Inequality is extreme.
By providing value or services to people which they want to spend money on. It's pretty simple actually. Though not simple in execution.
No one person has ever invented something good enough that they deserve an infinite amount of money. Maybe if somebody cures cancer some day.
That's the type of Jeff Bezos' wealth, it's mostly "discovered" rather than earned.
That's true. You just need to exploit your fellow humans! Make them work for you but never pay them for the full value they bring. Always pay them the least they will still accept. So you get a piece of their pie. Your position of power will allow you to do so, and people will see your position of power as "natural" and will see no problem in the exploitation.
The question is: how many other people, with the wealth Jeff Bezos had when he was younger, would be able to create something like Amazon? The reason he did and not someone else, how much of that was a combination of opportunity and luck?
Capitalism is a fine system, but extremes like this are a problem. And the fact that once companies get big enough, they can start to become inefficient and worse (in price + quality), because they get benefits like lobbying and owning the entire production process which potential competitors don’t.
Amazon was built on top of layers and layers of public goods that provide surplus value that Bezos and others are able to package into a product: postal services, roads, internet infrastructure, open source software, etc.
Indeed, there should be many people on this forum that understand that providing value is a relatively small part of the problem (see: any of a host of heavily used open source projects), it’s the “spend money on” part of the execution that matters.
The whole question then becomes, who actually created the value that is being paid for in this scenario?
Certainly, Bezos created a company that did many innovative things and made the correct decisions for him to win out over his competition. However, the concept of an online store wasn’t really all that novel. Such a store would have been impossible to create in the 1970s, but suddenly it became so in the 90s and there were plenty of potential competitors popping up at the same time because external conditions made it possible. Additionally, because the entire concept was new, he didn’t have to compete with an existing behemoth like Amazon is today (though of course the incumbent physical retail giants of the time shouldn’t be downplayed, nonetheless, starting an online everything store today is a very different proposition).
The issue isn’t “did Bezos create something novel and valuable”, but rather “how much value did he create, and how much did he just benefit from an existing pool of value waiting to be tapped, that was created by the rest of society”? To that end, it’s not a question of whether Bezos might “deserve” to be wealthy, but rather, how wealthy?
The consistent framing, as illustrated by your comment, is that our capitalist system inherently gives just dues to those that create value, and is often accompanied by the line that taxing the rich is “punishing success”. But the countervailing point is that it is often the case that the very rich receive outsized gains as the benefit from common resources, and they ought to pay back into that public trust in due course as they have benefitted from it the most.
According to a quick Google, Amazon has 310 million customers. Think about that - Bezos built something that a third of a billion of humans find valuable enough to use. Isn't that equally, if not more, impressive than the "60,000" lifetimes measure?
Secondly, there are a ton of people who have contributed significantly to things a lot of people use. Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs were instrumental to the development of the iPhone (about 1 Billion users worldwide). The "Tetra Pak" and similar containers are used by hundreds of Millions of people every day. There are ton of other examples. Being loved/used/supported by a large share of the population does not entitle you to essentially infinite money.
It sounds as absurd to me.
Today, even the least privileged in thedeveloped world carry around computers that bring news, entertainment, weather, etc. The worst cars are faster, safer, and get awesome gas mileage. The cheapest clothing is comfortable and durable. Food is plentiful and cheap.
The life of Jeff Bezos isn't that much greater than 99% of the people living in a developed country. There's never been a better time to be alive.
My quality of life is amazing, all of this capitalism’s working out great for me. I’m someone who doesn’t even have a high school diploma but thanks to tech I make a wage that makes my family and react in shock when I’ve revealed it to them. I get to go on vacation twice a year, I live in a great neighborhood, I love my job.
The thing is, Jeff Bezos has done far more to push up my wages indirectly by virtue of Amazon existing and hiring talent, and offering great salaries. I don’t care at all how much money Jeff Bezos makes and it strikes me as mean spirited the complaining surrounding “wealth inequality”. As long as my objective quality of life is unimaginably good compared to any of my ancestors that have ever existed, what am I supposed to be getting riled up about?
When I read a statement like “inequality is “extreme”, I feel it’s strongly implying a call to action to “tip the scales” against it. That it’s an injustice that ought to be remedied. With what, government action? Some new laws?
I feel like any attempt to mess with this good thing we’ve got going on would destroy it, either unintentionally or not.
> The aggregate figures are shocking. Underpinning them is a picture of a Europe that has fallen behind — sector by sector.
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
Because of the magic of compound interest, the EU will continue to fall behind at an increasing pace, as well as their quality of life. EU is already very poor if you travel around outside the tourist cities.
American capitalism is the greatest wealth engine ever created, and I pray it continues to exist. It is currently the only hope the world has for increased standards of living.
