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Comment by fairity | Hacker News Reader

You do a great job summarizing the problems that arise from greed, but I wonder if you recognize that there are countervailing benefits.

A lot of progress and innovation has been made by greedy individuals. I think much of this progress would be lost had they adopted more wholesome values, because greed is a superior motivator.

Greed is a superior motivator because it has no bounds. When someone is obsessed with accumulating wealth, it tends to be a never-ending pursuit. No matter how much wealth they accumulate, they're left wanting more. This is in stark contrast to more wholesome values, which tend to be more easily satiated.

I think another way to frame this is: the problem is not greed itself. Rather, the problem is that our current system of harnessing greed fails at controlling negative externalities. Without these negative externalities, greed would be a positive force.

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>Greed is a superior motivator because it has no bounds. When someone is obsessed with accumulating wealth, it tends to be a never-ending pursuit. No matter how much wealth they accumulate, they're left wanting more. This is in stark contrast to more wholesome values, which tend to be more easily satiated.

I'm not sure why you are stating this like it is a universal fact. Plenty of people reach a level of wealth in which their desire for more is satiated and many people have a need to do good that is never fully satisfied. It all depends on the person.

> It all depends on the person.

Agreed. I'm speaking in generalities to make the point that, on average, greed is a superior motivating force. At least from personal experience, I've found far more people foregoing personal health and relationships for the sake of wealth accumulation than societal contribution. Even among those that eventually satiate their desire for wealth, it's mostly because their values have shifted (not because their ultimate value remains wealth accumulation and now they have enough).

You just matched one viewpoint with an opposing one. At least the OP's opinion has some empirical evidence in the form of Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and so on. All greedy robber barons of their time that made profound impacts on industry and society while treating their employees like grist for the mill.

Gates stopped and started spending his money. If the wealthiest person in the world eventually gives up that suggests greed is bound, it’s simply high enough in many people that they never realize that goal.

Further the institution of retirement suggests greed isn’t an unlimited motivator for most people.

Yep, see FIRE and it’s sibling acronyms.

Is Gates actually spending it faster than his equity is rising in value?

I doubt it, considering he's now the largest private farmland owner in the United States. He's got a LOT of capital and it's growing every second. Now he'll be splitting it with his wife though and I expect we'll hear more stories about his philandering. The guy's a demon. He just uses a PR company now to make himself look humanitarian. He even tried to teach Epstein to do the same to rehabilitate his image. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-g... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...

For a decade he did, though not in the past 5 years. However, it’s kind of funny at those levels of wealth if you buy a 30 million dollar painting for example it’s likely worth more in a decade.

It’s not exactly difficult to spend a billion dollars, yet to spend several Billion dollars per year without retaining any value is basically just charity, politics, or bad investments.

Self determination theory is the opposite. And has a lot of empirical evidence.

Also check the overjustification effect to see how extrinsic motivation destroys any motivation.

Imo intrinsic > extrinsic

Any time any day.

Want examples? Look at passionate people. Look at academia. They’re not a handful if people but tons of them that did good work that helped innovation.

As GP said in your quote “When someone is obsessed…”.

Disclaimer: not saying I agree with GP.

> ...our current system of harnessing greed fails at controlling negative externalities. Without these negative externalities, greed would be a positive force.

I believe it isn't a "current system" attribute, but a chronic feature of human power dynamics in scarcity-bound systems. We've always had these negative externalities, but the reach and rapidity available to those at various apexes within our power structures has dramatically expanded in recent generations.

Greed could be perceived a positive force in the past because its negative externalities were limited to relatively local scope and durations, and its essential beneficial features could be extracted and applied in modified forms outside of those scopes. But it still sucked mightily for those within its blast radius.

I really wish there was structured, systematic study of human power structures in relation to the various common personality types engaged at different focal points of those structures I could investigate, as I feel quite naive and ignorant of them.

That's an interesting observation about bounded externalities and wider positive effects.

I hope someone studies the dynamics and effects of power through the lens you described.

It might show up in biological systems as well, as so many of these depend on resource competition and signalling in an ever changing, open evolution environment.

> That's an interesting observation about bounded externalities and wider positive effects.

