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>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society

I respectfully disagree. Here are a few examples why:

- In my country 1 in 4 people are employed by the government. Their income does not come from 'customers', it comes from tax payers. Many large gov. contracts are won through corruption.

- The weapons industry makes money. It benefits from war.

- Paper/oil/meat/mining industries are huge, they're largely fed by non renewable and increasingly precious resources.

- The food industry is making money while systematically destroying peoples health and negatively shaping societies relationship with food.

- etc etc.

>"You don't get to be a millionaire by making people miserable."

How quickly we forget. The housing market crash was created by a whole swathe of people getting rich while making people miserable. Financiers rarely consider the consequences of their decisions, they think about the bottom line.

I guess it's a difference in perspectives, because in your lists I definitely see things that help society:

- Government provides services. Around here, it's healthcare, schools, universities, infrastructure, defense, a justice system, social services, plain governing, etc.

- The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)

- Paper/oil/meat/mining provides tangible goods that while depleting a finite resource pool still provides value today to scoitey.

- etc etc.

"The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)"

Actually this is another example of a rich person talking about how it's not about the money. You think weapons are intrinsically unethical, go and talk to the hundreds of millions of unarmed "ethnically cleansed" peoples in the 20th century.

Are they dangerous? Sure, no question. Ethically negative? A lot tougher call. All of those beloved government institutions are fundamentally built on there being a strong government, and when it is all boiled down, that fundamentally depends on having a government that can defend you against foreign incursion. If that is easy to forget, it is only because you are abundantly supplied with defense.

> You think weapons are intrinsically unethical, go and talk to the hundreds of millions of unarmed "ethnically cleansed" peoples in the 20th century.

I find it hard to say any object is "intrinsically" ethical or unethical, but the arms industry certainly has a strongly culpable role in the outcome you're talking about. The genocidaires of the 20th century were massively more efficient than those of any previous century because they did killing on an industrial scale, with a lot of R&D behind it. And a lot of industrialists made a lot of money enabling it, sometimes working in close collaboration with the people doing the ethnic cleansing.

Rich is of course relative here, but for your argument I assume you mean a middle class person in a stable, western socitety with a couchy job? :)

Note that I say that they might be an ethical negative, not that they are intrinsically unethical. But I believe for example that when Sweden exports weapons via middle men to Libya or Iran, that's a net negative. Also, boiling down the existence and services of "all of those beloved government institutions" to national defense seems very simplistic. Right now, there are a ton of factors beyond missiles standing between me and foreign incursion.

"Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society."

Gambling does not help society, and it is legal:

Buy a house for x, sell it to a fool that will pay 4x, who will sell it to a bigger fool for 6x. Now houses go back to x. The only problem is that the bigger fool is the normal American or European middle class that in not an expert on economics and it has been fooled will all their savings from experts with their own money(investment banks takes the money from banks because they are the same since it become legal).

You can say: "I can choose not to buy a house". But then bailouts happen and you pay for it.

Invest on a company, lets call it "makebook", x money lended from pension funds, "makebook" gives (1/10000)x profits a year, sell private stocks to bigger fools for 10x("internet""cloud","social" or any other magical word companies, are the future...), and let those sell again to bigger fools for 100x. Now the company make an IPO for $100B is never going to recoup, but middle class get crushed again.

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GRPN

Also money printing makes a lot of money, it is the main way to "make" money in the world.

I mean I agree with you in what it should be, but a big part of the world does not work that way.

well, in the state I live in, gambling losses in the state lottery fund the education system.

what rich irony.

> $7 for a movie? Worth more than $7 in entertainment to the person buying it... or they wouldn't buy it.

What if the movie sucked but the person didn't know it beforehand?

> You don't get to be a millionaire by making people miserable.

Why not? I can think of several ways. You could make them miserable first by advertising, them sell your product as a remedy. Or sell a positional good and let your customers have bidding wars, even though the total sum of misery remains unchanged. Or sell a good with large negative externalities.

I work in Advertising. I make very good money. I am quite sure my work has little benefit to society. Most of what I do is deception.

Can you give some generic example of the deception that you do? Obviously mention no brands and change the products, but I'm curious to know what you consider deception.

>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society.

HFT and Domain squatting are legal.

The people who make money doing this will spend the money on goods and services, which in turn benefits the people involved in providing them.

Actually, the HFT people are more likely to sock their winnings away. Anyway, "I take money from people so that I can increase the national GDP by spending it" is not much of an argument for a socially valuable way of life.

Sock money away where, in their mattress? No, in the bank, money market, investments, etc. thereby increases the available funds for others to start businesses, take out loans, provide liquidity to the market. "Take money from people", you mean engage in a mutually beneficial and agreed upon transaction where you take money and give a product or service... yea not the same as theft.

I don't agree with "mutually beneficial" in either case, and "agreed upon" is murky in the case of HFT and at least somewhat misleading in the case of domain squatting.

And "I take money from people to increase available funds for others' business purposes" is not much of an ethical argument, either.

You're referring to "trickle-down economics" which is largely bunk.

