Wealth shown to a pixel scale (2021)
mkorostoff.github.io
mkorostoff.github.io
Inequality is extreme.
By providing value or services to people which they want to spend money on. It's pretty simple actually. Though not simple in execution.
No one person has ever invented something good enough that they deserve an infinite amount of money. Maybe if somebody cures cancer some day.
I would rather Bezos is allowed to try and invest it in something as impactful as Amazon again. He's certainly fair likelier to do it than, say, the US government, or you yourself.
i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.
US population = 332 million
152 billion / 332 million = $457 per person (I was over estimating!)
US debt = 33.6 trillion https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock#:~:text=The%20%2433....
152 billion / 33.6 trillion = 0.45%
Wow, I underestimated what Bezos' wealth could pay off in our national debt by an order of magnitude! It could only pay 1/10 of what I thought - only 0.45%! Incredible how much debt the US government has.
In terms of your own situation, assuming you are not disabled and are a healthy adult, then you need to start thinking longterm. Not "how can I become wealthier today", but "how can I become wealthier over 30 years?" The choices you make every day compound. You should work on a positive outlook, getting real skills, and trying to improve your situation every day.
The deficit is currently around 2 trillion dollars, so Bezos' wealth is around 7.5% of the deficit (if it were fully liquid, which it's not).
Bezos's parents when he was born were a highschool student and a circus performer. From him to be where he is today, probably indicates there are other differences.
And the fac that his parent had that money to invest in him? Another success of Capitalism.
Then how are you gonna use the money I give you in your business to grow it 10x in an about 5-10 years time frame so I can get my investment back? Put together a plan. Call it a "business plan" and put it in writing.
Jeff Bezos had to answer these kinds of questions (and many, harder ones) before he got his first investment. What seems to you as an obvious, trivial idea today was a novel, risky approach 30 years ago.
He did the work and that is why he's rich. We are here commenting on an investor's forum instead and that is why we are... what we are.
The same is true for other tech billionaires. They mostly have one or a couple of successes that can in any way attributed to them: Gates has Microsoft and his foundation, Musk has Tesla and SpaceX, Twitter is a clusterf*ck, Jobs has Apple, etc. etc.
My impression is that at best, even very giftet people have the opportunity to do a couple of "great things" in their lifetime and most stop after the first. The societal benefit of giving them dominion over unimaginable wealth in the hope that they'll are much more likely to come up with the next game changer is negligible. Historically, the next big innovation has mostly come from someone not yet incredibly rich (but empowered by access to capital, beneficial systems and knowledge, all often provided by the government).
If consumers actively choose to trade an IOU that offers future goods or services (that's what money is) to Bezos for something Bezos is offering now, and not to you for whatever it is you are offering now, I guess he "deserves" it, no? Surely people should have autonomy in who they decide to make trades with?
If that particular platform doesn't interest you, why pay for it? As before, the store down the street probably sells the same thing. There is nothing I know of that Amazon sells that you can't also get somewhere else.
"Selling stuff using the internet" probably makes you feel smart/superior but it infantilizes the company's contributions to the rest of us.
Better yet, pick an "easy" idea from right now and go ahead and execute it. Then come back and report how "easy" it really is.
Unlike luck, hard work has nothing to do with it.
Wait, I take it back. I wouldn't be able to exploit people as much as he did because I have a conscience. But I'd still be wealthy enough to live a comfortable life.
Stop glorifying luck as hard work. He was lucky. Wealthy parents and lived in a time where shopping online was not big yet.
This hard work myth is so annoying.
Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
You can glorify luck as much as you want, but hard work is the best way to maximise your "luck surface area". I've known plenty of people with countless wasted opportunities because they weren't willing to do the (hard) work.
Even inside the US, that's a very small niche that's present mostly in a few places like in SV, Seattle and NY (I'm sure there are a few more, but you get my point).
The startup world is more about connections than hard work or competence. How many ridiculous startups get money because they have connections with VCs? How many very good ideas never get funding because they aren't in that circle? How many startup founders are 2, 3, 4 startups in and keep failing up? And those who can't bring those ideas to life because they work 2 jobs to sustain their families?
There's more than an order of magnitude of hard working people that will never even get a chance of becoming billionaires compared to the lucky few that were in the right place, at the right time, with access to resources and sometimes were even hard workers (this one is not required, despite the myth).
Meanwhile I've met many incompetent people that hardly work and are still successful business owners and millionaires because... they were already rich.
It's how the world works today. Maybe it'll always be like this, but I like to think we can change it.
> Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.
Yes, it is if you're the only shop in town. If you can't leave the poverty treadmill because you can barely afford rent after working these ridiculously low salaries. I could go on.
