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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

Does it strike anyone as strange how much of the economy seems to be built around bizarre, failed, often seemingly blatant scams nowadays? It almost seems as if no matter how transparently irrational and corrupt these schemes are, what’s important is to maintain the semblance of it all, the specific articulation of power. The CEO, the visionary, the “disruption,” have become almost abstract fetishes, removed from any broader function.

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I think this is partially due to the fact that people are looking for the next Amazon; everyone wants to be a billionaire, and if that bald dude can become the richest man in the world by selling books, why can't I do it leasing office space?

That drive causes people to try a lot of ... "plans" might be a more charitable word than "schemes" ... that might otherwise have never seen the light of day.

And the media bears a lot of responsibility for this, too. WeWork is an office space rental company. It should have been trivial to figure out how much money they were taking in, and how profitable they could become - if they could become profitable at all.

Valuing them at thirty bajillion dollars was just stupid, but stupid gets eyeballs, and that's what the media thrives on. "Office space leasing company rents desk space" isn't going to make the front page of Hacker News.

> Does it strike anyone as strange how much of the economy seems to be built around bizarre, failed, often seemingly blatant scams nowadays? It almost seems as if no matter how transparently irrational and corrupt these schemes are, what’s important is to maintain the semblance of it all, the specific articulation of power.

I remember looking at the Russian economy in 2001 and thinking the same thing.

How much of the $20 trillion US economy so you think this is? If WeWork was a $40 billion dollar company it would be .2% of the economy. Apple, Google, and Amazon combined are about 4-5%.

That’s what I wish could be sussed out to a greater degree actually. How much of the US economy is comprised of things like tech scams, MLMs, various cults, etc. and what influence does this have on how businesses function more broadly and what is seen as legitimate. I’ve looked around, but there are only a few books on the history of things like MLMs and this good podcast about them called The Dream:

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream

10% is outright fraud or bait and switch. About 60% is just racketeering (not exactly scams, but products and services they buyer can’t really refuse... Comcast, cigarettes, etc) and 30% is actual services and production.

$20 trillion is the yearly output of the US economy. A fair comparison would therefore be the revenue of WeWork for a year, which was $1.82 billion for 2018.

That makes WeWork about 1/11000th of the economy and so about 0.0091% of the economy.

I was trying to be extremely generous with my numbers. Your comment makes a lot of sense now that I think about.

How much of the economy are companies like WeWork though? I would bet it's less than 1%.

For every WeWork, there's hundreds of companies like Anaplan, Twilio, Zoom, Shopify, Veeva, and Okta. You don't read about these companies as often because they're not circuses, but they just continue to build products people use.

Well you raise the obvious question of "how much is built around this sort of thing?".

My gut reaction is that not all that much of it is, and if it's increasing, it's simply due to global low interest rates.

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