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> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right?

Seems you're focusing on the Floor whereas pg refers to a Ceilings?

It's normal that enterprise sales lovers ends up as taller poppies than pottery lovers. You could take it a step further and say: it's normal than Tom Brady and Ronaldo ends up rich but mediocre football players make $0 from football, even though both have interest in football.

That's the typical Ikigai diagram stuff: if someone's "what you love" naturally aligns with "what you can be paid for", pg point is that this person will be richer. (On top of this, if someone's "what you're good at" also aligns naturally with "what you can be paid for", they'll also be richer).

But you're approaching a different question: do pottery lovers have a good enough quality of life? Do they deserve one if nobody needs any of their pottery stuff?

Does everyone's deserve a good quality of life regardless of what their passion is? What about people with antisocial passions (crime, exploiting others etc)?

I think you make a really good point at the end, that those with antisocial and pathological passions shouldn't be encouraged for the sake of societal health. They can really make a huge profit if done in a certain way, right? Exploiting others like using dark patterns or scams definitely can reap huge rewards.

As a layman, I'm curious to know what you and others think about what standards should be held to meet the floor, what standards should be held to reach the ceiling.

You're right in thinking the passage is weird.

Of course a potter will make less money than a software engineer. Nothing surprising or necessarily bad here. The problem however is the system under which having less money has stark negative impacts on your quality of life. For example a for profit healthcare system may result in the potter being utterly unable to receive necessary dental care.

A fair system would ensure that no one suffers just because they don't make a lot of money.

This is not the case even in many rich countries, where persons without a lot of money are forced to skip on health care and live in sub standard housing that doesn't suit even the most basic of needs.

It's good to know people crawling themselves out of poverty just lack the right hobbies

Hobbies is probably not the right word, rather it's what they're good at. It just so happens that building a hobby makes you good at something.

And this isn't necessarily in your control either. If you grow up on a farm you'll probably be very good at farming. If you grow up rich, you'll probably be great at networking and maybe sales.

Some topics, domains, whatever make a lot of money and then a lot don't. If you're good at physical stuff then you're kind of fucked from a societal perspective. You chose wrong, or more likely got dealt a bad hand.

If you're good at writing computer programs you got incredibly lucky. That's one of those topics that makes a lot of money.

Some of this you can build and some you can't. My sister would never be a programmer because she hates it. But she loves kids, and she's a fantastic teacher. Unfortunately, teaching is a topic that doesn't lend itself to high pay. So that kind of sucks.

I know you're being sarcastic, but there is truth to that. Without judgement, it is well-documented that those in poverty will spend, as a proportion of their income, 20 or 30 times as much on lottery tickets as someone who is rich. Now they have their reasons, I think a lottery ticket lets one dream what life could be like, at least until the draw happens, but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.

> but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.

Is this the new "Millennials would be able to buy a house if they would stop buying a $3.50 coffee"?

No, of course not. Obviously if a poor person spends up to 5% [0] of their income on lottery tickets that will have no impact on their financial situation at all. There's no way that changing that behavior could improve their life; 5% is just too small to matter.

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...

From my experience*, the lottery tickets they buy most are scratch-off. And every once in awhile they spend $2 and win $15-$20 (or $13-$18) then use that to buy "luxury" items; cigarettes, beer, candy for the kids or tacos from a taqueria or were able to make an extra lay-away payment. They still (I assume) end up losing more in the long run, but instead of saving that $2 a few times week to be able to have the $20 at the end of the month, they get a little bit of enjoyment from a crap situation. It's more rewarding to be able to get the items they were not planning to have and a little treat, as opposed to the sheer depression of thinking, if they saved that $2-8 a week, then in a month they can buy treats for their kids...

*Part of my childhood was living "on the other side of the tracks", my family wasn't rich, but we had more than many I went to school with. A much richer school district lines split the neighborhood - I wasn't on that side. Many kids at my school probably were in the poorest zipcodes. Most of them were on food-stamps and free-lunch, working parents (or parent); they didn't spend frivolously, goodwill, swap meets and garage sales is where their clothes came from. My direct experience was w/ couple families I spent time with and saw the result of winning scratch offs. That was when they would splurge on "luxuries". It was not about striking it rich and fantastical dreams of yachts; It was probably that experience which taught me the most about being practical and how to stretch a dollar.

You know it sounds silly, but it is broadly correct.

The coffees are inconsequential, but the mindset change is not. I have seen it in my own family. People given the same opportunities, same life, same family background, and yet outcomes are different based on what you value. Those who are often called 'cheapskates' end up much better off than those who spend more wantonly. Everyone made a choice. It's not the lottery tickets alone, it's the net result of having a small inclination to pay for things that you could have forgone. Over time, it does result in a net difference.

It's like how your 401k will end up substantially differently if you invest in a fund with 0.01% management costs v 1%. Yes it's 'only' a hundred or so a year, but it adds up.

