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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

>> One example is Endless, a computer company founded by a young Californian named Matt Dalio. I know his father, Ray Dalio, a successful businessman who became very interested in my ideas and my work

This is the real root problem - People are helping their already rich friends too much. Companies shouldn't be about the CEO and their friends, it should be about the product and the customers. Promoting the children of your rich friends in your news articles doesn't help balance out wealth equality.

There are thousands of other (poorer, more determined) entrepreneurs like 'Matt Dalio' who probably deserve the attention even more.

>> Dalio did not give up.

Yeah that totally deserves its own paragraph; not giving up is a huge achievement when daddy is a billionaire. It's almost like the author's subconscious is trying to tell us something.

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Rich people can take risks. Poor people can't.

> Rich people may take risks. Poor people must.

This seems more accurate and realistic about the source of the discrepancy:

Rich people have the luxury to choose which risks they take and make calculated endeavors, but are never forced to take a risk and have great ability to manage their total exposure to risk.

Poor people are inundated with being forced to take bad risks and manage the danger between them constantly, such that they can't properly gather resources to take on additional voluntary risks (even when they have an expected reward) because it poses too much systemic danger with the additional risk.

That said, once you count in drug sales, the poorest 10% of people I know have a higher per capita entrepreneurship rate than the richest 10%. So in practice, poor people are actually taking on business risk at a higher rate as well, though it's again motivated by necessity.

The biggest discrepancy is, of course, access to capital and explain the vast majority of the discrepancy in outcome.

Anecdotally, I knew drug dealers in high school. It was not out of necessity, but greed. I'm sure some are out of necessity, but not all.

I think you have the implication reversed:

I'm not saying drug dealer -> poverty.

I'm saying poverty -> necessity to try something to escape a slow death.

(And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to poverty is usually the motivating factor.)

This means that you end up with a lot of people having some kind of hustle, which the statistics also reflect once you remember that drug dealers (and other criminals) are a form of business. So you find an unusual amount of businesses per capita, again remembering to include drug operations and similar activities.

> (And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to poverty is usually the motivating factor.)

Totally agree. Also depends where you go to school, though. There are drug dealers who are poor and do it because it's one of the more attractive (if risky) job options, and there are well-off student drug dealers who know that they can get away with being caught because of their socioeconomic status.

In either case, it's not a totally unreasonable risk-reward evaluation, especially (as with everything) if the dealer knows how to execute (i.e. be careful). I knew several people in the latter camp, and I wouldn't necessarily call them "greedy". Though I suppose I generally dislike the term "greedy" because it's usually pejorative without giving any definition of what greed is or why it is bad.

In this vein I think Basic Income should be rebranded as Basic Capital. It's clear to me now that policy where people get paid "wages" for not doing anything will fail, but if it's positioned as a way to allow all people to participate in capital investment (or risky labor choices) it might be viable.

I find this project by Endless/Matt Dalio to be a real life manifestation of this video:

What do the Rich really Want? Imagine if oddly, wealthy capitalists didn't primarily want money; but something odder and more hopeful: respect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcUkgR4Op00

Would love to get people's opinion on this video.

Here's a set of videos of the Endless founder. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUrqcWVF3uekfwjPrNpoq...

If you think of how he could have instead utilized his wealth (investing in non-renewable energy projects, high ROI defense/gun stocks) this definitely seems like a less bad alternative.

Also its way better in my opinion than the alternative of using public tax payer money being used for this effort. It needs to be designed to be self sustainable. OLPC seems to have diverted money away from other developing world causes.

Endless did an AMA on reddit [1] a few days ago where Matt gave some insights in the business model behind it.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/75pu2j/we_are_endless...

Devil's advocate regarding cronyism is that they "just need someone good enough" for the job, and on average wealthy people tend to be far better qualified (or have the free time to learn) than trying to filter through the GP for people similarly qualified who don't already have ties to existing businesses (and would thus need higher financial motivation to be pulled away to work on your thing).

These days, it's so hard to find a decent job, that it's no surprise many turn to illegal activities, such as hacking and fraud, especially in poorer countries. From a capitalistic standpoint there's nothing wrong with it because the only thing that matters is money.

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