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Comment by jboog | Hacker News Reader

The low skilled workers are going to get paid very little because we choose to pay them very little.

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.

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Bezos has $100B because Amazon generated $900B of wealth for other people.

“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

> Bezos has $100B because Amazon generated $900B of wealth for other people.

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.

It's a little saddening to see a quote about envy below a post which mentioned the children who don't know when their next meal will be coming.

Why? The wealth was not taken from those children.

There can be more than one truth valid at any given point:

* 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.

It is, however, extracted from their parents. To post a quote about envy when the discussion is not based in envy but in concern for the welfare of the most vulnerable in society is the upsetting part.

extracted? As in not through voluntary agreement?

I think you're talking about taxes, and missing the point entirely.

>extracted? As in not through voluntary agreement?

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.

'Extraction' does not imply lack of voluntary agreement, neither does exploitation, in fact[0].

[0] https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/v_2011_10_27_yoshihara_veneziani...

We don't "choose" to pay them little. They get paid very little because on an individual basis they provide very little value. This is just reality, and it will continue to be true until we have a post-scarcity economy. If we are making any choice at all, it is choosing to pay the lowest-skilled workers in our society more than they are owed by value delivered, because we have empathy and don't want people to starve to death if avoidable. If you set the scales, with one end being the raw value delivered to the rest of society by a warehouse worker at AMZN, and the other side of the scale being the value being delivered to that same worker from society (in the form of food, clothes, cars, entertainment, housing, etc)... well, the scales would not be balanced at all. Some European countries are more egalitarian because they have deliberately chosen to put their hand down more heavily on the scale in favor of the worker, but this does not change the economic realities of the situation. Relative prosperity continues to increase for everyone, all the time. Amenities once considered to be ridiculous extravagances in times past are now considered pedestrian and in some cases, "deserved".

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.

All smokescreen. We choose what to pay executives (egregious amounts) but not the rank-and-file? Nonsense.

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'.

The smokescreen is you focusing purely on "how much wealth (in terms of imaginary currency units) some people have", as if that is somehow indicative of anything meaningful when it comes to the way we live our lives.

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.

Meanwhile his employees don't even have adequate healthcare, and can't send afford to educate their children. Seems like a great system we've got here, but I'm glad you're worried about private jets.

How exactly is that a problem of wealth disparity?

Jeff Bezos has a few billion sitting around in cash, while people that work for him are struggling to get by, and you don't see how that's a problem of wealth disparity?

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?

The answer is that we’re not defending billionaires. We’re defending the idea of ownership. In this case, ownership of a company he founded and nurtured from the ground up into one of the most valuable companies on earth.

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.”

Fixed pie fallacy.

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.

A company's bottom line IS a fixed pie. The executives spend their meetings calculating how to get the largest fraction for themselves, and leave as little as possible on the table for the employees.

Have you actually participated in these meetings or where exactly does this knowledge come from?

Because that does not sound like any C-suite meeting I have ever been party to.

It's not at all. A bottom line is a flexible thing and by increasing costs you can increase profits, eg, opening more stores as part of your chain.

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.

Maybe in the 1950-60's. Now its a shark tank and no room for ideas like that. Not in industry anyway.

And maybe you're mistaking board meetings for the executive suite?

Reducing employee wages doesn't make each employee poorer and Bezos richer? Wow you'll have to show me how you did that math.

Bezos isn’t the worlds wealthiest man because his company is the most profitable. In fact it’s very easy to argue the opposite — AMZN is doing so well because for many years of the company’s existence, Bezos chose not to line anyone’s pockets at all, instead putting everything back in CapEx, I.e. hiring more people.

Nice job stepping around the question there. Do you take tango lessons?

...?

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.

They provide little value yet where deemed essential workers. F off with that bs man.

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

Without them in aggregate, yes.

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.

I think the entire world would be much better off without Bezos, we should pay him 0 and redistribute all of his wealth. By your arithmetic he may be "infinitely valuable," but from my stance he's infinitely worthless.

Yes, and we should probably do the same to you while we're at it, right?

Or is it more of a "rules for thee but not for me" kinda thing?

No, it's more a "when you spew baseless beliefs, I'll show you how ridiculous you're being by doing the same." If you're going to make a moral argument, at least try to back it up with something. It's interesting how you notice this fallacy when people are attacking billionaires, but not defending them. How's the taste of Bezos' dick in the morning?

How is “I believe in private property and ownership, including the ownership of businesses” a baseless belief? It seems pretty clear and internally consistent to me.

He could keep a billion or two.

> The low skilled workers are going to get paid very little because we choose to pay them very little.

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.

Yeah, I don't know where to start with comments like this. There certainly are people that think "stock runners" should make as much as engineers and business people (or close), but this isn't exactly a mainstream belief. The concern is more about making a living wage, healthcare, retirement, and employment rights. Communism isn't necessary to achieve these goals. The outrage has more to do with people hoarding obscene amounts of wealth, without paying their fair share of taxes.

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)

Not so much hoarding, as the rules were changed so they could skim egregiously off of every transaction. When the man-in-the-middle makes more off of a money transaction than either of the parties involved, the systemic result is they end up with all the money. Model the flows, not rocket science.

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.

I don't know how much of it is something "we" decided versus how the ultra-rich have been able to take over our political system. It was happening for decades but after the Citizens United ruling it became fully legal to buy politicians with corporate money (if you think they weren't pocketing a lot of that PAC money you're insane).

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.

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