Well, you got to understand how the mind of a socialist work. They would rather have everyone equally poor and equally miserable quality of life, than a rich society where there might be huge disparities of wealth, and even the poorest may have a reasonably good quality of life.
It's a purely an envy thing. Nothing else.
Assuming we agree with the premise that this amount of inequality is too extreme, what is to be done to reduce it? And in what way do we ensure this does not compromise the basic principles of our capitalist economy, e.g allowing the rewards to be commensurate with the risks, rewarding people who work harder and have more qualifications, and preserving ownership.
Nothing would stop somebody with money under this schema from continuing to invest. The mindset of "i dont want the government is taking my money!" is reactionary bullshit that has resulting in underfunded public serves, from the FDA to the IRS. The idea that no amount of money can be enough for one person is toxic, and antisocial.
People would still be able to amass enough wealth to do whatever they want for themselves and their family and friends, they just wouldn't be able to amass so much money that its gravitational field starts to warp all of society.
Of course, modern capitalism has devolved into crony capitalism, but that's a different topic altogether.
And yeah, life isn't fair and it should never be totally fair. But at the same time having it rigged against so many people is a big problem. At what point do you say "ok, you have won, good job, it is time to promote the common good now."
He earns money by exploiting workers (sometimes literally to death) and destroying competition with unfair practices.
> and something that most people aren't willing to do, especially to the extremes he has
He was able to get started due to hundreds of thousands of dollars from his parents. That’s neither a risk nor something most people can do.
> which is the cornerstone of capitalism
Won’t argue with that. But it’s not a positive.
What do you find surprising about consumers preferring to buy something from Amazon rather than their local mom and pop store?
Hell, that's the entire foundation of the urbanization movement. When the population was rurally isolated, they had little choice buy to buy from the local mom and pop – keeping wealth widely distributed, but we collectively saw value in having one big "mom and pop" enabled by having large populations living in close proximity to each other, so we (the majority of us) made the migration into the city.
If you have ever chosen to live in a city, you must have recognized the value too? Else why would you be there?
The website. It’s been absolute shit for years. It’s full of knockoffs and scams. I can hardly find the things I want, there’s dark patterns, they actively compete with sellers on their platform… I honestly think they get away with it because mom and pop are out of business. I’d go back if I could.
It seems like you want to find some way to prevent individuals from being wildly successful, but I think you are overlooking the fact that his wealth is a fraction of the value what he started has provided to the economy.
You are concerned that Bezos has "accrue[d] that much wealth" but his wealthy is mostly stock which is basically just an indication of how valuable people think Amazon (and his other companies) are to the US (and world) economy. He doesn't have $150 billion in cash in his basement or bank.
If you want to think in terms of "How can we keep a company from providing this much value to the world?" then yes. If we could push everyone back to living in caves, there would be less disparity, but that probably isn't something most people want.
Using Bezos as an example - an interesting proportion would be something like: how many customers (eg, people who find his work valuable) does Bezos have versus an average American? How many people has Bezos employed and made successful (or at the very least, gave them a better job than they would have otherwise?) vs an average American.
To wit, it doesn't make sense to compare "wealth" without also talking about "impact" in a case like Bezos.
The other ignorant thing is this makes it seem like his wealth is some sort of zero sum game where if he has a dollar that means you don't have it. The reality of his wealth is something like this: he owns a chunk of Amazon, AND Amazon has grown to be valuable and valued. The same guy, had Amazon gone nowhere, would have nothing. The mechanism of him becoming rich is primarily the world collectively deciding that the thing he has built is valuable, rather than him taking dollars out of your pockets.
Why does this bother me? Because I find things that breed resentment in the world to be a detrimental evil.
1) Does he deserve this money based on the things he did?
2) Should any one person, regardless of how much they deserve it, hold this much wealth?
This comments section shows that people disagree strongly about both #1 and #2.
But I think even if you answer YES to #1, you can still build a reasonable case that the answer to #2 should be NO.
And if that's the case, I don't think the resentment comes from the fact that he's got all this money and didn't properly earn it. Instead, it comes from the fact that when you have one person with this nearly unfathomable amount of wealth (and power), there are a lot of second- or third-order consequences that are undesirable.
I am a distributist, of the classical type represented by G.K. Chesterton, and believe that society works best when the ownership of productive property is widely distributed. That doesn't mean I believe in robinhoodism (i.e. forcible redistributions of wealth), but that concentrated ownership is to be avoided, and public policy should reflect this.
I see you're in tech and an author (btw, I've come across your book before, congrats!) and I bet MOST people would also think that you have "too much" because it's more than them, and "what do you really do to earn it? type on a keyboard? That's not real work."