I find it appalling how so many assume that people working in the Amazon warehouses are full of opportunities everywhere and they choose to work there, so they can't complain. I know we're mostly software engineers that are well paid but we could make an effort and put ourselves in their shoes for a second, couldn't we?
No, it's not black and white like your comment is claiming it is, and it never will be.
There's a big difference between choosing to pay the lowest amount possible without having people literally starve to death and a decent living wage. There's still a ton of exploitation that turns into profit for the few at the top, but they could at the very least treat people like... people.
If Bezos (or any other billionaire) chose to reduce their profits a few percent points, they'd already be able to provide a much better life for all of their employees. In my book, even putting the profit debate aside (exploitation of labor), that's exploitation in the moral sense too.
I live in a small town in Eastern Europe and I get contacted weekly by individual investors, firms and funds. In my turn, I mentor entrepreneurs and invest (angel, seed or later rounds) in ideas that could make a difference locally.
Throw away your scarcity mindset. It's outdated.
> the only shop in town
Feel free to open your own "shop in town" to offer employees another choice. Till then, 1 is much, much better than 0.
Yeah, let's open a small shop in town to go against Amazon. That'll sure work. What a naive take.
Pretending that people would be better with less employers in town and laughing at the suggestion that anybody can come in and steal away employees from Amazon if they are unhappy there - is the naive take.
I can't wait to see what you build.
That's true. You just need to exploit your fellow humans! Make them work for you but never pay them for the full value they bring. Always pay them the least they will still accept. So you get a piece of their pie. Your position of power will allow you to do so, and people will see your position of power as "natural" and will see no problem in the exploitation.
If it improves the allocation of resources (like labor) then it provides value.
The question is: how many other people, with the wealth Jeff Bezos had when he was younger, would be able to create something like Amazon? The reason he did and not someone else, how much of that was a combination of opportunity and luck?
Capitalism is a fine system, but extremes like this are a problem. And the fact that once companies get big enough, they can start to become inefficient and worse (in price + quality), because they get benefits like lobbying and owning the entire production process which potential competitors don’t.
That's the type of Jeff Bezos' wealth, it's mostly "discovered" rather than earned.
Amazon was built on top of layers and layers of public goods that provide surplus value that Bezos and others are able to package into a product: postal services, roads, internet infrastructure, open source software, etc.
Indeed, there should be many people on this forum that understand that providing value is a relatively small part of the problem (see: any of a host of heavily used open source projects), it’s the “spend money on” part of the execution that matters.
The whole question then becomes, who actually created the value that is being paid for in this scenario?
Certainly, Bezos created a company that did many innovative things and made the correct decisions for him to win out over his competition. However, the concept of an online store wasn’t really all that novel. Such a store would have been impossible to create in the 1970s, but suddenly it became so in the 90s and there were plenty of potential competitors popping up at the same time because external conditions made it possible. Additionally, because the entire concept was new, he didn’t have to compete with an existing behemoth like Amazon is today (though of course the incumbent physical retail giants of the time shouldn’t be downplayed, nonetheless, starting an online everything store today is a very different proposition).
The issue isn’t “did Bezos create something novel and valuable”, but rather “how much value did he create, and how much did he just benefit from an existing pool of value waiting to be tapped, that was created by the rest of society”? To that end, it’s not a question of whether Bezos might “deserve” to be wealthy, but rather, how wealthy?
The consistent framing, as illustrated by your comment, is that our capitalist system inherently gives just dues to those that create value, and is often accompanied by the line that taxing the rich is “punishing success”. But the countervailing point is that it is often the case that the very rich receive outsized gains as the benefit from common resources, and they ought to pay back into that public trust in due course as they have benefitted from it the most.
Of course, modern capitalism has devolved into crony capitalism, but that's a different topic altogether.
And yeah, life isn't fair and it should never be totally fair. But at the same time having it rigged against so many people is a big problem. At what point do you say "ok, you have won, good job, it is time to promote the common good now."
Jeff basically built that company from nothing. He deserves any wealth he has.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars from his parents is very far from “nothing”.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-paren...
> today countless investors are ready to give YOU millions if you are willing to do what Bezos did.
Maybe consider not everyone considers it a positive to exploit other human beings for unnecessary amounts of money.
So all those broke founders that went to investors and raised money to fund their startups - did not build them from nothing?! That is news for them, I am sure.
> exploit other human
The absolute best thing you can do for a fellow human being is give them a job. Jobs for free people that can accept or reject them are not exploitation. Somebody who doesn't respect jobs and work has probably never worked an hour in his life.
