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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%.

Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. Also, employees can capture this divergence by investing wages in index funds like the S&P 500. The divergence, which began in the early 80s, also tracks the start of the huge bull market. Profits that would go to employees are instead reflected in rapidly appreciating share prices and dividends. A lot more people today have IRAs compared to 40 years ago, representing significant wealth .

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> Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees.

I don't see how. Those things aren't new, and aren't better than they used to be. Their impact applies to before "the divergence" at least as much as it applies now.

Technically yes, the working class can become capitalists by just saving their money. Practically, I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a dishonest and rude suggestion, at best. Just because anyone can become a shareholder in a company that squeezes its employees dry for profit doesn’t mean that that company isn’t a weapon in the class war.

From Wikipedia: Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%.

Bezos increased his wealth by $100 billion over the last decade. If all that money was evenly distributed among Amazon's 1,500,000 employees instead, they would get like $6k more every year. That might be a nice bonus to the average Amazon employee making $30,000 a year, but it would hardly be revolutionary.

I don't think 1% of people holding 32% of the wealth is that surprising or exceptional. A lot of people are in the bottom 50% because they don't save any money at all. I think these stats give people the idea that if you were to somehow take all the wealth from the top 1% and give it to the bottom 50% that this would vastly improve their situation, when in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference and would fuck up economic incentive structures.

Fixed pie fallacy of wealth strikes again. Amazing how common this view of x% people holding 'the wealth' is. Nothing similar existed before Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the 2 Steves built their offerings; they got massively rich thanks to people worldwide choosing to pay them for their products & services (or voluntarily shunning the open internet with multiple anonymous fora like this one for Facebook's walled privacy screwing garden).

Bob creating wealth does not imply he took from someone else. Capitalism works by creating wealth, not by redistributing it to themselves.

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