter of deep partisan and academic contention.
This illustrates very well how difficult it will be to agree on good/bad tax.
> There definitely are ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way.
If you've found one, can I come to the Nobel ceremony?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
We have those, and they disagree almost as much as the general public does. Economists get plenty partisan; they're human!
> By that logic, any tax I suggest should be accepted by you, because there is no way to tell if it's good or bad right?
No. But I'm deeply skeptical of "bad tax!" assessments from someone who's calling random people Marxists on this thread!
(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...)
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
And yes, economists are human of course (unless they're now AI). Not sure how that changes what I said. Just because they disagree doesn't mean what they do isn't better than throwing your hands up and saying it can't be done.
> There definitely are ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way.
You then asserted those are:
> Academic panels, economists writing papers on impacts of various policies like rent control, monetary policy, and yes, taxes.
But Marx himself is an example of that process - an economist, writing papers on all this. You clearly don't agree with his conclusions, so now we're... right back where we started?
So your functional way to effectively assess good/bad tax is ... not so functional.
Anyway, you're seeming to misunderstand me when I asked you questions as well, such as why you took Marxist for an insult for example when it accurately describes what I was talking about. I'm not the only one that will answer your questions, seems like there is some sort of sealioning you're doing in this thread.
Do you vote?