Hacker News Reader

Comment by moregrist | Hacker News Reader

Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries.

A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding.

For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it.

Everything that’s kind of in an employee’s favor is not socialism. You don’t have to like the idea of “work hard, help the company do well, get rewarded,” but that isn’t socialism. It’s just a thing you don’t like.

View on HN

There has never been an understanding that rising profits = no layoffs. Zero idea where that came from. Companies will reduce workforce when they dont think those workers are providing value, that has always been the case.

This was not the case for much of the 20th century, where layoffs were seen as an embarrassment.

For decades, engineers at IBM, HP, Xerox, etc assumed that they had a job for life; because they did.

The management culture you describe may predate Jack Welch, but certainly came into vogue with him. It has all the well-known downsides: management often lays off critical staff because they can’t really measure productivity, it destroys morale, many of the remaining high-performers leave, and is often followed by hiring replacements in the next year or two because the people cut were actually necessary.

So it is odd to see it happen for highly profitable companies.

It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them.

The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...

Inequality going up means the situation is changing and that is what people are complaining about. There definitely has been a culture shift as MBAs took over executive leadership and their compensation packages skyrocketed. Companies were always for the share holders but there used to be more consideration of the longer-term value for the company that amounted to appreciation of and fairer treatment for both employees and customers.

I also think though that individual experiences of this kind are more about specific companies maturing than a widespread culture shift. A lot of people on these forums worked in tech companies that are relatively young and have changed a lot over the past two decades.

"Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should."

The second part of your sentence is not necessarily true. It might be true in some or even many cases, but it's certainly not something you can just assert & move on, as if it's a physical law.

I'm just tired of re-litigating this issue. Discuss with your favorite frontier model. Roughly, productivity has been outpacing pay since the mid 1970s, and I wrote about this in another comment here.

There's just so much confusion here. Some people like you don't get why a world where a handful of billionaires own everything is a bad idea. Madness. I think nothing less than another depression will get through to most.

Increased capital investment (e.g. software) could explain productivity not attributable to the employee.

On its face, productivity vs pay isn't a faor metric. I agree that problem exists, but we shouldn't use it to benchmark

> I own your tools therefore I own everything you do with them

Like I said, madness.

It's like slavery was technically outlawed but a lot of America strongly disagreed. And they're posting on HN.

If I lease tools that triple your productivity for the same cost as your wage, how much more do I pay you?

My point is increases in productivity can be caused by capital investment, not totally attributable to the worker. That money has to come from somewhere.

Ideally there's a fair balance. This isn't it but you can't look at the number you referenced blindly.

You're not thinking at a systems level. Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in - in large part because of pay not keeping up with housing/school/medical/etc.

Correct systems-level answer to your question "how much do I pay you" is "as much as it takes to stabilize the US curve". Happiness correlates with financial security, which we won't get if the rich get richer from those capital investments then buy up all the housing.

Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone.

I don't care if you are tired or not, it's not something you can just assert and move on.

Also, you know nothing at all of my opinion on whether "a handful of billionaires own everything" is a bad idea or not. All you know about me is I don't agree with you that rising inequality AUTOMATICALLY means some people haven't been rewarded as much as they "should", whatever that means. Reading comprehension, combined with not assuming others' POV, for the win.

Dude go figure it out yourself, it's not that hard. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier. At this point if you still don't get it, with a billionaire in office, surely it's on you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

I got what I needed from here, I'm out.

lol, the arrogance of youth.... I think the point I'm making might be too subtle for your young, idealistic brain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com