Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't.

> In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

A lot of people already do.

And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling.

In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

You're wrong.

Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.

A shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment. Please share with me (and others) what's wrong with my thinking. I'm trying to be transparent about my reasoning in child comments, so hopefully, you will have enough to work with.

> a shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment

An excellent critical comment is wasted on a shallow argument… your thinking assumes that reaching beyond the metaphorical ceiling doesn’t require standing atop those still struggling to reach the metaphorical floor… it absolutely and necessarily does. Worse, you seem to think that reaching for means that vastly outstrip your need is somehow noble. It isn’t… it’s pathetic.

If Jimmy turns a piece of wood and some graphite into a pencil, he has created value. That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

What's "pathetic" are the ad hominems and insults the people in this thread have to resort to when they can't argue like adults. You're not right because you're angry, and you weaken your advocacy by trying to use your frustration as leverage over people giving reasoned arguments.

If Jimmy only ever prototyped the pencil by collecting and working the wood and graphite himself then, sure, he didn’t exploit anyone… as soon as he went into business employing others to manufacture those pencils he started to. The moment he concentrated the means of pencil production in his own hands he started to exploit both his raw suppliers — that graphite miner’s health woes are the fruit of Jimmy’s demand — and his employees. In the end it was the people actually turning the raw materials into pencils that made the value; the invention added nothing until someone’s labour was exploited.

Jimmy didn't do any of those things. The claim was that Jimmy can't produce value, but he did.

And even so, the work the people making the pencils for Jimmy would not exist without Jimmy. Jimmy, in yet another way, provides value. Jimmy figured out to put the wood with the graphite, not them. Who actually does it is irrelevant; or are you suggesting that if Jimmy kept his operation entirely mechanical, that'd be better?

You don't need to resort to extremely basic non-real world examples to show how capitalism works out when we live in a world full of capitalism.

Just because something seems like it _should_ be possible, doesn't mean that other worse consequences won't manifest.

This is an exceptionally real example. People invent things all the time and build companies around their ideas.

It's not "should", it's "is". This is happening, all over the place, right now.

I'm afraid I fundamentally disagree with your rose tinted view of capitalism.

You disagree with reality then, because what I'm writing is descriptive and not subject to opinion.

My earlier statement re. whether or not you're delusional stands then.

All the best.

No, but it does show you need to resort to insult in order to argue, which in turn reveals the weakness of your beliefs and hurts your own advocacy by not putting forward the best form of your argument.

It's not an insult. I genuinely believe this.

You can genuinely believe something insulting. And for what it's worth, I don't think you genuinely believe this. It's much more likely you're using a pathos appeal, as your logos argument has failed, which I'm telling you actually weakens your ability to execute your own goals, as it's entirely transparent.

I genuinely believe it, and the fact you seem so triggered makes me feel even more certain I have a point.

> the work the people making the pencils for Jimmy would not exist without Jimmy

Apart from this example being overly reductive and not rooted in reality, the hypothetical Jimmy would eventually be replaced by someone else who would invent this pencil.

There is no truth that needs a single person to be uncovered. There are infinitely many people able to invent the pencil given enough tries and time. This also makes the argument of original thought not being original.

We are made and influenced by our surroundings and thus the ideas we form must necessarily be a product of those surroundings.

So, even if Jimmy had the idea to "invent" the pencil, he will not be the first one who did. He might be the first one with enough capital to execute (as in buy machines and factories, hire workers and exploit them for their labor and scale the business to planet-scale) and this is where it gets ugly.

> the hypothetical Jimmy would eventually be replaced by someone else who would invent this pencil.

As I've seen it historically, here's the crux of your argument. "If not for this employer, some other person would have done what they did, so it's not even really their value."

The problem becomes the devaluation effect this has on ideation, which misaligns incentives away from innovation and progress. Since when do we presume someone would have done something, discounting the person who actually does? This wouldn't apply to the laborer who constructed the pencil, I observe. "Well, anyone could have constructed this pencil, so why value the production?" Nobody makes that argument.

Additionally, this devalues the organizational contribution of coordination between the lumberjack and the miner. Jimmy coordinates their raw materials into an environment where they can be combined in the first place. Even if he doesn't invent the pencil, he still creates value by building the environment for the job to exist. Absent someone in Jimmy's role, none of the pencil-construction jobs would exist.