He earns money by exploiting workers (sometimes literally to death) and destroying competition with unfair practices.
> and something that most people aren't willing to do, especially to the extremes he has
He was able to get started due to hundreds of thousands of dollars from his parents. That’s neither a risk nor something most people can do.
> which is the cornerstone of capitalism
Won’t argue with that. But it’s not a positive.
What do you find surprising about consumers preferring to buy something from Amazon rather than their local mom and pop store?
Hell, that's the entire foundation of the urbanization movement. When the population was rurally isolated, they had little choice buy to buy from the local mom and pop – keeping wealth widely distributed, but we collectively saw value in having one big "mom and pop" enabled by having large populations living in close proximity to each other, so we (the majority of us) made the migration into the city.
If you have ever chosen to live in a city, you must have recognized the value too? Else why would you be there?
The website. It’s been absolute shit for years. It’s full of knockoffs and scams. I can hardly find the things I want, there’s dark patterns, they actively compete with sellers on their platform… I honestly think they get away with it because mom and pop are out of business. I’d go back if I could.
That tells that you believe there is room for mom and pop to return, which questions why you aren't becoming the mom and pop?
So, I guess we're back to questioning why you think people would choose Bezos over you.
I don’t know of any perfect system, the ones I’ve studied historically always have something. Many modern day systems proclaim to be of the people and for the people but you still end up with this an ultra rich senators or Stalin and starvation and plump nomenklatura political class. Over simplification I know but point is there are always abuses. It sounds nice to say “no one needs this much, let’s give it to the poor” but even there is mass corruption. Remember all those life changing billions donated to Haiti with their last big earthquake? Much of it went poof in fees and siphoning and Haiti is unchanged.
I also think it’s easy to emotionally manipulate people into a frenzy “bezos has stolen from us, let’s get our pitchforks and seize his manor” and I feel it too as I scrolled and scrolled.
Mind you, I really don’t like bezos and his phallic space machine or his absurd mega yachts that he frivolously wastes resources to disassemble national monument bridges to get out of the shipping docks in Europe. That said, I also don’t have a right to his money. As it was once said “but the poor you will always have with you.” I focus more on treating them in my here and now than fantasies about pitchforks.
And as a final point, I support the 99% protests but notice how those all got co-oped and now we speak of racial warfare, gender war, library wars, economic wars, actual wars, and the evergreen ALIEN INVASION IMMINENT LITTLE GREEN MEN HELD BY US GOVT. headlines. So I do hope these discussion come back and I will study the developments.
According to a quick Google, Amazon has 310 million customers. Think about that - Bezos built something that a third of a billion of humans find valuable enough to use. Isn't that equally, if not more, impressive than the "60,000" lifetimes measure?
It sounds as absurd to me.
I suspect that both Einstein and Schroedinger went into science because they loved intellectual work, the academic lifestyle, the thrill of discovery, and perhaps the fame and recognition. Because they were successful, they attained that which they wanted (granted, I am guessing at their motivations...)
Bezos set out to build a valuable business and as a result of his success, ended up with... a valuable business.
If you evaluate life meaning purely based on dollars (as you seem to be) then yeah Bezos is ahead. If you evaluate life on more complex criteria as I described above, the scientists got what they set out to get, just as much.
Ruth Georgie Erica is presumably still alive. You could obviously send her payment for whatever value you feel her father brought to your life. Is it absurd that you haven't sent her money or do you only see absurdity in other people's actions and not your own?
Secondly, there are a ton of people who have contributed significantly to things a lot of people use. Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs were instrumental to the development of the iPhone (about 1 Billion users worldwide). The "Tetra Pak" and similar containers are used by hundreds of Millions of people every day. There are ton of other examples. Being loved/used/supported by a large share of the population does not entitle you to essentially infinite money.
Did these people not get paid? Many of them are also millionaires or very least FAANG-level comp, and then for the warehouse/drivers is it not their best opportunity (hence they working there?)
// Steve Jobs were instrumental to the development of the iPhone
Jobs was worth 10B when he died, and that share of Apple would be worth a lot more today. Are you saying that Jobs-level wealth is ok while Bezos level isn't? How do you decide and more importantly WHO gets to decide?
It seems like you want to find some way to prevent individuals from being wildly successful, but I think you are overlooking the fact that his wealth is a fraction of the value what he started has provided to the economy.
You are concerned that Bezos has "accrue[d] that much wealth" but his wealthy is mostly stock which is basically just an indication of how valuable people think Amazon (and his other companies) are to the US (and world) economy. He doesn't have $150 billion in cash in his basement or bank.