Because I don't want to someone to have the power to say "hey xyzelement, your FAANG salary is unreasonable and we're going to take it away for greater good" (and ditto for my wife's medical salary), I don't feel it's right to do it to anyone else.
I think that's what drives leftists crazy - that no matter how much they hem and haw, they can't force the market to bend to their own version of morality. If you want to dethrone amazon, then create something better that free people choose with their own wallets.
"How many people has he '''made successful'''" is a fuzzy and already biased metric, how do you decide on that one? Why not "how many people would have had a better job if not for his company" or "how many liters of urine in soda bottles because of his policies?"
Wealth is concrete and measurable. People can differ on what exactly the consequences of wealth inequality are but I think nearly everyone will agree that it measures something worthwhile to know.
You are missing the point. The only way Bezos can take a cent from you is if you willingly give him the money. In contrast, in a socialist system, the government takes money from you regardless of whether you want to give it or not. Spoiler: no one wants to give it. Governments are 91283128391823918293819381x more evil than billionaires.
If my sole proprietorship goes from 1k to 1M annual revenue then it's easy to argue that I absolutely earned all that money. If a bunch of people join the company on that journey to 1M then it's a lot less clear how much I did and what work I have a legitimate claim to the fruits thereof. I think we're so used to the current state of employment contracts just being contractors with 401k's that we don't consider that it could work differently.
I must say though that I do worry about people having enough money to bend the "rules" of the market. I.e. paying for lobbying, having an outsized say on regulation, or wielding influence over politicians to give special tax favors, etc.
The direct problem there has to do with laws, not wealth - but it must be said that increasingly massive wealth does unlock corrupting influence that would be otherwise infeasible.
The policies of wealth and unbridled capitalism in the USA have stifled wage growth, increased homelessness, and driven down life expectancy. You should be mad about this. You gain nothing by trying to hold a moral high ground.
I suspect one's perspective on this depends a lot on one's a-priori sense of victimization and it's just not what I lead with. So yes, I can see that how you feel makes you think what you think, but it's not for me.
- Invest $8.30 at 10% interest for 250 years and you're richer than Bezos
- Jeff Bezos couldn't afford to buy all the houses in Coronado, California (a small island that's approx. 8 square miles of city)
- If Bezos put tried to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with gold coins (a la Scrooge McDuck) it would be less than 6 inches deep before he ran out of money
But arguments like the one in the link are pointless - Bezos could have 10x the money he does and it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts. The government spends way more, countries spend way more and problems don't get fixed.
I'd like to see that 9 billion for all cancer treatments graphed against the trillions americans spend on healthcare cumalatively. Or if we really wanted to be snide about it, the total americans spent on pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Billionaires shouldn't exist because market forces and taxes should eventually chip away at that wealth. But people make it seem like all the world's problems will be solved if billionaires just suddenly lost their wealth.
I am much more concerned about raising the standard of living for the average person than being worried about trying to prevent someone from being wildly successful. Personally, Amazon has increased my standard of living and the same is true for a large portion of the US...which is why the company is so valuable.
It's hard for me to say what 'dimensionality' accurately portrays magnitude of wealth. Showing us say 2d projections (pictures) of 3D cubes might correlate, but I suspect that it more of a logarithmic than cube root relationship.
There's nothing special about using a line, square, or cube to illustrate amounts. However if I were trying to have people actually get a sense of a large range I would use cubes as that's the highest dimension we can intuitively grasp. e.g. picking up a metal object of visible volume weighs about as much as we expect.
I believe we produce over 100% of the food we need to feed everyone but under 200%, and logistics / food waste is another issue. Among the housing crisis there are a lot of vacant apartments and buildings with extra space, but idk if there are enough to give everyone a furnished apartment with plumbing, electricity, proper heating/cooling, and access to community.
Also debt. Debt isn’t material so it could be paid with the excess wealth (or the government could just say “your debt is gone”). The problem is that now you have to pay the companies who are owed the debt, and what will they spend the money on? If they just save it like Jeff Bezos, good, but if they spend it on more materials we run into the same issue. And you can’t just not pay the debtors or getting a loan becomes much, much harder.
I think inequality is a serious issue, I think it’s very obvious and the website does a great job conveying it. But I also don’t think it’s as simple as “just redistribute the money”. The bigger issue which I think everyone has good reason to want to support is logistics: getting people what they need and want, as efficiently as possible, while reducing waste.
And when everyone supports something, someone can become fabulously wealthy working on this, like shipping magnates, railroad magnates, oil magnates and Jeff.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp
I'd like to see a list of wealthiest individuals based on diversified liquid assets they could reasonably be expected to sell. I always imagine it is some old family that has gold, commodities, treasuries, stocks, real estate, etc. etc.