> That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

This is absolutely not where most of billionaires' wealth comes from. You are being naive if you think this is how they make money.

It's true that Jimmy created value, but so did the people who chopped the trees and mined the graphite (or however you get graphite). But it's unlikely that Jimmy got the wood from the person who chopped the tree - they got it from someone who paid the lumberjack a wage and took the created value for themselves. If Jimmy starts employing people to make these pencils, he is now taking the value of their labour for himself, purely because he had the money to buy these raw materials in the first place.

That's ignoring the environmental impact of getting these raw materials. Value creation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and most people involved in the creation of that value don't get a share in the profits from creating said value.

>The[re] will never be a successful society....

As I do hold degrees in the field studying this very question, may I kindly ask for your sources? Or, not being greedy here, reasons...?

I would bet entire dollars you'll hate this source, but here's one: "The Magnificent Progress Achieved By Capitalism: Is the Evidence Incontrovertible?" [0]

Here's a less insane one: "Comparative Economic Systems: Capitalism and Socialism in the 21st Century" [1]

Another one: "Economic Systems and Economic Growth" [2]

It's not really controversial in your field to claim that rewarding effort is a superior model to spreading out value evenly. The question is more of "to what extent" or even "what is achievement."

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560252

[1] https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2021/08/Comparative-Economic-Sy...

[2] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87244/1/MPRA_paper_87244.pdf

What's un-controversial is claims like "There will never be..." are bullshit.

Quality contribution; thanks for commenting.

Same vibe here.

I'm not really sure that "it's okay if the billionares have space palaces so long as the poor aren't literally dying" is the optimal economic philosophy.

Depends how much the people at the top (money-wise) are playing zero-sum games. If they are, to a large extent, engaging in asset acquisitions and passive growth of eg real estate, or monopolistic protectionism, then there’s plenty of room for others to engage in activities with positive externalities instead.

There’s no question a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue their niche passions and drives, based on a bad birth lottery ticket. There’s a lot of wasted potential in countries that reduce aperture of the early success funnels.

The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

Their wealth actually comes from those people who have so little.

Stop peddling this absolute fabrication that there's unlimited wealth and the super rich should be left get richer still.

You're going to need to do a lot of work to demonstrate that wealth is zero-sum, as it doesn't comport with any well-respected economic model I'm aware of.

But even granting that, a government that creates a "survival floor" would protect against wealth-seeking in a world where it was zero-sum. The floor only needs to be high enough to allow people not to be held to the floor should they desire to participate in the accumulation of wealth and its ensuing benefits.

The whole point is to incentivize value creation.

Edit: You really won't like what this paper [0] has to say:

> Globally, zero-sum thinking is associated with skepticism about the importance of hard work for success, lower income, less educational attainment, less financial security, and lower life satisfaction.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...

I'm sorry. I consider you either very sheltered from poverty, delusional or both.

Why would anyone give heed to such a vague, unsupported claim? Would you care if an Internet stranger simply declared you, "sheltered from poverty or delusional" without offering any explanation at all?

I just gave you a long answer, now you have no excuse to complain, but I agree with lwhi. You can only be either of those, or both.

Both activities happen in the same economy. Zero-sum or negative-sum activities are plenty. Asset speculation is one such area where the first, second and third order effects are all completely useless to society as a whole, and lack meaningful externalities. Yet people invent the most far-fetched fairy tales to explain why golden handcuffing the brightest math and physics phds to work for hedgies/hfts is a critical piece of human progress.

The truth is markets work great for some things and terrible for other things. When you make a means a goal you always end up with absurdity, in any system.

That's not true; speculation is the absorption of risk, an immensely useful financial tool. For example, farmers require speculators to secure guaranteed revenue from crops. Landlords create (yes, they create) housing for people who can't afford to purchase homes by ensuring capital flow into housing construction, among other things.

Investors take on risk in exchange for additional reward. The upside is the people who can't afford the risk have safe ways to protect themselves.

If the people who ran that study were really as smart as they pretend to be, as they are from Harvard, they would understand how even their own thoughts, the language they speak and so on, all happened because they were lucky.

