Hacker News Reader

Comment by neona | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, while I think many out there have earned their money, this stops at a certain point. It's just not reasonable to think someone is 10,000x more valuable than someone else. That's just ridiculous.

Even beyond this, I see little proof that individuals having absurd amounts of money is in any way beneficial to society, at least on any consistent basis.

To be perfectly honest, I almost feel that there should be a legislated maximum income disparity within a company to reduce the insanity that can happen. Maybe something like no employee may make more than 100 times what another employee makes in terms of net hourly compensation. 100 times is still an absolutely massive disparity, and yet this would improve things. Want to pay your CEO more? Give your janitors a raise.

View on HN

For Joe to be 10000x more valuable than Frank, a given company must prefer to have one day of Joe's time, rather than 27 years of Frank's time. Is that possible? Absolutely. Maybe Joe can spend that day calling up an old friend from Harvard and get an extremely valuable deal going. Even if the deal doesn't close that day, the other execs can get it closed now that Joe got the ball rolling and made the right introductions. This can easily be worth hundreds of millions.

Maybe Frank has no useful skills, and is extremely lazy on top of that. He might be yours for 27 years, but he'll do his job badly, lower morale, and make lots of screw-ups that his co-workers have to fix.

Now, I'm not saying that every CEO is like Joe or every minimum-wage worker is like Frank, but you (the reader) know that there are definitely people out there like each of those. Hence, one person's time can be 10000x times more valuable than another's.

While I can certainly agree that people can have relative value, and even agree that a disparity of four orders of magnitude might just be possible on occasion (though overall i'm skeptical of that claim), I think we're confusing skill/value to society vs value in terms of money one can extract via their skills/etc.

Generally, at the high end of skill, skill increases linearly, but financial reward can sometimes increase exponentially with it.

While someone may be 100x more skilled than someone else, this can result in them making 10,000x as much money as them. Is that fair? I'm not sure. Certainly some amount of potential reward is helpful, as it may drive some to pursue skill and benefit society as a whole, but I think It's grown out of proportion.

If I save someone a million dollars and they give me $10k, just to pick a random example, it doesn't matter how "skilled" I am. I created a whole ton of value that's easily measured in dollars (in this case), and I take home a piece of it. You could say I must be skilled at something; making money, if nothing else.

As long as an individual can own a company or part of a company (capitalism), and given that companies regularly create a huge amount of value out of thin air, some individuals will be entitled to a fraction of the value created. It's that simple.

> Want to pay your CEO more? Give your janitors a raise.

Or fire them and replace them with a contracted cleaning company. Or a robot. Or move your company to another country.

True, it's an imperfect solution, but it was an example. Of course robots are inevitable for such menial tasks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com