I hear a lot of focus on money and not just quality of life. One issue with quality of life is that as you improve it for the bottom, the expecations of what a minimal quality should be tend to go up. So you may never really "solve" it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continually trying to improve.

There's really not much to understand. He's pointing out an inherent flaw in capitalistic structure (that the market disproportionately awards some labor over others, leading to gross imbalances and to runaway problems like climate change) and trying to convert what would be a legitimate critique of such a system (i.e. it seems bad that this economic system is structured in such a way that the social values we have are secondary to individual economics) into a character judgement "well, it's not my fault you happen to have the poor people hobbies lol!"

It's the sort of dodge that's extremely typical of people who have gotten extremely lucky and benefited heavily from this economic system. If pg wound up taking up painting more heavily instead of programming as his primary means of subsistence, I damn well guarantee he wouldn't be reducing economic imbalance to a "natural consequence" of mere "difference of hobbies"

I don't think it's really a flaw of capitalism itself, but a flaw of capitalism on a mass scale and without additional safeguards. Smaller-scale, local capitalism in small populations but with some social safeguards would not have nearly as much problems, even if unusually talented people were rewarded a bit more.

Every game has rules to keep the game approximately fair. Football has rules, chess has rules, Survivor has rules. Capitalism has child-labor laws and OSHA (and others) but needs more rules to prevent people from gaming the situation.

Also I bet there is extreme income inequality among studio potters. Could even be more unequal than the overall population.

Art tends to be the most unequal of professions, while the 'capitalist' work like finance and all are actually more equal in pay. This is simply due to the fact that finance bros get paid a salary whereas art is almost a winner takes all industry

i think it's pretty clear what pg means. more useful products = more money = better outcomes in life. no one wants more pins and posters of some artist's OCs, they want software that helps the world and actually changes lives for the better. studio pottery won't do that.

I've written software that has had a big impact, on a lot of lives. I'm still doing it.

I haven't been paid a dime for it, and I'm quite happy with that.

I don't think PG, or any VCs would be at all interested in my work. They might like the work, itself, but it's not gonna make anyone rich.

Can you please share some more about what you’ve done.

Not in the public forum. The very last thing our service needs, is thousands of curious geeks, signing up throwaways.

If you really want, you can figure it out, from my GH page, or send me a message.

To be clear, I like the idea of making something really useful and being rewarded from bettering other people's lives. I don't doubt that if you make something really useful for the world, you can gain a lot from it.

But when people talk about fairness, (I assume) they're usually thinking about the successful scammers, predatory practices, people not contributing to the world yet profiting a lot from it. They may also think about "essential workers" who, in contrast, may live paycheck to paycheck.

It becomes blurrier to me when I think about who "deserves" what.

>and that some interests yield far more money than others

Okay. Why?

This is presented as an axiom, but it isn't.

Do you mean to suggest that this isn't true or that we should question the reasons that it happens to be true, and possibly change them?

Well, as the interests that yield any given amount of money vary with time, location, and even the identity, personality, or abilities of the person with a given interest, the implied conclusion that one should simply choose a "higher-yielding" interest, and that failure to do so is a personal matter that absolves any interest/pay relationship of unfairness, seems... incorrect.

Maybe axiom was the wrong word. The intent was to convey that the original quote meant to present "and that some interests yield far more money than others" as an "obvious", self-evident notion immune to decomposition or factoring. And it isn't.

> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?

Then why is it that the same people who go on about inequality continue to go on about inequality when countries raise the entire standard of living but have more inequality as a result.

For example, by and large, the modern day economic system (let's just call it capitalism) has caused the greatest increase in standard of living for the average world resident. We live at a time of unheard of prosperity and abundance for the vast majority of people. They are way better off today under this economic system.

Yet the constant criticism of this system is that there are really rich people. Why is that a criticism when the data are pretty unequivocal that the system also makes things better for everyone else?

Directly analogous to the fact that drugs have side effects. Massive inequality and other attendant ills are undesirable side effect of a net beneficial system.

Alright sure, but like if you are on metformin for diabetes and you complain about the side effects, that's one thing, and we can try lessening them (and should). But inequality is used as an argument against capitalism. That's like using the side effects of metformin as 'evidence' that it's not effective at increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering blood sugar. The data are quite unequivocal... it is.

The "these examples" in the footnote refers to the preceding content in the main part: the example of Bill Gates, and:

> There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.

He's just saying that people who are especially interested in making money are likely to make more money (just as say, people interested in listening to music are likely to listen to more music).

(No comment on whether this is a good point or a satisfactory explanation of economic inequality or whatever, just explaining the point of the footnote, as that's what you asked.)

> In a world where some people like to write enterprise software

Come on now...

I’m no socialist, but yeah, “natural” doesn’t mean fair, right or desirable.

Of course PG didn’t say “it’s fair that I have billions and others can’t afford basic necessities.”

With robust supply of necessary goods, and a political system that limited the ability of wealth to influence policy, then I do think inequality would be less of a concern. But that isn’t the world we live in.