If you want to think in terms of "How can we keep a company from providing this much value to the world?" then yes. If we could push everyone back to living in caves, there would be less disparity, but that probably isn't something most people want.
My quality of life is amazing, all of this capitalism’s working out great for me. I’m someone who doesn’t even have a high school diploma but thanks to tech I make a wage that makes my family and react in shock when I’ve revealed it to them. I get to go on vacation twice a year, I live in a great neighborhood, I love my job.
The thing is, Jeff Bezos has done far more to push up my wages indirectly by virtue of Amazon existing and hiring talent, and offering great salaries. I don’t care at all how much money Jeff Bezos makes and it strikes me as mean spirited the complaining surrounding “wealth inequality”. As long as my objective quality of life is unimaginably good compared to any of my ancestors that have ever existed, what am I supposed to be getting riled up about?
When I read a statement like “inequality is “extreme”, I feel it’s strongly implying a call to action to “tip the scales” against it. That it’s an injustice that ought to be remedied. With what, government action? Some new laws?
I feel like any attempt to mess with this good thing we’ve got going on would destroy it, either unintentionally or not.
> The aggregate figures are shocking. Underpinning them is a picture of a Europe that has fallen behind — sector by sector.
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
Because of the magic of compound interest, the EU will continue to fall behind at an increasing pace, as well as their quality of life. EU is already very poor if you travel around outside the tourist cities.
American capitalism is the greatest wealth engine ever created, and I pray it continues to exist. It is currently the only hope the world has for increased standards of living.
Well, you got to understand how the mind of a socialist work. They would rather have everyone equally poor and equally miserable quality of life, than a rich society where there might be huge disparities of wealth, and even the poorest may have a reasonably good quality of life.
It's a purely an envy thing. Nothing else.
I think they might be Nordic or Australian, maybe from the EU ...
It's just terrifying what these monsters get up to.
> They would rather have everyone equally poor and equally miserable quality of life,
What, you "learnt" about socialism, social policy, and socialists from reading Harrison Bergeron and never looked any further?
At least add a /s tag to such obvious claptrap.
None of those caps wealth, plenty of billionaires there, they are capitalist as well.
Sound bite dictionary definitions look like:
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
It's quite alright to laugh at those that take Harrison Bergeron as a socialist text and claim that the goal is to reduce everybody down to some lowest common denominator.
They are, quite literally, just being very very silly and attempting to invoke a bogeyman to scare children.
Assuming we agree with the premise that this amount of inequality is too extreme, what is to be done to reduce it? And in what way do we ensure this does not compromise the basic principles of our capitalist economy, e.g allowing the rewards to be commensurate with the risks, rewarding people who work harder and have more qualifications, and preserving ownership.
People would still be able to amass enough wealth to do whatever they want for themselves and their family and friends, they just wouldn't be able to amass so much money that its gravitational field starts to warp all of society.
Nothing would stop somebody with money under this schema from continuing to invest. The mindset of "i dont want the government is taking my money!" is reactionary bullshit that has resulting in underfunded public serves, from the FDA to the IRS. The idea that no amount of money can be enough for one person is toxic, and antisocial.
Tax on capital gains do not work to tax them either since they don't sell their stocks but take loans against them.
In what way should these systems be changed, or new systems be used, to appropriately tax them without compromising their ownership of the companies they built?
- From the perspective of a communist, it's clear.
- From the perspective of a libertarian, it's clear.
- From the perspective of people who want to stay within the bounds of capitalism but would like to have some way to curtail inequality, a group to which I belong, it's not clear.
If you're of the same beliefs but are unable to present and defend a specific solution to address the problems presented, as I am, you should welcome those questions.
I'm not trying to fight you, I'm unclear on where you're unclear and trying to understand.
I'm not going to be able to comment on that with any confidence.
(And, yes, of course: establish a sensible annual exclusion, so no one accuses me of trying to demolish second mortgages for middle-class families, or whatever.)
What (good-faith) second-order drawbacks might this have? I'm genuinely curious about whether this would be a feasible idea.
Second, loans require repayment. Even if the bank accepts your stock directly as payment, there's a taxable transaction. I don't understand how loans evade taxation.
Third, marginal tax rates used to be MUCH higher than they are today. Example from USA Today: "For married people filing jointly in 1953, for example, any income above $200,000 was taxed at 90%, above $300,000 at 91%, and above $400,000 at 92%."
I don't understand fully how loans evade taxation either. What I've read is that it's a combination of:
- They can be carried forward into other loans.
- They don't repay them, they only pay the interests.
- They aren't close in amount to their actual net-worth.
So most of the money they own is not liquid and not subject to those taxes. Unless we're talking about a wealth tax, which I'd be interested in seeing an argument for as well.
