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Depends on what you mean by filthy rich. By my definition (worth >$1bn), I don't know any. I do know several people worth several hudrends of millions tho. The

Depends on what you mean by filthy rich. By my definition (worth >$1bn), I don't know any. I do know several people worth several hudrends of millions tho. They are CEOs of their own companies or companies they helped grow. I don't think anyone works harder than them in their companies. If there is someone, it probably is someone from the upper management. >What they're good at is business, which is organizing and capturing the value of other people's labor and innovation. You say that like it's easy-peasy. Everyone can do it, right?

wpietri 11y ago
> They are CEOs of their own companies or companies they helped grow. I don't think anyone works harder than them in their companies. I also know people in that bracket. None of them work significantly harder than some of the house cleaners and construction workers I've met. And even if they did, it's not like they work 10 million times harder. There are only so many hours in the week. > You say that like it's easy-peasy. Everyone can do it, right? It's not easier than anything else. But it's not appreciably harder. Read Warren Buffet on this. He's one of the best in the world, and he describes his success as coming from talent and luck. E.g.: "I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless." I note also that he was born into a family with business experience. His grandfather ran a store; his father, a stock brokerage. That sort of early education is of enormous help. (I know myself; my dad started programming computers in the late '60s.)
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  It's not how much you sweat, it's how hard your work is. Managing a firm with 1200 employees for sure is 10 million times harder than moving boxes around. But be my guest. Go to North Korea or Cuba. I'm sure people are very happy there. Everybody is equal. Just some are more equal than others.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Come now. I've started 5 companies at this point. I volunteer a fair bit helping entrepreneurs. If you can't tell the difference between critique of managerialist tropes and wholesale rejection of capitalism, you aren't trying very hard. You seem to have shifted your metric from working hard to the work being complicated. But again, plenty of people do complicated work without getting zillions of dollars for it. I know math PhDs who do amazing technical work; it's far more complex than the workaday accounting done by executives. I know organizational consultants and senior HR people who are way better at designing organizations than your average executive. I know plenty of front-line managers who have much more complex managerial problems than senior execs. What you're missing is that as with Cuba and North Korea, the people on top get disproportionate rewards solely because they are on top of a large power structure. They all "deserve" those rewards for the same reason: they won at the musical-chairs game of hierarchy. Were Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong smarter or harder working than their competitors? Maybe. Or maybe they were just lucky in either the talent lottery or in how things played out. The only difference here is that our game is built around competing entities that, on average, create economic value, so there's possibly more social utility that results from the hierarchy games. But the people creating the economic value are mostly the ones doing the actual work. I generally don't begrudge people the money they collected. The game is the game. But let's not confuse winning the game with "deserving" the winnings in some moral sense. That's the just world fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

wpietri 11y ago

> They are CEOs of their own companies or companies they helped grow. I don't think anyone works harder than them in their companies. I also know people in that bracket. None of them work significantly harder than some of the house cleaners and construction workers I've met. And even if they did, it's not like they work 10 million times harder. There are only so many hours in the week. > You say that like it's easy-peasy. Everyone can do it, right? It's not easier than anything else. But it's not appreciably harder. Read Warren Buffet on this. He's one of the best in the world, and he describes his success as coming from talent and luck. E.g.: "I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless." I note also that he was born into a family with business experience. His grandfather ran a store; his father, a stock brokerage. That sort of early education is of enormous help. (I know myself; my dad started programming computers in the late '60s.)

TheLogothete 11y ago
It's not how much you sweat, it's how hard your work is. Managing a firm with 1200 employees for sure is 10 million times harder than moving boxes around. But be my guest. Go to North Korea or Cuba. I'm sure people are very happy there. Everybody is equal. Just some are more equal than others.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Come now. I've started 5 companies at this point. I volunteer a fair bit helping entrepreneurs. If you can't tell the difference between critique of managerialist tropes and wholesale rejection of capitalism, you aren't trying very hard. You seem to have shifted your metric from working hard to the work being complicated. But again, plenty of people do complicated work without getting zillions of dollars for it. I know math PhDs who do amazing technical work; it's far more complex than the workaday accounting done by executives. I know organizational consultants and senior HR people who are way better at designing organizations than your average executive. I know plenty of front-line managers who have much more complex managerial problems than senior execs. What you're missing is that as with Cuba and North Korea, the people on top get disproportionate rewards solely because they are on top of a large power structure. They all "deserve" those rewards for the same reason: they won at the musical-chairs game of hierarchy. Were Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong smarter or harder working than their competitors? Maybe. Or maybe they were just lucky in either the talent lottery or in how things played out. The only difference here is that our game is built around competing entities that, on average, create economic value, so there's possibly more social utility that results from the hierarchy games. But the people creating the economic value are mostly the ones doing the actual work. I generally don't begrudge people the money they collected. The game is the game. But let's not confuse winning the game with "deserving" the winnings in some moral sense. That's the just world fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis