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Comment by ageek123 | Hacker News Reader

Wide disagreement? Sure, the people who disagreed wrote essays, but people who agree are usually invisible (how do you write an essay about agreeing with some other essay? and why would you bother?). I think the reason some people got so riled up was that there was so much uncomfortable truth in those essays. Just as people usually don't bother to post when they agree with something, they usually don't bother to post when they disagree with something that is obviously nonsense. Graham's essay created the perfect storm by hitting a raw nerve with a vocal community -- but that doesn't mean there was "wide disagreement."

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People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong. And as one of the hyper-rich he has a bully pulpit with which to broadcast his thoughts.

Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.

He doesn't have a "bully pulpit" because he's hyper rich. He's been writing fantastic essays that have been widely shared for much longer than YC has existed (including one responsible for modern spam filters which made email usable again 16 years ago).

Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.

The Bayesian spam thing was already known before the essay.

Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.

This is the basic political argument that defines society.

>"His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped."

Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.

>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."

Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.

>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation

But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?

The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.

One loophole was the use of corporate benefits in lieu of higher pay. So yes, ideally you should organize to capture your value. Either in a startup, or a union, or a country, or a planet. Wealth is not capital. It is human ingenuity.

> Wealth is not capital. It is human ingenuity.

How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.

> But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time?

Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.

Regardless of my personal perspective, this is unfair. He stated a position which is not only widely disputed, but the dispute over which has an entire field of media and academics devoted to it, and which routinely splits the population roughly half and half (look at basically any election result in the western world). And he disagreed with your side. He's in the other 50% of the population from you.

To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)

This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.

Life's too short to argue red vs blue.

This isn't really about red vs. blue -- the "red" side acknowledges massive wealth inequality as a genuinely bad thing as much as the blue does (recall the president most known for trust busting, and recall the 'R' next to his name -- Republicans like markets, not wealth inequality). The two sides just have different explanations for what causes it and what will resolve it. This is about understanding an issue. The essay is indefensible; many, many people have taken the opportunity to eviscerate it because it presents such an easy target. There are plenty of other HN threads for you to peruse if you need specifics.

Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.

I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.

Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.

I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.

You have your history all wrong. If you try to squeeze the Republican party of 1900's economic policy into the current American liberalism vs. conservatism spectrum (I say squeeze because obviously the political positions of that time were different than today's), they would be liberal, and the Democrats of that time would be conservative.

So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.

If you pay any attention to current political discussion, e.g. the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality. They describe it as a problem just as the Democrats do.

And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?

What? The New Deal was socialist, which is liberal on the American political spectrum. Calling it part of American conservatism is clearly untrue.

Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.

I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).

It was sarcasm.

Okay... You should be a lot more obvious about it in the future. Probably didn't help to put true statements on the same line as sarcastic ones.

>>the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?

No. The New Deal is the most liberal policy enacted in American history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.

You missed the sarcasm.

> the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality.

That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.

> [T]he new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?

The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.

Funny story: not being american, my red and blue are the other way around. I'd recommend not interpreting this in terms of US politics. I'd even more strongly recommend not making claims about the beliefs of the side which you don't support.

If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".

Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.

If you aren't interpreting this in terms of US politics you are completely missing the context, so it makes sense how you could have misunderstood the essay/issues. PG lives in the US, works in the US, every word of what he says is in that essay is about US economics/culture. His essay is a response to the US movement to recognize and deal with income inequality, one of the primary issues US politicans are handling in preparation for the US presidential election.

And you used two paragraphs to state a rhetoric 101 textbook's definition of "straw man" -- that's not what I'm doing.

> People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting [sic] our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong.

What did he get wrong, specifically?

The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.

He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.

Really? I don't think that at all. Sikh guy here whos extended family back at home actually have to deal with poverty and could definitely use some just start up generating inequality in the area. There is just inequality.

In general I think you're right regarding uncomfortable truths riling people up, but my response to PG was more out of a desire to correct what I perceived to be incorrect thoughts on PG's part.

I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.

Quite a lot of us who disagree haven't gotten around to write essays about that either.

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