I think this is super interesting (because the answer is not at all obvious to me): What do you mean by "through work alone"? Can it only be work if I can map a human hour cleanly onto someone paying an invoice for that hour?
Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.
Yes, the same is absolutely true for many other professions. And artists are probably more aware than most, at least on average, how much luck plays a role.
But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.
Of course that is a feature, but at this point I have to suspect that you're willfully ignoring the point.
The moral problems begin when writing that book gives you extraordinary power beyond what is healthy for society (which is extremely rare for authors, of course; the discussion isn't really about authors, you just invoked them in an attempt to conjure a moral shield for the people who are the real problem).
And again, even that in itself is still not a moral failing of the individual. It's primarily a failure of the system in which the individual operates.
It does become a moral failing of the individual if the individual uses that power to perpetuate the system.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1]
I was talking specifically about the moral implications of books that can be read without any additional work from the author. This statement is about books, not authors.
> but it's certainly not "work" the same way that digging a ditch
I don't think so. Value comes from utility, not from toil.
It's nice to be nice. The strongest possible interpretation of your comment is that you're simply noting accurately that there is no moral failure in writing a great novel.
I agree, writing great novels is a wonderful thing and a moral positive.
What do you mean “extracted”? The wealth is sitting there in his 401(k) being risked through (highly) fractional ownership of various publicly traded business ventures.
Some Nvidia employees are making graphics cards, that cost $1000, and use $300 of materials, and being paid $200. $500 is being extracted from the value chain at that point and some of that is going to you because you own Nvidia stock.
Work implies the creation of value: physical artifacts, services, or more generally, stuff that adds to the world. Capital gails isn't work, you're getting money without adding anything to the world.
The counter-examples are so obvious you didn't feel the need to cite even one?
Please provide an example of how logging in to fidelity.com to see that today my net worth increased by a multiple of my annual salary constitutes "work". Define your terms so it's clear to readers.
Fund managers are paid to do a job by the owners of capital. Obviously that job is is work. The overwhelming majority of the gains accrue to the owners, and only a small fraction to the diligent fund manager who did the work.
Are you sure you tried to come up with a counter example?
>Are those excess returns not work? What are they?
Normally you'd get a low percentage fee instead of getting all of the returns unless you got that capital for free (inheritance?), so yes, you are a worker compared to the person controlling the capital.
Say I dig a hole and then fill it back in and dig a hole and fill it back in and make a mud pie then throw it on the ground and then a stranger gives me $100. Is that work?
The common argument would be that, unless you set it up as a co-op/full profit share or never hire employees, you're extracting value (exploiting) from what your employees' labor earned the company.
Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]
So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition? We presume that people at large would be ready say "Oh yeah, in that case: You earned that billion dollars for sure, nothing wrong with any of that, go you"?
Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.
Reasonable thoughts. Folks have been arguing about this forever. Both sides - community-focused and individual-focused -- have reasonable points on the ethics and morals of what they claim. Both sides want claim to a split of the pie produced by the efforts of individuals.
Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).
In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.
The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.
But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."
I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.
This is one of their many issues, yes. They also have many bright sides that aren't covered in my
<250 word response and miniscule relevant paranthetical aside.
>So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition?
That's the fun part: they cannot make a billion dollars through their own work. It doesn't exist. Billions of dollars do not exist without either collaboration (extremely rare), or exploitation of others (see: every single YC company)
>Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Would you have made that billion without the employee ? If not, you did not earn it. Would your company have gone under if you didn't have someone handling those support tickets, what percentage of the survival of the company is linked to it, and why didn't you pay them nearly that percentage ? Congratulations on exploiting your employee.
Reality is reality. Her statement was based on reality.
Inventing some nonexistent fantasy where her statement is wrong isn’t a useful exercise.
Yes, it’s possible that in the future there may be some person that manages do be worth billions by themselves, but that doesn’t exist today so isn’t relevant to her statement
I appreciate you would really like people to agree with you here, but you've made your argument cage wrapped so tight you fail to recognize the people just outside who support a lot of where you want to be.
Working through a world where some condition proves true is useful to inform logical policy. It admittedly doesn't make for a sexy soundbite and is a lot harder to work through, but it has substantial use (1) to both justify the morality of a policy/action in the real world and (2) to anticipate a potential real world scenario where a single person makes a billion dollars in a SaaS.
Just because pg is `not even wrong` doesn't mean we have to be as well.