> Some will argue that using this wealth for public benefit is not possible, because it's "tied up" in stocks, and therefore inaccessible. This is just not true.
On the featured site the last sentence links to the author's argument that taxing stocks is possible over a period of years or decades [1].
For context, the author of the site is Matt Korostoff.
[1] https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...
Today, even the least privileged in thedeveloped world carry around computers that bring news, entertainment, weather, etc. The worst cars are faster, safer, and get awesome gas mileage. The cheapest clothing is comfortable and durable. Food is plentiful and cheap.
The life of Jeff Bezos isn't that much greater than 99% of the people living in a developed country. There's never been a better time to be alive.
Using Bezos as an example - an interesting proportion would be something like: how many customers (eg, people who find his work valuable) does Bezos have versus an average American? How many people has Bezos employed and made successful (or at the very least, gave them a better job than they would have otherwise?) vs an average American.
To wit, it doesn't make sense to compare "wealth" without also talking about "impact" in a case like Bezos.
The other ignorant thing is this makes it seem like his wealth is some sort of zero sum game where if he has a dollar that means you don't have it. The reality of his wealth is something like this: he owns a chunk of Amazon, AND Amazon has grown to be valuable and valued. The same guy, had Amazon gone nowhere, would have nothing. The mechanism of him becoming rich is primarily the world collectively deciding that the thing he has built is valuable, rather than him taking dollars out of your pockets.
Why does this bother me? Because I find things that breed resentment in the world to be a detrimental evil.
"How many people has he '''made successful'''" is a fuzzy and already biased metric, how do you decide on that one? Why not "how many people would have had a better job if not for his company" or "how many liters of urine in soda bottles because of his policies?"
Wealth is concrete and measurable. People can differ on what exactly the consequences of wealth inequality are but I think nearly everyone will agree that it measures something worthwhile to know.
You are missing the point. The only way Bezos can take a cent from you is if you willingly give him the money. In contrast, in a socialist system, the government takes money from you regardless of whether you want to give it or not. Spoiler: no one wants to give it. Governments are 91283128391823918293819381x more evil than billionaires.
In my understanding labor is the resource billionaires extract their wealth from, worker exploitation is the mechanism they use to do it. Between the two of us I don't think I'm missing the point here. I've seen your point before but it's a red herring. Allowing power to accrue so dramatically to individuals is the problem, not whose micro-decisions allow them to claim a sliver more of it.
Where do you get your worker exploitation from? That is absolute nonsense.
The policies of wealth and unbridled capitalism in the USA have stifled wage growth, increased homelessness, and driven down life expectancy. You should be mad about this. You gain nothing by trying to hold a moral high ground.
I suspect one's perspective on this depends a lot on one's a-priori sense of victimization and it's just not what I lead with. So yes, I can see that how you feel makes you think what you think, but it's not for me.
That's great for you! But have you considered the radical notion that other people with different circumstances to you exist?
Do you know anyone who works for Amazon? How are they treated? Do you know anyone who works for a company who supplies Amazon? How are they treated? Do you know anyone who purchases products from Amazon? Who delivers those products, and how are they treated?
The Amazon delivery guys I interact with seem pretty happy. I read the same things you read about the horrors of warehouse work but it's pretty hard to know how much of that is spin vs real vs normal. Again, presumably if it was the worst people won't work there.
1) Does he deserve this money based on the things he did?
2) Should any one person, regardless of how much they deserve it, hold this much wealth?
This comments section shows that people disagree strongly about both #1 and #2.
But I think even if you answer YES to #1, you can still build a reasonable case that the answer to #2 should be NO.
And if that's the case, I don't think the resentment comes from the fact that he's got all this money and didn't properly earn it. Instead, it comes from the fact that when you have one person with this nearly unfathomable amount of wealth (and power), there are a lot of second- or third-order consequences that are undesirable.
I am a distributist, of the classical type represented by G.K. Chesterton, and believe that society works best when the ownership of productive property is widely distributed. That doesn't mean I believe in robinhoodism (i.e. forcible redistributions of wealth), but that concentrated ownership is to be avoided, and public policy should reflect this.
I think that's what drives leftists crazy - that no matter how much they hem and haw, they can't force the market to bend to their own version of morality. If you want to dethrone amazon, then create something better that free people choose with their own wallets.
Amazon has the money and the power to bend the market to their own will. That's not a free market. They have the supply, and they'll force your demand to them one way or another.
I don't understand why building a warehouse in a small town, where people voluntarily start to work for them (presumably by offering better pay, working conditions, and opportunity) is a bad thing. You have a zero-sum, incorrect understanding of market forces and how the economy works.
