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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

I’ve wondered about this too. I’m guessing a lot of the effort going into society is from other countries. People picking fruits and growing food is hard working going in. But it probably becomes a problem of definition. Is a tech CEO / Wall Street banker giving or taking value if they enable millions of people to do work but consume a great deal themselves. Everything’s all too muddled up

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I think dicounting for corruption, the material/monetary amount is a very good proxy for value. So I would say the average ceo yes, but companies relying on government spending (Palantir I’m looking at you) maybe not

I think the value needs to be traced to an essential need, only those functions resulting in food, water, shelter count as intrinsic value - by this definition tech CEO's contribute less than an average farmer

You say only farmers and home builders create value.

But the farmers and home builders who work at scale require tools and resources created by industry, which in turn require raw materials, an ability to process these materials, and an ability to transport them.

So are people working in those industries any less important than the farmers and home builders themselves?

Further, those industries are capitally intensive and require a financial network to raise and allocate the capital required so these industries can function.

In a nutshell - everything is connected. How do you simply decide where to draw the line of who is contributing an essential service and who isn’t?

I said value needs to be traced to an essential need, this covers most industries pretty well - but there seems to be a lot of tech that is more than 5 times removed from an essential

I would posit tech exists almost entirely to distribute wealth without requiring any measurable value to society. It's our answer to what is from a certain point of view a post-scarcity economy where everyone feels that without work there should be no food.

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