Comment by notdonspaulding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notdonspaulding | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

notdonspaulding

I think you find this amazing, in large part, because in 2021 the American culture (and to an extent, the global culture) has equated wealth with corruption. If somebody has wealth, then they must have done something distasteful to get it. The wealthier they are, the more people they must have exploited to gain their wealth. So the logic goes.

This is wrong-headed but pervasive thinking. In reality, rich people are just people. Politicians are just people. Celebrities are just people. All people are corrupt to some degree, and some people are corrupt to a large degree.

It's easy for you to imagine a very wealthy person slipping into amoral hedonism, but I contend that their wealth has little to do with it. I once visited a rural Siberian village where a significant contingent of the older men wandered around town drunk. It was so commonplace that 10-year-olds in the community could tell you which of the men were angry drunks, and which ones could be led by the hand back to their homes. Those men lived on food rations from the government, and the first thing they would do when they got their ration of bread was to take it to the local convenience store and trade the bread for vodka. There are probably lots of reasons why someone would wallow in drunkenness for months at a time, but one reason is that they're just following whatever desires they have at any moment in time. Amoral hedonism isn't strictly a rich man's game.

At the same time, nobody has accumulated a billion dollars in personal wealth with a totally clean conscience. Millionaires, sure, thats an order of magnitude less wealth though. Billionaires are such a distortion of economic allotment that just to be one necessitates having such a profound influence on so much of their economic sphere that to have gotten into that position required someone else being taken advantage of at some point, and in practice its a lot of someones and a lot of harm caused. Its no different than diverting a river into a reservoir - you can make a small lake with minimal ecological damage, but when you divert into a sea or an ocean the entire environment shifts around it for some good and some ill with there always being some consequences for it happening.

For a lot of people (myself included) it is not mainly about the ethics of individual billionaires, its about the ethics of the existence of billionaires to begin with.

The spread of this narrative is fascinating, given how easy it is to find counterexamples. I attribute it to a lack of education around business.

One of my good friends is a highly-paid engineer at a tech company, and he told me, "Businesses want to keep people poor, so they have cheap labor." Which is about as sensible as saying consumers want businesses to be poor, so we get cheaper products. This is actually a pervasive myth believed by many intelligent people.

Of course businesses want to pay as little as they can for labor, the same way literally anyone paying for anything wants to pay as little as possible. But other concerns obviously come into play as well, e.g. the quality of the people you hire, the affluence of the customers you can sell to, your top-level revenue numbers, etc. This should have been obvious to my friend, who works at a tech company that's happy to pay him and others $200k+.

The reality is that businesses actually prefer wealthy societies with wealthy customers who can buy more things. It's a chronic problem that poor communities are under-served by businesses, because poverty makes it harder to profit.

And yet the myth that businesses want people to be poor persists.

As does the myth that you can only make large sums of money through cheating, scamming, lying, stealing, etc.

I'll agree, but I really do think being a successful politician is probably heavily correlated to being prone to corruption/other immoral acts. The type of people who are attracted to and capable of succeeding at political are necessarily immoral. Those with morals generally lose elections and aren't able to raise money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com