Elon sold about $23 billion in Tesla stock from April 2022 to December 2022 to buy Twitter and my memory was the stock going from about $400 to $100 that year. Of course there are other factors in the decline but it’s certainly a component of it. Bezos would need to sell almost 10x that much.
However, vertical scroll, please
So, why is the author so mad about it? If I make a company and sell one percent to someone for 1000 USD, my net worth would rise by around 100k (as a bad example), but have pretty much none of that. Right? Thats what this is, isn't it? Im sitting there with 1000 bucks which I spend on the next phone, and im dirt poor with a lot of """wealth""".
I find these comparisons a bit disingenuous
I didn't do the math so I don't really know what could be done with such sums.
We (relatively smart STEM people) must understand that first, there’s ergodicity to inequality and many other more important metrics and issues to address.
And second, that it is poor people who need to be helped, not rich people who need to be robbed.
Inequality per se shows nothing about the quality of the society.
Don’t stand still - educate yourself, educate your friends.
We need to be strong and supress dumb people’s narratives. They lead to nothing but wars and destruction :(
There's no way Bezos consumes (spends) $180B during his life. As long as he's not spending the wealth, wealth inequality is not a huge problem. He said he plans to give most of his wealth to charity but didn't specify any numbers.
Another thought - if he gives all the money to the bottom 60% and they start spending, the net effect would be that economic output would stay roughly constant but consumption would be redirected from the top 40% to the bottom 60%.
A lot of scroll wheels are, if you can believe it, not made for scrolling dozens of pages worth at a time and some even make noise while doing it!
...there is.
If you want to do a lot of scrolling, you click the mouse wheel. Then you just move the cursor down to scroll down or up to scroll up. You don't move the wheel at all.
You can also use the various keyboard navigation options, like pgdn or the space bar.
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22998347
Focus on what you can change in your life to be better than the old you, don't compare yourself to others, it won't go well.
Millennials being locked out of developmental milestones
Covid showing that sometimes governments can be effective
It was fun for a bit but it got old.
He was able to create those monopolies because Republican and Democrat govt's had weakened anti-monopoly laws.
Capitalism thrives on competition.
More commie drivel on the front page of HN. I thought this was an entrepreneurship forum?
These people have no idea what wealth means, it would indeed be a problem if Bezos was consuming all his $100B+ but he isn't. The value he created through Amazon is likely orders of magnitude greater than his net worth.
If you agree that nobody deserves or needs that wealth, then please move to Cuba or North Korea. And enjoy your life, there's no Bezoses there.
What a tremendous deal we got: such an amazing value at the tiny price of the part Jeff got to keep. No wonder capitalist societies are leapfrogging societies dabbling in various forms of watered down communism.
In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc.
And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes:
> Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.
> In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.
In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds.
We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)
I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.
Whose morals? Who judges the correctness of the manner?
> Piketty writes
Piketty has done nothing for his society. Today's France's top 3 companies are in Fashion. Another country left behind. Its philosophers should shut up and take notes, not dictate how they thing others should run their own country.
Only in socialist societies are people who contribute nothing the richest - e.g. North Korea.
Regarding wealth growth while not working, what are you trying to get at? This is such a simple concept that it barely requires an explanation. Rich people don't earn money per hour worked, by definition. You'll never be rich if your income is proportional to the hours you work. You have to do something that's scalable, and thankfully with Industrialisation a lot of things are.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I think it's a common misconception that the rich don't pay taxes. According to a quick Google (but in line with prior research):
In 2020, the bottom half of taxpayers paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of all federal income taxes.
However, were we to discourage his entrepreneurial act 30 years ago (and others entrepreneurs as well) - we’d all lose.
Let's say we distribute Bezos money to everyone. That's 24 Dollars per person. It would change nothing. Nada.
The same thing happens here, except it isn't a game.
The relationship between wealth and quality of life isn't linear (beyond a certain point, additional wealth won't meaningfully improve your health, comfort, etc). But that's very much not the case for power. AFAICT, the relationship between wealth and power is linear as far as the eye can see. More wealth == more power.
It seems pretty clear that wealth is not the most sensible way to distribute power. Otherwise, why bother with things like democracy? We could have just stuck with something like feudalism, right?
ie: We all work for Zuckerberg and the gang, giving them free labour/info which they resell.
Interesting take on the subject. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalis...
Old guy me expects a revolution of some kind because the standard of living in N. America is slowly declining for most and they remember when it was better. You can agree or dis-agree but Americans won't let that happen forever...
Ah, but that’s not at all true. All of us plebes have to pay taxes that Bezos and other billionaires are managing to escape.
This is a serious economic issue.
Is he hoarding Amazon stock? Do you mean there is a finite amount of wealth and he has hoarded it somehow in Amazon !?
He worked to make his company as valuable as possible, which is what his job was.
