great example of why the pitchforks are overdue. Even the rich who can see the writing on the wall are too greedy to do anything other than virtue signaling.
And wage disparities are only bad where they don't make sense. But at AMZN, they do. AMZN has both some of the least skilled workers in the world, and also some of the most skilled workers in the world, which unsurprisingly demand vastly different rates.
The requirements to be a warehouse worker at AMZN are basically:
1. Know how to read
2. Be physically fit.
...which is a pretty low bar. You don't even need to be clever with your hands or anything, so sweatshops in Bangladesh require more skill. Meanwhile, the people building infra at AMZN are some of the most intelligent, highest skilled people on earth. And I'm sorry, but until we live in a post-scarcity economy, the former group is always going to get paid very little, and the latter group is going to get paid a lot. Nothing else is tenable. You can ignore supply/demand with Communism, but Communism clearly doesn't work in practice as long as there is scarcity.
Personally, I think UBI is a great solution to this problem. But the idea that AMZN is perpetrating an injustice by not paying unskilled, easily replaceable workers at anywhere close to the rate they pay highly-skilled, hard-to-replace workers is just silly.
We as a society have decided that rather than increase the wealth of the very poor at the bottom of society, instead we want to increase the wealth of the ultra wealthy.
Why does a person need tens of billions of dollars? Because they worked very hard or had a great idea? Why isn't $500 million enough instead of $50 billion when we have kids in this country and around the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from?
Much of Western Europe decided on a much different route than the US took and they have much more egalitarian societies.
The problem is that in the US we decided that the ultra wealthy are our betters and deserve as much capital as they can accumulate and the parasites at the bottom are inferior and deserve to toil for Bezos' pocket lint.
The other issue here is that practically nobody actually has tens of billions of dollars, Jeff Bezos included. He is worth $100B+ because he owns AMZN. If Jeff Bezos did not own such a large portion of AMZN, then arguably he would not have worked so hard to run it. If he had not worked so hard to run it (harder than you or I have ever worked, I'd bet, and I worked a 19H day yesterday), then it seems unlikely AMZN would be worth what it is today. And if it wasn't worth what it is today because Bezos hadn't been there, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. There would be no "billions that no one man deserves!"
Europe has plenty of billionaires too. They have fewer because they have produced fewer stratospherically successful companies.
Most of the money in the world is possessed by 100 people. Not a fiction, not sophistry about who has the money. It would be a terrible surprise to them and their bankers if they discovered they didn't actually have the money.
Crediting a manager for running a business, but not the people that did the work (and they work as hard as Mr Bezos you can be sure), is an American fiction.
If not Mr Bezos, then somebody else, or several others (those he put out of business simply by being earlier / bigger). Its very arguable that he has no special merit, other than being in the right place at the right time. Like the railroad magnates of the 1800's, who we now call 'robber barons'.
Bezos has 1,000,000x more wealth than I do, it's true. But his life is not 1,000,000x better than mine. I guarantee he is not 1,000,000x happier than me. The food he eats is not 1,000,000x better. The gym he goes to is not 1,000,000x better (by any metric, even if it's nicer than mine and in the comfort of his own home). His TV is not 1,000,000x better than mine. His car is not 1,000,000x better than mine. etc. etc. Not anywhere close. The numerical value we assign to some (very few) of those things do have large deltas when compared with what I have (e.g. property he owns), but it is still not even gonna approach that 1M multiplier. And even more certainly, the value he personally is deriving from those things is not anywhere close to 1,000,000x, even if what he paid for it is (which again, it's not).
The major difference is many things he has that I do not: for example, a private jet. But not everyone on earth can have a private jet, that is untenable. I am happy for the people with private jets to be the people who, by-and-large, have delivered the most economic prosperity to others.
Prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Yes, total value in currency is a zero-sum game (kinda, if we ignore inflation and such), but luckily this doesn't actually matter. What matters to humans is prosperity, and prosperity is not zero-sum. In fact, Bezos has increased the prosperity of humanity in ways that I very much doubt I ever will, while simultaneously creating a massive "wealth disparity" between himself and myself. Almost like just because a disparity exists doesn't mean the world is worse off. In this case, it actually means the opposite.
Why, oh why, does HN love to defend billionaires like this. I guess it makes sense since it attracts narcissists who love to hoard money. Let me guess, you're one of those temporarily embarrassed millionaires?
Just like you might own a house, he owns a technology company (just like someone might own a restaurant, or a car wash, or a bank, or a toothbrush).
The difference between you and I is that I am not envious of his success, and I don’t think it’s morally justifiable (if you believe in private property) to entirely randomly make up some imaginary line which, if the value of the thing you own crosses it, it’s suddenly wrong for you to own that thing.
Because that is literally what you are saying: “oh, it’s fine for someone to own a website that sells books online, but when that same person grows that business into a company that employs thousands of people and improves the lives of hundreds of millions (and therefore increases in value), it’s no longer ok for him to own it. It’s even worse if the company provides jobs that require no skill at all, because that would be just heinous.”
There is not a finite amount of dollars to be held. Bezos holding more money does not make other people poorer. Economies are engines and Bezos is the one shoveling in coal.
Amazon can almost always find employees and it can do so because it pays a lot more than Macy's or 7-11. Workers choose to work at Amazon because it's better than most other no-skill jobs.
