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Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

People write these findings as if they're surprising. It's not. Take Google, for instance:

-The founders, early hires, and investors made a lot. This is their top 1% accounting for 35% of the wealth

-The rest of the employees made not as much, but still quite a lot. This is the next 19% holding 50%.

Then there's people who didn't have anything to do with building Google, who own none of Google. That's the other 80% of people, who own 15%.

The people who didn't build Google benefit a heck of a lot from the people who did - they have free to a range of amazing quality free services - search, Gmail, Maps, Earth, Apps, Finance, Analytics, Voice, Android, etc, etc, etc. They don't own Google and they're not millionaires. But they're much better off because the Google guys built that amazing company, which is why they're so wealthy.

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Are you saying it's not surprising, or just not surprising to you?

Evidence shows that most people don't know the actual wealth distribution in this country: http://www.slate.com/id/2268872

Looking at the Real vs. Imagined Welath Distribution, it's easy to see that people underestimate the top 20%, but what is striking to me is the the bottom 40% isn't even visible on the actual distribution because they make up about %0.3. Call me ignorant but that was a big surprise to me.

EDIT: Just wanted to make it clear that the slate link is only about wealth and not income.

The nytimes wrote an interesting article on this a while back titled "How We Value The Super-Rich." It suggests that Americans don't have a general resentment towards the wealthy, but rather a resentment toward rich people who aren't perceived as generated wealth.

A couple of quotes:

"The super-rich of high-tech, on the other hand, create tangible things that make our lives easier, and this we can respect. Steve Jobs gave us the ubiquitous iPod. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the roller-blading Google guys, devised a better way to search the Internet. Jeff Bezos gave people a way to shop in their pajamas. Bill Gates makes the desktop software on the computers most people use every day."

"In contrast, the public seems to resent the big boys of Wall Street because they do not appear to have invented anything -- unless you count ingenious ways to make more money. Option derivatives are as inexplicable to the general public as particle physics. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Alan Schwartz of Bear Stearns and Robert Willumstad of AIG might have tremendous records of innovation. If they do, none of us were told."

I actually think that much of the supposed American resentment toward the "rich" is anger with wall street. I have a feeling that some wall street PR will attempt to use this ambiguity, attempting to equate anger toward bailed out banks with a general hostility toward capitalism, investing, rich people in other sectors of the economy such as high tech, etc....

I also think that it would be foolish for "the left" (am I allowed to say that?) to play right into this by acting too alarmed about wealthy people who clearly have created great wealth.

So sure, give Thomas Jefferson and George Washington a huge percentage of the profit from this country.

A better analogy is that Sergey Brin's kids will never have to lift a finger in his life, and he'll still make more money than all of your grand kids combined, regardless of how smart, good, and ambitious they are.

People write these findings as if they're surprising. It's not.

Before reading this article, did you know that CEO pay has grown twice as fast as the S&P 500, three times as fast as corporate profits, and sixty-nine times as fast as production workers? And that the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has not grown at all and has in fact lost ground?

Yes, it's true that good companies make everyone wealthier in absolute terms, but that's not the whole picture either. Not every company is Google.

Why should you or I care how fast a company is increasing the pay of their CEO? That's an issue for their shareholders. If I'm not a shareholder I don't care, it's not my money.

If I was in the business of selling luxury yachts or real estate in exclusive neighborhoods, I'd definitely prefer a smaller number of wealthier individuals.

Are you seriously maintaining that someone who inherits $10M and lives off the interest is contributing more to America than someone who works for Habitat for Humanity for $35K a year? It's much more logical to suggest that the American system allowed the top 1 % to accumulate much more wealth than they would have amassed by their wits alone, and consequently owe a disproportionate share back to society.

I think nobody blames CEOs to get n-times more than the average worker. But this article blames a malfunction in company-hierachies to be able determine a realistic, 'earned' salary.

And with the malfunction in mind I don't think that these findings are to be applied to the googles, but to those companies with atomized shareholder stakes.

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