I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.
Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades.
There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome?
If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions?
Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.
All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case."
Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case.
The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.
Either way it got me curious and I started reading your other comments and I realized you're just not a very nice person and highly mistaken about a lot of things. You're not very logical or scientific or academically inclined. So I just wanted to help you out and teach you some stuff that's all.
Just responded to a couple comments you made. Just trying to be informative. :)
But even if it wasn't rude, who cares. It's no longer relevant. We've both moved on.
I hold no grudges but your previous statement is a total lie. Don't pretend it wasn't intentional.