Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

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Yes - perhaps PG should have added qualifiers along the lines of "YC originated billionaires" versus attempting to cover all billionaires that have ever existed. It seems somewhat naive to say that every person with a billion in their bank account has built something and always is the best allocator of capital.

Oil and Gas billionaires leverage the fact that society hasn't figured out how to factor in negative environmental externalities. Consumer Staples billionaires leverage their supply chain monopolies and labor monopolies.

The original tech billionaires leveraged their early knowledge of computers/internet. Web 2.0/3.0 billionaires leverage the fact that society hasn't figured out how to appropriately regulate stuff that's similar but slightly different from their old school regulated counterparts (i.e. Uber, Airbnb).

In general, leveraging technology capabilities seems less exploitive than leveraging human/environmental resources/lack of regulation.

As a follow-up thought - perhaps when Forbes makes its Billionaires List, instead of a basic sort ranked by on net worth, Forbes should incorporate Environmental, Social and Governance (a.k.a. Triple Bottom Line accounting) like factors similar to those starting to be used for Equity investing [1] and do a final ranking based on ESG x net worth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line

And may be with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29

> In general, leveraging technology capabilities seems less exploitive than leveraging human/environmental resources.

I see what you're getting at here, but I don't know that I completely buy it. Case in point: privacy. I guess it depends on how one defines exploitive.

That's a good point - it should probably include exploiting "lack of regulation" which digital privacy could fall under broadly. I was generally thinking of "tech" in the semiconductor, computing aspect which while perhaps has some negative environmental impact and can develop monopolies; generally doesn't exploit other humans, etc..

Absolutely any action could be framed as exploiting the lack of regulation against it, from getting milk at the grocery store to shipping electronic waste to third world countries for sketchy disposal. So that's not such an effective philosophical razor.

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