Free market capitalism (specifically Amazon's method) significantly results in market dominance, a macro-economic reliance on that company succeeding, and reduces social mobility among working class Americans.
Market Dominance: Amazon has, in basic terms, brought upon the Walmart Effect throughout the US. And exacerbates the effect within the small towns where they build their warehouses.
Macro-Economic Reliance: As Amazon employs 1.1m Americans, the macro-economics of America have become reliant on Amazon succeeding. Resulting in a fear, or at least a trepidation, in interfering with whatever Amazon wants to do. The threat of mass layoffs due to any state/local/federal regulations would have profound effects of the American economy. Something that, back when free market capitalism was seen as the most equal way to ensure competition, was not possible, and most likely not even conceived as being likely.
Reduction in Social Mobility: Building off of the Market Dominance bit, this reduction in wages and revenue for small businesses/local businesses reduces the ability of everyday American citizens to build a successful business to provide social mobility for them and their children. And for employees, yes, they make great money working at an Amazon factory. But talk to many Amazon employees and they'll tell you it's grueling, backbreaking work. And when they have enough and decide to quit or are fired there are, typically, no jobs in their local area that either pay that well or that they may qualify for.
I'm not saying Amazon is forcing you at gunpoint to buy from them. I'm saying that Amazon, due to our government's failure to intervene earlier on in their growth, has crafted the free market around them, has made it to where it's more difficult/annoying/impossible to not buy from them.
It’s not impossible to not buy from them. It’s quite easy not to. You just choose to do so, because they are the best.
People complain that some people get extremely rich but fail to realize that they do so by increasing the average standard of living for a large number of people. Amazon provides conveniences that did not exist 50 years ago and it does make people's lives easier, provides more free time, provides jobs for a large number of workers, provides companies a way to get their products to customers, etc.
These days, "The Amazon Effect" is probably even more worrisome, because it's much more diffuse.
When companies can rely entirely on economies of scale, rather than innovation, to crush competition, it's possible to have immediate effects (such as lower prices) that are beneficial, but knock-on effects (such as the broader impact on the economy and the quality of jobs available) that are insidious and deleterious.
If you calculate what impact Walmart has had on the average standard of living, would you claim that it has driven it lower? There are obviously going to be some people and segments that aren't able to adapt quickly, but that is the case with anything...and even those individuals are going to benefit from goods being available at lower prices.
* Companies doing what's best for their profits; not what's best for people. * Companies becoming so large that they are literally impossible to compete with. * Customers choosing what's cheapest and/or most convenient for themselves, regardless of human/societal/environmental cost.
Defending this concept of a "free market" is an excuse for saying "making money in a way which doesn't hurt the world is too hard for me so let's not even try".
Blackberry, Kodak, IBM, US Steel, Blockbuster, Direct TV. These companies are far smaller proportionally to what they once were. No one considers them empires, or on the cutting edge.
Hand waving away the free market as corrupt ignores the perfect track record of capitalist societies vs. every other single system ever tried.
I see you're in tech and an author (btw, I've come across your book before, congrats!) and I bet MOST people would also think that you have "too much" because it's more than them, and "what do you really do to earn it? type on a keyboard? That's not real work."
Because I don't want to someone to have the power to say "hey xyzelement, your FAANG salary is unreasonable and we're going to take it away for greater good" (and ditto for my wife's medical salary), I don't feel it's right to do it to anyone else.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
If my sole proprietorship goes from 1k to 1M annual revenue then it's easy to argue that I absolutely earned all that money. If a bunch of people join the company on that journey to 1M then it's a lot less clear how much I did and what work I have a legitimate claim to the fruits thereof. I think we're so used to the current state of employment contracts just being contractors with 401k's that we don't consider that it could work differently.
I must say though that I do worry about people having enough money to bend the "rules" of the market. I.e. paying for lobbying, having an outsized say on regulation, or wielding influence over politicians to give special tax favors, etc.
The direct problem there has to do with laws, not wealth - but it must be said that increasingly massive wealth does unlock corrupting influence that would be otherwise infeasible.
- Invest $8.30 at 10% interest for 250 years and you're richer than Bezos
- Jeff Bezos couldn't afford to buy all the houses in Coronado, California (a small island that's approx. 8 square miles of city)
- If Bezos put tried to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with gold coins (a la Scrooge McDuck) it would be less than 6 inches deep before he ran out of money
But arguments like the one in the link are pointless - Bezos could have 10x the money he does and it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts. The government spends way more, countries spend way more and problems don't get fixed.
