Hacker News Reader

Comment by hans00 | Hacker News Reader

Man, what fantasy world do you live in? Large corporations decrease inequality? [citation needed] Ambitious people started to lose interest? I can't even dignify that with a [citation needed]. Ambitious people have what to do with anything on a national scale? Ambitious people somehow caused, or were party to, the decimation of the middle class, which somehow never once gets mentioned by the actual economists and political theorists who actually know stuff about this stuff?

Oh! Are you "pg" of that ludicrous "hackers and painters" essay, the one that actual painters tore to shreds because it's the same sort of bizarre nonsequitor drivel? I can see you're still at it. Nice "work".

View on HN

I don't buy pg's argument, but I don't find it implausible at all that an economy dominated by a few large employers will tend to have more similar compensations for the same job class than one of many small companies.

If you did a survey of developer compensations in Silicon Valley, do you think (a) developers who work in corporations with over 500 or (b) developers who work in companies with under 50 would have more egalitarian compensations?

My intuition suggests the former, in line with pg. I'd love to see actual evidence of this, though.

My disagreement with PG would come with whether that's the primary driver of inequality. For that, I'd argue it's the increasing power of generic capital over generic labor, instead of competition between specific types or quality of labor.

You don't seem to be serious, but I'm making this reply for other people in HN. I might be wrong, so judge and reply.

Large corporations decrease inequality?

Yes. All (most) software developers in a large corporation are paid the same wage. Well, there are persons that can make millions not working in a company (ie. Indie game developer, iphone app developer...). But when you work for a large corporation, you might take 20% more than the average developer, but not 20X times more.

So large corporations increase equality among developers. Boss get paid 10 times more than a dev. gets? Well, a boss is not a developer, and you are doing the wrong comparison here. Compare the boss in this corporation to another boss in another large corporation. They are getting paid in the same range, no? That's equality.

When you are your own boss, and your friends is his own boss; you can become as unequal as you want. So, small businesses and startups promotes inequalities.

Income equality has a broader meaning than just people doing the same job having similar wages. It most definitely includes the difference between the boss and the workers.

But, if, for each class of worker, there is income equalization, you will find that large companies tend to have an equalizing affect rather than an unequalizing affect. In this example, it's not interesting that bosses get paid more than workers, it is interesting that all bosses tend to get paid the same amount.

Since you're unaware he's also "pg" who created ycombinator.

Edit: I'd like to point out that this wasn't some kind of appeal to authority to support pg's arguments, so kindly explain the down mods.

I wasn't one of the downvoters, but my guess is that the logic is something along the lines of "don't feed the trolls."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com