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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

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

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