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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

If pg doesn't understand that the way he uses the way "earn" is very different from the way that AOC uses "earn", then I guess he is just not that smart.

AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc. You can behave perfectly morally in US society and "earn" a billion dollars. It is just that, no matter what exactly you did, you didn't actually "earn" it.

Of course pg is smart enough to understand that there are two different meanings of "earn" at play here. It is just that he chooses to ignore the second one, because the second one is hard to define exactly, and it puts him out of his comfort zone. He likes being right more than finding the truth (like most of us), and so ignoring the second meaning is the easy way out.

The trouble is, just because something is difficult to define, doesn't mean it isn't essential, or important.

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And putting aside the definition of "earn", extreme wealth inequality is objectively bad for society regardless of how it arose.

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

> Effects of income inequality, researchers have found, include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods,[1] a lower population-wide satisfaction and happiness[2][3] and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption.[4] For the top 21 industrialised countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries (r = -.907).[5] A similar relationship exists among US states (r = -.620).[6]

> 2013 Economics Nobel prize winner Robert J. Shiller said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem.

> AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc.

She says you can't earn it and then gives several examples in a row of immoral and/or rentier economic practices. At no point does she give any example that is what most people would call moral behaviour. She does not give the example pg gives, of simply working hard for it. The implication is that it is impossible to earn that level of wealth morally.

Earn is already defined in the dictionary in both ways perfectly well, and she is using the sense of deserved. pg clearly knows she's using it that way, and his argument is:

1. You can make a billion dollars

2. You can do it by making something people want

That deals with both senses of earn because none of AOC's examples apply and he adds that:

> The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy

How is that immoral? How is that unearned? If you think it's unearned then you've failed to understand the maths he elucidates in the article, or you've taken a position that earning large amounts of money by any means is immoral (or, like AOC, wish to present the straw man that it's only possible through immoral means).

The trouble is, a lot of people just cannot think clearly beyond their own ideology. It apparently makes even reading and understanding a short text difficult.

The confusion is, in part, because one of the functional underpinnings of capitalism is “make a bet” as a method of allocating resources.

Those whose bets paid off didn’t “earn” the money, they “won” it. Calling it “earned” confuses “being morally deserving” with “receiving”.

The positive functional effect of “take a risk and get more money if it pays off” is that folks who allocate capital well end up with more capital to allocate.

Of course, this is imperfect ; there are those who allocate capital poorly (by some definition) yet win returns anyways, and some who allocate it well while being unable to capture the value they create.

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