Let me repeat to you, as you seem unable to read and comprehend what I have previously written, it can be reading comprehension issue, so I won't judge you negatively like Harvard, an elitist school would, here it is:

Talent is everywhere. It's abundant. There is an immense amount of hard-working people that even if they don't believe in "zero-sum", get nowhere. They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole and this situation will stay as it is until they perish.

That study was done by one of the most well-known universities, full of privilege in a country that managed to have its reigns on the world for so long, an empire.

Let's think together. It would be strange if either the study or the University would conclude that people work really hard. And are as talented as the people able to attend Harvard, but because they were unlucky and that the world is unfair, they couldn't.

That would be a big counterargument to Harvard's selection process, it wouldn't feel it's a really deserving university, nor that the creator of the study is as good as he believes to be. Why would anybody want to pay for its overpriced curriculum that are literally books you could buy it at Amazon? I'm not saying it is all fake, but you can understand how much reputation is bought, not acquired.

You aren't special, nor the thought of zero-sum thinking is what creates poverty. People are drawn into those ideas, not because of stupidity, but lack of luck.

Stop pretending you have so much control of yourself and your thoughts, read more science and you'll see how all those conclusions you believe to be true are really naive.

I grant you all of this (for argument's sake). However, none of it actually addresses the merits of the "zero-sum" claim about capitalism or the claim that economic disparity will in the future be regarded in the same way as racism.

Also maybe I'm blind, but I don't think we've interacted before.

I'm having a hard time figuring out why you are being downvoted so much when you are following the HN policy that has been around for a very long time now, providing sources, etc. As someone that works with data, I would absolutely love to get my hands on the data associated with the visitors of this site since it first started. It may or may not exist, but referral addresses, location and whatnot. Then run some modeling on it and see what kind of interesting things popped up.

I've been browsing here for a very long time. Anecdotally I've noticed a pickup in the lack of progress, or degradation in threads, especially when it comes to economic systems and the corresponding bias that comes with it. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with you, but you've followed the HN guidelines, being insulted several times along the way.

Old HN there was of course some bias and debate, but it hardly ever resolved to petty insults about reading comprehension.

> They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole

A sad fact about the world is that one can work hard and end up accomplishing very little for their effort. "Working hard" may be a necessary condition for pulling oneself out of poverty (or very near to one, at any rate), but it's not even close to being sufficient.

I would even argue that "working hard" is dying, if not already dead, as a means of escaping poverty in developed nations.

What matters substantially more is working "intelligently," which is even harder for those in poverty, given their lack of education.

> The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

In an ideal world, we could first ban those practices, and only resort to punitive wealth/income taxes [1] if/when those measures fail to resolve the problem. The problem is regulatory/legislative capture by the wealthy. But I have doubts wealth caps would solve that - organizations such as WIPO or the BSA don't need multi-billionaire members to lobby effectively. A wealth cap would just multiply the number of shareholders.

[1] In the sense that they are intended to prevent ultra-richness, instead of merely filling government budget shortfalls from the pockets of those who can most afford it.

> In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling.

It absolutely does, right up until the exact future moment when EVERYONE is pulled up above (well above) the (bottom) floor. In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

> The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

There has never been a successful society that hasn’t.

Again, you rely on the utterly false notion of a "zero-sum" economy, when in fact it may only be possible to pull everyone out of poverty if we allow people to be proportionately rewarded for their contributions.

That _may_ be true (though the fact that we _have long_ allowed them such rewards and they certainly have not pulled everyone out of poverty seems to auger against that hypothesis) until you prove that conclusively, however, we should continue to proportionally tax them on their earnings.

"Prove conclusively" is not how any of this works.

> In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

Can you explain your reasoning?

The reasoning is based on feelings, so changes with the wind and subjective.

The ceiling is there because without it, a minority of people eventually acquire enough wealth and political power than comes from it, that it dominates entire society, to its detriment. Just look at Mexico or Ukraine as examples of what happens when there's no reasonable ceiling.

What ceiling are you talking about? AFAICT there is no earnings or wealth ceiling in the Western world, and there certainly isn't one in the United States.

Yeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com