No, that's not. You have no idea what you're talking about. Keynesian economics, for instance, uses a similar example to justify government spending. You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords you really don't understand because you're just corroding the conversation.

>"You have no idea what you're talking about."

>"You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords"

Who's corroding the conversation? Keep it civil buddy.

Hence virtually? It's easy to pick out a few examples of people making money (often lots) that do have a detrimental affect on society, but it really is a very small number of people. Compare how many people you know who are making money through 'bad' jobs such as HFT and domain squatting, and compare it to the number of people you know who aren't.

HFT: provides liquidity and increases market efficiency (suppresses pricing inconsistencies) Domain squatting: allows market to set the value of a domain.

Not sure what's wrong with either of these, or why they are any worse than any other business that seeks to take advantage of market inefficiencies or speculate on asset prices (after all, most businesses are some combination of the two)

> allows market to set the value of a domain

By holding it hostage and waiting for the highest bidder?

Yes. That way the person who would use the domain more efficiently is more likely to get it. Remember that domains are not people, they're property, and it's okay to hold your own property hostage.

This is why I said "Virtually". Seriously, think about what you've just said. Do you realize that you didn't even make a claim, you simply imply that these are somehow not beneficial to society as if it were a fact? Don't you realize that you should have made an argument here, if you're going to make that claim? Making a counter argument is simple: HFT adds liquidity giving better prices to traders, and domain squatting effectively provides a set of links to relevant sites when someone goes to a non-existent site. Shouldn't you have made an argument for your position, if it was worth making a comment?

Are you really trying to derail the discussion into a debate about HFT and domain squatting?

Do we really need to think of all the possible legal ways to make money that don't help society?

How about recognizing that the point of my comment is correct, even if you manage to find some legal way to make money that "doesn't benefit society"?

While it is true that most of this discussion is a false dichotomy much of your claim is based upon the statement "Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society" which is coming from ignorance. I doubt you have a firm grasp of how many jobs there are, what kind of value they produce, or how to quantify that value (I don't think anyone has even a basic grasp of one of these factors let alone all three).

However, one thing I don't understand is why everyone keeps talking about industries that fall largely outside of the scope of Silicon Valley. This post seems to be directed at entrepreneurs (I would guess that most employees of SV tech startups are paid more than the rest of the tech sector anyway) and it seems counterproductive to steer the discussion in the direction of the finance, law, medical, or any other industry which are (I would think) drastically different situations.

Academia, Teaching, Charities & Not for profit organisations all improve society and you wouldn't do any of those if you wanted to be rich.

People have gotten rich doing all of those. For instance, the head of the Red Cross makes a lot of money. So do the leaders at United Way.

Further, many of these organizations arguably don't improve society. For instance, the Red Cross monopoly on blood supply significantly drives up health care costs, primarily to the personal profit of the Red Cross bureaucracy.

But this is all sidestepping my point.

The idea that making money is to the detriment of society is the claim I wish to dispel.

My point is not that you can't help society without getting rich-- its easy to prove you can.

My point is, most ways of getting rich do significantly benefit society.

Coming from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large government research grants. And the people who do this do very well financially.

There are many individual academics for whom it's not about the money, but this institutional culture corrodes altruistic motives, and selects against them.

I do think this is a big problem (bigger than it was a few decades ago), but I think on average it's still not mostly about the money for most scientists. People don't go into physics because they want to get rich, but mainly because they want to research physics. At least, they shouldn't, because if your main goal is making money, the physics-professor route is far from the optimal one.

I agree that incentives are increasingly selecting for empire-builders, though, which is money-related. There are some people who really want to manage a big, important physics lab, and are more ambivalent about the physics itself, and those people are nowadays being selected for.

There's a difference between money for the university and money for yourself. I think the poster was trying to point out that taking an academic job is not the path to riches.

For example, I made more at around five years in to working at Microsoft than I will as a professor unless I manage to make full professor at a top university _and_ run my own lab. Undergraduate starting salaries in this field, from top-tier institutions, are still far above assistant faculty salaries, despite ~8 years less education (a post-doctoral stint is basically mandatory to even get a faculty position interview at this point).

So, even if I made the very top tier of my field and stayed there until senility sets in, it's questionable whether I could ever make up for the lost wages during my re-education. And that's assuming I had never gotten another raise beyond inflation, ever.

At least in CS, you don't go into academia for the money.

I think it's terrific that you're making choices based on what really interests you, rather than optimizing your income. You're obviously the kind of person pclark was talking about, and that's admirable.

I do think, though, that if the institution's executive goals are more along the lines of "make money" while an individual's are more "do cool stuff to change the world," he or she is setting himself up for an enduring conflict which can be hard to negotiate, or even to keep track of at times, because the institution will have so much influence over their life.

There is a lot of money to made in non profit and charitable organizations. At least for those at the top. Go look up how much your higher ups make in groups like United Way and you will begin to wonder how many people could be helped if so many people didn't make near a half million a year at a charity.

Agreed, most of the wealth generated by most businesses is enjoyed by its customers, not its owners. Take Google or Facebook - while they enjoy huge profits now, and will in the future, their profits are dwarfed by the wealth (search and connection) they have created for their users.