To a first-order approximation my mental model I'm trying to look for extant literature upon: model the signalling as a message-passing system whose agents exhibit observational reflexivity while they pass the payload. Agents are simultaneously bounded by their individual observational capacity's volume (how much granularity, how fast, how broadly of topics, how far-ranging of inter-relationships they can comprehend).

If the hypothesis withstands systematic back-testing scrutiny against historical data, then the next step is to assess its predictive modeling power. Degrees of validation would help me resolve some confounding observations of my own that different organizing principles of various systems ("capitalism", "socialism", "communism", "anarcho-", "merchantilism", etc.) in different contexts (economic, biologic, social, etc.) appear to repeat certain patterns. As if the levers of control change an interface like a protein surface on a cell/bacterium/virus/DNA-strand/RNA-strand changes, but there is a certain "core API" functionality that is found over and over, like a "portable DSL" that is re-evolved in many contexts due to emergent properties of power structures in resource-constrained settings.

I wish I had Dyson Swarm-scale computronium and stor-tronium to help us process and synthesize all of history's known works to find out who else has gone down this rabbit hole, though. There is hardly any original thought when college-dorm-style chatting ideas like this, mostly new ideas only show up in engineering new capabilities and pursuing scientific discovery of new principles; our ancestors were smart cookies. The Vatican has vast stores of works yet to comprehend, for just one data source out of many (every nation's archives, every private archive, etc.).

Curse our limited lifespans, and simultaneously marvel at our verse's breathtaking beauty, right?

It doesn't make any sense to talk about "losing" progress. Either you're progressing or you're not. What you're potentially losing here is "speed of progress" which may or may not turn out to be beneficial to this planet's inhabitants over the long run.

I think you are hanging to the literal meaning of the expression they used instead of the metaphorical (aka the progress wouldn't have been achieved).

As a side note:

>It doesn't make any sense to talk about "losing" progress.

Haven't you (or someone you know) ever lost progress because of a power failure? ;)

Yes, I will accept your definition of losing progress.

I'm arguing that the progress will get achieved with or without the greedy actors, and possibly even in a "better" way, overall.

For who you may ask? Only to the elite few, the rest are left with scraps.

I think it's questionable whether top-down interventions could ever control the negative externalities associated with greed.

The upside of character is it is a bottom-up limitation on creating negative externalities, placed on those who are best placed and informed to avoid creating them.

Admittedly, this only goes so far. Another issue is that people are so often greedy for status. Being zero-sum, it is inherently a negative externality when one achieves a status increase.

> because greed is a superior motivator.

is it?

and even if it was, is it worth the (personal, familial, societal, environmental) consequences?

There are definitely counter-examples. Linux wasn't started because Torvalds thought it would get him rich quick. Rowling didn't write the first Harry Potter thinking it would eventually earn billions. Plenty of famous artists, inventors, and scientists died poor, only receiving posthumous recognition. Key vaccine researchers were resigned to struggling in less-profitable sectors of biotech until 2020 happened.[0][1]

People in a great many fields put in huge amounts of effort for very little financial reward (and even virtually guaranteed hardship), and sometimes that results in huge benefits for the world.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125003

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-...

Feynman is a fun one. Einstein obviously. I like strogatz and what he did with graph theory.

"When someone is obsessed with accumulating wealth, it tends to be a never-ending pursuit. "

Wealth creation is not value creation.

Just because you put money in your account, does not mean you 'grew the pie' - in fact - you can generate a lot of wealth individually, while shrinking the overall pie.

For example, some kinds of resource extraction do more environmental damage than the profits generated.

'Good Capitalism' creates a ton of value for society, and then captures some of those surpluses.

'Negative Capitalism' just grabs surpluses by whatever means: leverage, legalities, etc..

The problem is we generally don't have a language for distinguishing between the two.

As of today, I believe everything related to blockchain is 'bad capitalism' - in that, the externalities and effort are not worth the benefits (though that could change).

My mother was complaining yesterday about the volume of ads on Facebook - while I think ads are ok, when people are locked in and deluged, its starts to corrode the net value of a situation.