I'd like to see that 9 billion for all cancer treatments graphed against the trillions americans spend on healthcare cumalatively. Or if we really wanted to be snide about it, the total americans spent on pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Billionaires shouldn't exist because market forces and taxes should eventually chip away at that wealth. But people make it seem like all the world's problems will be solved if billionaires just suddenly lost their wealth.
I am much more concerned about raising the standard of living for the average person than being worried about trying to prevent someone from being wildly successful. Personally, Amazon has increased my standard of living and the same is true for a large portion of the US...which is why the company is so valuable.
It's hard for me to say what 'dimensionality' accurately portrays magnitude of wealth. Showing us say 2d projections (pictures) of 3D cubes might correlate, but I suspect that it more of a logarithmic than cube root relationship.
There's nothing special about using a line, square, or cube to illustrate amounts. However if I were trying to have people actually get a sense of a large range I would use cubes as that's the highest dimension we can intuitively grasp. e.g. picking up a metal object of visible volume weighs about as much as we expect.
I believe we produce over 100% of the food we need to feed everyone but under 200%, and logistics / food waste is another issue. Among the housing crisis there are a lot of vacant apartments and buildings with extra space, but idk if there are enough to give everyone a furnished apartment with plumbing, electricity, proper heating/cooling, and access to community.
Also debt. Debt isn’t material so it could be paid with the excess wealth (or the government could just say “your debt is gone”). The problem is that now you have to pay the companies who are owed the debt, and what will they spend the money on? If they just save it like Jeff Bezos, good, but if they spend it on more materials we run into the same issue. And you can’t just not pay the debtors or getting a loan becomes much, much harder.
I think inequality is a serious issue, I think it’s very obvious and the website does a great job conveying it. But I also don’t think it’s as simple as “just redistribute the money”. The bigger issue which I think everyone has good reason to want to support is logistics: getting people what they need and want, as efficiently as possible, while reducing waste.
And when everyone supports something, someone can become fabulously wealthy working on this, like shipping magnates, railroad magnates, oil magnates and Jeff.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp
I'd like to see a list of wealthiest individuals based on diversified liquid assets they could reasonably be expected to sell. I always imagine it is some old family that has gold, commodities, treasuries, stocks, real estate, etc. etc.
Elon sold about $23 billion in Tesla stock from April 2022 to December 2022 to buy Twitter and my memory was the stock going from about $400 to $100 that year. Of course there are other factors in the decline but it’s certainly a component of it. Bezos would need to sell almost 10x that much.
However, vertical scroll, please
So, why is the author so mad about it? If I make a company and sell one percent to someone for 1000 USD, my net worth would rise by around 100k (as a bad example), but have pretty much none of that. Right? Thats what this is, isn't it? Im sitting there with 1000 bucks which I spend on the next phone, and im dirt poor with a lot of """wealth""".
I find these comparisons a bit disingenuous
I didn't do the math so I don't really know what could be done with such sums.
We (relatively smart STEM people) must understand that first, there’s ergodicity to inequality and many other more important metrics and issues to address.
And second, that it is poor people who need to be helped, not rich people who need to be robbed.
Inequality per se shows nothing about the quality of the society.
Don’t stand still - educate yourself, educate your friends.
We need to be strong and supress dumb people’s narratives. They lead to nothing but wars and destruction :(
There's no way Bezos consumes (spends) $180B during his life. As long as he's not spending the wealth, wealth inequality is not a huge problem. He said he plans to give most of his wealth to charity but didn't specify any numbers.
Another thought - if he gives all the money to the bottom 60% and they start spending, the net effect would be that economic output would stay roughly constant but consumption would be redirected from the top 40% to the bottom 60%.
A lot of scroll wheels are, if you can believe it, not made for scrolling dozens of pages worth at a time and some even make noise while doing it!
...there is.
If you want to do a lot of scrolling, you click the mouse wheel. Then you just move the cursor down to scroll down or up to scroll up. You don't move the wheel at all.
You can also use the various keyboard navigation options, like pgdn or the space bar.
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22998347
Focus on what you can change in your life to be better than the old you, don't compare yourself to others, it won't go well.
Millennials being locked out of developmental milestones
Covid showing that sometimes governments can be effective
It was fun for a bit but it got old.
He was able to create those monopolies because Republican and Democrat govt's had weakened anti-monopoly laws.
Capitalism thrives on competition.
More commie drivel on the front page of HN. I thought this was an entrepreneurship forum?
These people have no idea what wealth means, it would indeed be a problem if Bezos was consuming all his $100B+ but he isn't. The value he created through Amazon is likely orders of magnitude greater than his net worth.
