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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

PG's recent articles have changed from what they used to be. Recently (last few years) there is a dramatic change towards defending riches, logical fallacies to explain why being rich is okay, a lot of focus on wealth and how to get it and why it's okay.

A lot less technically interesting than he used to post. I used to send Startup=Growth to everyone I knew. I think people are used to high-quality content from PG and so the upvotes fly - but honestly, recently, the quality isn't there. And often the content of his posts I now find quite offensive and wrong.

Not very interesting any more. Mostly wealth defenses and fallacies.

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The political messaging has also changed from “people in poverty have specific material needs that we need money to fix” (war on poverty) to “actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality).

The war on poverty can be waged with a modest tax on the PGs of the world. The war on inequality is different. Venture capital always seeks to create wealth that will flow to some more than others; a very efficient way to fight inequality is to simply abolish venture capital. Along with anything else that facilitates creation of personal (rather than societal) wealth.

> actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality).

This is a misrepresentation though. There isn't anything inherently wrong with people having or making different amounts of money. The complaint, as I see it usually, is that the degree of inequality is unacceptable. That is, millionares aren't inherently unethical, heck people who make millions annually aren't inherently unethical. But people who make billions a week, might be.

That is, I can comfortably and easily donate enough each year to support a few working families. Bezos could match the Child Poverty Tax Credit to every child in poverty in the US each year and still turn a profit.

(For the math here, its ~$3000 * 11 million children, which comes out to ~35 billion, or half his income this year). And remember: he could do that every year and his wealth would increase.

The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society, so why should society encourage it? That, again, doesn't mean that no one should have any personal wealth, just that the ROI, after a point, should lessen.

How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?

> The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society ... How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?

What do you think the billionaires' billions are doing? Sitting in a bank account? I think the majority of their wealth is invested, i.e. it is funding industry, which is a good thing. If we assume for illustration that billionaires will spend $1B on things like private jets and invest the rest, then if we have $1T divided among 10 billionaires, we'll have $10B spent on jets and $990B invested, while if we have $1T divided among 1000 billionaires, we'll have $1T spent on jets and $0 invested. Given that, at least for the concern of "how it's being spent", it's actually best to have the megawealth concentrated among a relative few.

> What do you think the billionaires' billions are doing? Sitting in a bank account?

Yes. Maybe not their own savings account, but in some organizations' bank accounts.

Money in the hands of the low to middle class is spent far more efficiently. [1]

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2011/12...

So, let's take Jeff Bezos. Googling a bit, an article allegedly updated Mar 13 says he has 55.5M shares, which at AMZN's price of $3379 is $187 billion; I'm sure both multiplicands have changed but that's probably not far off from the truth. What bank accounts is the $187 billion sitting in? If he sold all his stock, where would that money come from? If he then spent it all on a fleet of private jets, how would that impact the economy?

And if we split Jeff Bezos into 1000 individuals, each of which had about $200 million, and each of which spent half of it on mansions and yachts and invested the rest... would that be an improvement?

Those few would, however, have proportionally much more power and are not going to use that power to threaten the structures which made them their money. I don't think it's by any measure a good idea to have a few billionaires set the course of society; deciding what gets invented and produced, what kinds of ventures get supported, what programs enabled. That is just autocracy with extra steps.

"Its invested" can mean a lot of things. And in general (as another user notes) the velocity of "invested" money is lower than the velocity of money spent. In other words, the 1T spent on jets is actually better for the economy.

Invested money is usually in things like the stock market, which doesn't directly support a company (buying a share of AMZN doesn't put money in Amazon's pocket, although it does, amusingly, make Bezos wealthier on paper). Angel investing might actually be better here from a velocity perspective, I don't actually know for sure.

> ~35 billion, or half his income this year

Thanks to $AMZN going up. There's no way he can spend that much per year for prolonged periods of time.

If the utility of money is a suitably concave function, those two become much more similar.

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i... makes a good case that poverty and inequality are quite related historically, too.

PG's articles are like a modern day Siddhartha. He illustrates the glories of growth and change initially, but by the end he illustrates the glories of stability and security.

This isn’t a surprise. The religion that formed here hanging off his every word subscribed to it to get rich, just like he started YC to get rich. Now he’s happily rich, barely even looks in the mirror at these adherents that he left behind, and is writing for his new friends who are also rich. It was always pointless snake oil but the Sand Hill Greed here made everyone overlook that because maybe, just maybe, the key to get into YC and skip the bread line was buried in the ninth paragraph of some polemic from a guy who figured out retail in Lisp and somehow convinced a greed-seeking generation of hackers that he had all the answers.

I’ll take my -4 for hitting close to home. The grayer I get — silencing unpopular ideas by making them grayer was his idea too — the more confident I’m right. We stopped telling you folks you were following someone who only cared about your impact on his RoI because that sort of unwashed heathen isn’t welcome here. Paul Graham, YC, and this creation of his on which we speak now has done more to distort and destroy any foundation of computing remotely paying attention to making the world better than almost anything before it, and while I’m happy to see people finally figuring out that it just might be bullshit, it’s a bit too late.

Maybe one day, you'll even be confident enough to not make a throwaway account to say something like this.

This is kind of like a Clippy suggestion: hi there, it looks like you’re criticizing the forum. Would you like to establish a reputation on the forum?

How does one get to make more than three comments a day? Maybe that's why some people create new accounts, because they've filled their daily quota on the other ones.

Downvoted not because you're right, but because you're mostly wrong.

I mean, you're maybe 10% right. You take that 10% and inflate it to the point that it's almost completely wrong, though.

I appreciate your well-defended and reasoned argument. I learned a lot from your countless examples of what I got wrong and given that I’ve missed the mark on earning your vote, I’ll be sure to factor your feedback into my future comments.

Dang now that you're back in the black I don't know if you're right or not :-/

I'm kind of a contrarian myself, and what you've said resonates with me a lot. Take my upvote!

I don't think it's at all fair to say he started YC to get rich.

His own thoughts about are here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

Whether you believe that or not is up to you, but back then there was no guarantee it would work. To look with hindsight and say it was just greed is easy for you to hurl, but not at all what it looked like at the beginning.

He was rich enough not to need more money before starting YC-the acquisition price for viaweb was $49M, and it roughly ~10x'd between then and the peak in late 1999. (cites: https://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-buys-viaweb-for-49-million/ https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/08/as-other-tech-stocks-rall... ). I don't know how long he spent there or what fraction of the company he still held, but I'd assume that he'd have stayed long enough to get to his personal Fuck You Money.

More generally, I know many many people (maybe literally tons by weight?) who continue to work long after they don't need to, usually because they're just deeply interested in the domain. I've seen this up close with my father, who continues to farm at 70, and with some founders who keep founding despite having more money than they will ever need. So when someone in that situation says they work on a thing because it is interesting to them, I generally believe them.

They come definitely from a privileged niche point of view although they usually have some really interesting insights. For instance this one article about how suburbs are created and that kids in the past were at their parents' workplaces and learned how they work. [1] Or another article about quality of discussion, ranging from collaboration to ad hominem. Still I hesitate to share them outside of the typical startup crowd because parts of them might offend people. [2]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

>"being rich is okay"

Sure being rich is ok. As long as they make mortals better off which is not what is happening now. Rather majority of the people are getting worse for wear in the process.

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