The retail giants went out of business because they were taking advantage of their customers and employees. My local department stores went under because they couldn't hire anyone.
Executive meetings are mostly about forecasting how the business is doing accurately, and then communicating that to shareholders. It's.. not an exciting meeting in any way, shape or form.
And maybe you're mistaking board meetings for the executive suite?
Because that does not sound like any C-suite meeting I have ever been party to.
I didn’t step around the question. Bezos is not making billions of dollars. If he took a salary of $0 he would still be the worlds wealthiest man, and the pay of a warehouse worker would not change appreciably even if 100% of his salary was allocated to increasing warehouse worker wages.
I don’t take tango lessons, no. But I do know basic economics and arithmetic, which you might want to brush up on.
The lowest paid people are the people who deliver the last Mile of service, without Them, McDonald’s doesn’t serve a billion burgers. Amazon doesn’t ship its groceries. Safeway doesn’t have stocked shelves.
Police has existed to destroy unions and the country as a whole Also discourages unionizing. We’ve taken a tool these people had to fight for better wages away.
Edited Autocorrect typos
Unfortunately, at an individual level, this is not true. This is an important point, because we are talking about individual income disparity here. AMZN spends a large bulk of their income on that last mile delivery, they're not really skimping. The issue is that delivery of this portion of the service is provided by lots and lots of unskilled people.
Without one burger flipper, McDs is not going to fall apart. In fact, it's doubtful a single restaurant would be hurt much at all by the loss of a single burger flipper. Without Jeff Bezos, AMZN very well could fall apart (or more accurately, probably wouldn't have made it this far in the first place).
Jeff Bezos is worth way, way, way, way more to AMZN than a single warehouse worker. Is he worth more than every warehouse put together? Maybe not. But you need to remember that AMZN has AWS and various other things which don't require warehouse workers at all, but are all still under Bezos. This makes the arithmetic a bit harder, but Jeff Bezos in many ways is arguably literally irreplaceable to AMZN, making his hypothetical value to the company infinite.
Or is it more of a "rules for thee but not for me" kinda thing?
Very few people are interested in going after the middle class. Now the middle class may or may not be collateral damage of their policies, but that's not the goal. Not too many people are worried about a software engineer making $90k-$200k (probably more in the valley, this is based on areas with modest COL)
Taxes are a patch. A direct fix is to severely limit fees for money handling, and to limit executive compensation. Like we used to do, before de-regulation turned it into a shark-infested bloodbath.
“Of all human emotions, none is trickier or more elusive than envy...as soon as we feel the pangs, we disguise it to ourselves—it is not envy we feel but unfairness of the distribution of goods or attention, resentment at this unfairness, even anger”
The Laws of Human Nature – Robert Greene
I think you're talking about taxes, and missing the point entirely.
This argument is so facile that I can't believe you are arguing in good faith. The power dynamic between an a low-wage employee (any almost any kind of employee) and an employer is incredibly biased in favor of the employer.
[0] https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/v_2011_10_27_yoshihara_veneziani...
* The wealth was not taken from those children. At the limit, those children can just fuck off and die in the street of starvation, it's not like they have too many useful skills to offer to society anyways.
* We have an ingrained tribal expectation that the tribe will take care of all its members to some degree, within the available resources. Driven by the game theoretical proposition that tribes that fail to do so will find their human resources and social cohesion depleted and be easily torn apart by rival tribes. By now integrated in our genetic heritage.
One only need look into the streets [or at Twitter] to see that we are incapable of having any nuanced conversation anymore. It's either 100% A or 100% B. If you dare explore a balance, both sides will rip you apart for lack of ideological purity.
Even if this made sense - and it doesn't, because Jeff Bezos didn't convert dirt and manure into $900B worth of goods, so we don't know what the world's output would have been in his absence - there's no reason his share should be $100B.
As a result, the regular people lost our voice in the political process. Our political system -- yes, both parties -- exists to subjugate us and keep wages low for unskilled labor. The recent protests / riots have been about the police state that has developed in response to this.
I was in the middle of them in my city, and the rioters were primarily poor and white. Their grievances were both pro-Black and economic. They were trashing wealthy areas and stealing from the rich with no reservations. The common sentiment was "I've never lived anywhere nice, why should I care about keeping their [the rich] area nice?" You don't have to be Black to feel that way.
I wish it were that simple. More reasons:
* Low skilled workers are paid very little because there don't have any higher paid options.
* Low skilled workers are paid very little because there are some many other low skilled workers willing to take their place, domestically, internationally, and through immigration.
* If there are 2 business using low skill labor, one paying low wages and another high wages, the latter goes bankrupt.
Cherry on top: the AWS project is to turn SWE cushy jobs into 'low skill' occupations. Bezos understands economics. He's building the ultimately efficient money making machine, which, by necessity, reduces the human expenses to the absolute minimum.
I'm not so sure about UBI, though. You'd lose a lot of the workforce that don't make a lot of money, right off the bat.
Minimum wage is less dangerous, agreed, but it feels like just pulling out the bottom rungs of the ladder, since it limits what contracts can be made, not really raising the people on the bottom up. Sure the overall effect on unemployment won't be much because not a lot of people actually are on the minimum wage, but young people and low skilled workers will have a harder time.