'The Web' and 'Google' probably create a lot of value.

'Facebook' and 'Blockchain' ... more dubious.

Because of the ridiculous amount of money available to be made in net-zero games, even respectable VC's have to pay attention.

It definitely bothers me that there is no language of distinction in the SV.

Finally, yes, greed is a quixotic motivator, and sometimes it actually does help.

> The problem is we generally don't have a language for distinguishing between the two.

There is a language for this sort of stuff, it's part of economics, they just don't teach people much of it by default in our public school system. I think some of the terms you're looking for are productivity, rent-seeking, etc.

More and more I think economics should be a bigger component of K-12 education even if it means pushing out some things to college like chemistry or calculus (or really, even CS). Basically all the wealthy first world countries are social democracies, with a large role for government spending/regulation in addition to the private sector. Getting more people to see the economy through an economic lens (as a complex series of cause-effect relationships and not a more simple story like "who are the bad people", which politics often devolves to) might help us as a country better connect the actions we need to take to the outcomes we desire.

Unfortunately, we don't have a language for this even in the domain of economics.

The difference between zero-sum wealth capture, and 'growing the pie' is a point of discussion, yes, but it's rarely discussed and we don't do any real discrimination on it.

Where is the economists lists of businesses that create the most surplus value?

Imagine if we did valuation by consumer surplus, instead of stock value.

None of that is part of the discussion.

We generally don't even tax differently between those who extract and those who generate surpluses.

Of course, it's a very difficult thing to measure.

I'll try to explain the terms I think apply here - I'm not an economist but I find the subject very interesting and so read about it a fair amount.

I think what you call "value creation" (growing the total size of the pie) is what economists would call "productivity", and it doesn't include zero-sum wealth capture. The idea that productivity is ultimately what makes a country prosperous and not money or gold I believe dates back to Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations".

If you look at the shortest intro to modern macroeconomics that I know of [1], productivity is still basically the first thing mentioned.

The opposite of growing the pie is rent-seeking [2] - trying to get a bigger piece for yourself without growing it. Businesses that face a lot of competition have trouble just unilaterally taking a big piece of the pie, so the focus on this is businesses that are monopoly-like (or at least have a lot of market power). I think some of the courtroom arguments in the ongoing Apple vs Epic trial are essentially about value creation vs rent-seeking.

But these two factors tie in to many aspects of public policy - when making projections about the effect of corporate tax rate changes on growth, economists are probably estimating what percent of profits are due to monopoly rent. The reason for doing infrastructure investment is long-run productivity growth. Some countries have implemented a land-value tax because it falls on rent instead of value-creation.

The more I learn about economics, the more I feel that our (economic) problems don't really stem from a lack of effort on the part of economists to understand things - I think the obvious things have usually been considered already (although many things are hard to measure). More often the problem seems to stem from sound economic advice just getting ignored by our political processes.

[1] https://www.economicprinciples.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

You're close.

Productivity, classically i.e. 'stuff per labour input' - would be a good measure.

But productivity is ultimately measured in profits. If Nike is able to capture massive surpluses by changing their logo and making it more hip, it's deemed more 'productive' effectively, even though it really isn't in the classical sense. I guess you could argue their 'cool logo' does improve people's lives but that's different than the difference between a 'good shoe' and a crap, 1960's one.

And for services, which make up much of the economy? It's hard to measure.

And yes, rent-seeking is the other side, but probably 'the best' companies are 'rent-seekers' in some way, using their value chain power or entrenchment to generate profits. But how much is due to their innovation vs. power is really hard to tell.

Like the AppStore debacle ... what if Apple subsidized the iPhone distribution to recoup profits in their AppStore monopoly? What if if the judge rules they have to open up their AppStore to competition, thereby meaning they have to jack up iPhone prices? Would consumers win in the end? Hard to tell. (Of course, Apple makes a lot of money on iPhones, I'm just stretching reality to provide an example)

One way to do it would be to measure aggregate consumer surplus, but we don't or can't do that.

You're missing that apple isn't a monopoly, there's a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an iphone.

You might find Matt Stoller's blog interesting: https://mattstoller.substack.com/

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