Inequality is extreme.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"Owned or Regulated" as in the people police the commons and those capitalist industries that seek to profit from and supply to the people.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...
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.
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.