Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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