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Comment by usaar333 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really view the skill vs luck as a "moral" question. In the end, everything is luck - we're a product of our genes and our environment.

What you do want to ask is what the proper incentives need to be to have a functional society. Fundamentally, we're just trying to define some social utility function and maximizing it.. but even ignoring political problems, it's hard to understand how wealth transfers (or any equity improving policy) alter incentives, potentially leaving society worse off if done wrong.

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I don't like the "skill" argument at all. It's not just skill vs luck, it's also willingness to throw everything else under the bus in favor of income.

Take for example US colleges: I'm pretty sure that tuition inflation doesn't quite lead to a large windfall for the best at teaching and researching, but surely for apex administrators. And considering the serpentine nature of career paths leading to the top of education administrations, low level administrators couldn't ever reach those positions through skill or hard work. The career path is basically feign academic ambition until there's window for defecting to administration. Similar compromise-paved ways to economic success exist in corporate cultures and even an entrepreneur will often be faced with a decision between money and other goals and qualities.

American culture likes to glorify greed as ambition, but there are more ambitions be had than money and power.

The socialist "nanny state" democracies in europe have much lower wealth inequality, and much higher social mobility than the US. To me, it's a clear blueprint to follow.

No. Europe has lower income inequality, and higher wealth inequality.

Good numbers are hard to come by since:

1) Much of the wealth inequality in Europe does a nice job of hiding wealth. Old money doesn't talk about wealth. But there are families in Europe with fortunes dating back a half-millennium. A half-millennium of interest, even at the relatively low rates over most of history, is a lot of money.

2) The figures are biased by people with negative wealth (e.g. debt) in ways which are somewhat different from what one would hope to understand.

A model to follow is based on a modernized version of Islam -- a wealth tax.

The main difference is that the top 10% like software engineers and doctors earn much less and the bottom 50% earn more. So most people posting at HN would be much poorer while the top 0.1% are still very rich in Europe.

> So most people posting at HN would be much poorer

You have it completely backwards. Software Developer salaries would likely be higher, _yes higher_, in the US. The US has had very large GDP growth over the past 45+ years. But that's how much money has gone to capital vs labor since the 70s.

The clearest way to think of software engineer salaries is: median software engineer salary as a multiple of median country salary. US is 1.38, France is 1.21, Germany 1.33. [1] Overall our software salaries are proportionally no more or no less than expected based on median labor rate / salary in major European countries.

However, because all of the gains in wealth have gone to capital, overall salaries are actually suppressed. Salaries across the board in the US would be higher, if gains of the past ~45 years hadn't been siphoned off. Essentially if we had the same income distribution as we exited the 60s with, everyone today with a salary of < 200,000 would be making more money. So that covers the vast majority of software engineers. Even more so if you remove the 20% Cost of Living bump due to being in Bay Area. So even most FANG employees would be making more if the US still had a normal income distribution. [2]

I think that's the largest thing people don't understand. Devaluing labor, devalues labor for everyone. Software engineering salaries are vastly underpaid, vs the revenue they bring in - it's incredibly skewed and goes to ownership / capital. It's half the mantra behind all of push for doing your own startups: working as labor in software you're being vastly undervalued. Might as well do the same thing and have a chance at ownership / capital. It's all the same issue.

1. http://swexperts.com/news/software-engineer-salaries-by-coun...

2. https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/10/a-25-trillion-question-wha...

a lot of work was also outsourced. that led to global upward class mobility. it was win win because young professionals in india and vietnam and eastern europe were able to climb the salary/wealth ladder while american companies also made profits.

millions of jobs were created globally that did indeed have a role in erasing poverty in many countries. the wealth re-distribution was global. at the same time, noone became poorer in the united states and corporates flourished. to me, it is all win-win.

we forget that bay area was responsible for global change. it isnt just about california or america. silicon valley made the whole world a better place on average in the past two recent decades. this cannot be disputed.

>at the same time, noone became poorer in the united states

This is false.

That's just not true https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17627134/income-inequality-cha...

> . In 2016, the top 1 percent in Western Europe had about a 12-percent share of income, compared to 20 percent in the United States

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