If you agree that nobody deserves or needs that wealth, then please move to Cuba or North Korea. And enjoy your life, there's no Bezoses there.
You’re crazy dumb idiots for thinking Bezos having money is connected at all to homeless and hungry people existing (in fact, I’d think you’ll find those things are negatively correlated — the USSR and Mao’s China had no billionaires, but boy did people go hungry!)
Hehe, this totally makes the opposite point from what you intended. The government spends that money on more than 330,000,000 people - some more than others. The realization that Bezos, one single person, is holding enough wealth to fund all government activity and absorb all taxes for 13,000,000 average Americans for a year is yet another way to get a sense for what a silly amount of money this is for one person to have.
> You’re crazy dumb idiots for thinking Bezos having money is connected at all to homeless and hungry people existing
Lack of affordable housing is the primary cause of homelessness, and in at least some cities where homelessness is extra bad (like San Francisco) tech companies including Amazon are the primary cause of housing inflation. I don’t see that it’s a stretch nor agree that anyone else coming to this conclusion is a crazy dumb idiot.
> in fact, I’d think you’ll find those things are negatively correlated — the USSR and Mao’s China had no billionaires, but boy did people go hungry!
Using other countries with other economic systems that had unique problems and no longer exist doesn’t have anything to say about why homelessness is increasing in the US today, this is pure straw man.
What a tremendous deal we got: such an amazing value at the tiny price of the part Jeff got to keep. No wonder capitalist societies are leapfrogging societies dabbling in various forms of watered down communism.
In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc.
And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes:
> Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.
> In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.
In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds.
We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)
I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.
Only in socialist societies are people who contribute nothing the richest - e.g. North Korea.
Regarding wealth growth while not working, what are you trying to get at? This is such a simple concept that it barely requires an explanation. Rich people don't earn money per hour worked, by definition. You'll never be rich if your income is proportional to the hours you work. You have to do something that's scalable, and thankfully with Industrialisation a lot of things are.
Whose morals? Who judges the correctness of the manner?
> Piketty writes
Piketty has done nothing for his society. Today's France's top 3 companies are in Fashion. Another country left behind. Its philosophers should shut up and take notes, not dictate how they thing others should run their own country.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
However, were we to discourage his entrepreneurial act 30 years ago (and others entrepreneurs as well) - we’d all lose.
The secret ingredient that separates a fee from tax is the same that separates sex from rape: consent.
Under your model, what happens if I buy property and default on my military/police payment? Presumably I at least lose the rights to access that property, and I likely also lose rights to the property itself (since I'm no longer paying for its defense).
I think it's a common misconception that the rich don't pay taxes. According to a quick Google (but in line with prior research):
In 2020, the bottom half of taxpayers paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of all federal income taxes.
First, that quote you found is cherry picked from 2020 which is not representative of most years. [1] The argument is also sneakily abusing the fact that federal taxes are intentionally applied only to income above the poverty level.
Second, it’s well documented that our billionaires pay around 8% (only on their “reported income”, btw, which is often tiny compared to the wealth they have access to. Google says Bezos pays more like 1% on the money he makes when you account for all of it.) 8% is obviously far far lower than our middle and upper middle classes pay. The millionaires might pay taxes in proportions similar to the middle class, but the super rich do not. The sources on this are plentiful and easy to find.
[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3894233-how-america-actu...
Let's say we distribute Bezos money to everyone. That's 24 Dollars per person. It would change nothing. Nada.
This is a serious economic issue.
The fact that one person can steal so much wages from his employees while simultaneously also getting “paid” through their equity, and that stealing wages and wage growth from his employees is viewed as positive is everything that’s wrong with capitalism.
Is he hoarding Amazon stock? Do you mean there is a finite amount of wealth and he has hoarded it somehow in Amazon !?
He worked to make his company as valuable as possible, which is what his job was.
The relationship between wealth and quality of life isn't linear (beyond a certain point, additional wealth won't meaningfully improve your health, comfort, etc). But that's very much not the case for power. AFAICT, the relationship between wealth and power is linear as far as the eye can see. More wealth == more power.
It seems pretty clear that wealth is not the most sensible way to distribute power. Otherwise, why bother with things like democracy? We could have just stuck with something like feudalism, right?
ie: We all work for Zuckerberg and the gang, giving them free labour/info which they resell.
Interesting take on the subject. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalis...
Old guy me expects a revolution of some kind because the standard of living in N. America is slowly declining for most and they remember when it was better. You can agree or dis-agree but Americans won't let that happen forever...
The same thing happens here, except it isn't a game.
Ah, but that’s not at all true. All of us plebes have to pay taxes that Bezos and other billionaires are managing to escape.