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Comment by skynet-9000 | Hacker News Reader

> America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. If I take two lines of code and put them together, I've created something of value that I might be able to sell.

Wealth is created all the time out of thin air. It might take the form of an innovative new technology, open source code, or even art. It might be because you bought raw materials and built a house, and the subsequent value of the house is greater than the costs that went into it.

Scale that up, and you can create vast amounts of wealth without ever taking it from anyone else. The local coffee shop didn't steal $5 (well, $10, but who's counting) from my wallet; I pay it willingly.

This very common idea that if one person has wealth then they must have taken it from someone else is simply not true.

There are just as many fair and honorable ways (perhaps more) to make wealth as there are the opposite.

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The issue is the distribution of the wealth. Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much. So then why is a disproportionate amount of wealth given to people who are not the movers and shakers? Society doesn’t cease to be pump blood when leeches are peeled off.

> Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much.

Except that is one of the root causes for wealth/income disparity. A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.

The reason tech companies have such high profits per employee is because they deliver even more value per employee, far more than previous companies have ever delivered on a per employee measure at their scale. That’s the power of the infinitely scalable solutions and near zero marginal costs of software.

> A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.

Your point isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth pointing out how that came to be. Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so. This probably calls for a reframing of how we think about individual economic value, at least in a distributive sense.

> Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so

I’m not really sure how this fits with the discussion. Literally everything builds on something that came before, software isn’t particularly unique that regard. This also doesn’t change the fact that one person can provide far more value than another.

> they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence.

any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society. its just that only some chose to take it early on, and reaped the proportionate reward to having taken it on early (not knowing that it would lead to this end result). Now that it is known that tech is high pay, people now naively claim that it's unfair, and that the tech jobs should "pay" for this inequality of outcome.

>any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society.

What does "everyone" mean?

i meant by "everyone" as in there's no special privileged class of people that were allowed to become techies. Of course, not everyone can afford a college education, but in general, back in 2004, right after the big crash, the openings were available, the opportunities existed then. It just looks risky back then, because tech just crashed. However, if you weren't willing to take on risk, you cannot blame that the outcome for those who take on risk gets more.

Privileged classes can afford to take on risk because if they fail then they still have decent prospects.

>A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.

Imagine what it would have been like if the million+ were uplifted instead by the same amount of developer effort.

Now I expect most tech creatives will never know how much more you can get done when you have an above-average secretary compared to just another average engineer.

Apple and their kind have such high profits per employee because all the outsourced workers don't count as Apple employees.

I half agree with this. It is about scaling, scaling exploitation of workers. You think Bezos actually made his money fairly? Or does it matter to anyone since the winners just pull wool over everyones eyes?

How this privileged viewpoint came to prevail is most likely from decades of brainwash. Wealth has power to keep that message strong and alive.

This keeps coming up in almost every thread because of so many blinded by acquiring capital. The Myth of the Temporarily Embarassed Millionaire. Shine on

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