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Comment by jrlocke | Hacker News Reader

Pg, in effect: "if there was no economic inequality there would be no startups (and all the good they bring). The real problem is the number of super poor, not the number of super rich".

But this is a straw man: no one is arguing for total economic equality, just a reduction in inequality. Further, pg asserts that startups are wealth creators, and they thus create rich founders without having influence on poverty in this country. This is patently false: the best startups make money eating other people's lunch, and they concentrate this money in the hands of the founders. Jeff bezos holds money that would have found its way to book store owners, Netflix money from video rental services, Uber money from taxis service owners, etc. The startups are often the better solution, you will not see me hailing a yellow cab, but the economic inequalities they are introducing must still be addressed.

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The weirdest thing is he seems to have written this alongside another article which points out that for various reasons post-war America didn't have the same economic incentives for startups, yet Big Industry and seemed to do just fine with innovation and popularisation of relatively novel technology. You didn't get 140 characters, but you did get jet airliners. For all it's inefficiencies according to neoclassical economic theory and lack of startup culture, it's usually classed as a golden age.

Economic analysts obsessing over equality aren't assuming the pie stays the same size; they're asking if that growing inequality might actually be a factor behind the pie growing at a slower rater than used to, despite all the claims that structural and technological progress has made it easier and more financially rewarding to grow the pie than ever before. And whether, if certain measures suggest median incomes aren't growing in real terms, startups (and other, more common routes to large growth in personal incomes) actually are bringing that much good.

That's a complex and difficult claim to assess even when you don't have a deep appreciation of the work ethic and skills and close personal interest in the outcomes of an unrepresentative subset of people who might be playing something closer to a zero-sum game than you realise. Sometimes looking at macro-level data can yield more useful information.

> This is patently false: the best startups make money eating other people's lunch, and they concentrate this money in the hands of the founders.

No, they concentrate the profits in the hands of their founders, but the big winners are the millions of consumers. Yeah, Jeff Bezos is rich, but not as rich as a world with Amazon in it

The point in question is that it is debatable that a startup like Uber, or Airbnb create absolute wealth: that if airbnb is worth 1billion dollars, they created 1 billion in value, because they also damanged other industries.

Facebook can be super successful, but more people use it at work that they used to, is there a negative value effect of its services in society? Are cabbies poorer because of Uber?

A huge part of startup growth is effectively eating other industries, something always ommited in the argument "we create value, we are just making the pie bigger". Business are supposed to devour each other, its just a bad image to give.

I don't feel rich when I live in a town with no bookshop, beyond a certain point the availability of cheap goods is pretty meaningless.

Unfortunately, that's not your decision. It's everyone's. You might personally dislike the choices other people make, but clearly other people do think saving money via buying at Amazon is worth it.

Sadly I think you are right, although the French do have an interesting approach to this.

What is the French approach?

They fined Amazon daily because they were found to be in violation of the law that protects the bookseller's guild against deep discounts.

Last I heard, Amazon responded by paying the fine... And continues to pay the fine, because the value of the French market still exceeds the fine.

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