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I'm glad Paul Graham is being honest about startups' role in wealth and income inequality. Ezra Klein says there are good (Silicon Valley) and bad (Wall Street)
by jackcosgrove 11y ago
I'm glad Paul Graham is being honest about startups' role in wealth and income inequality. Ezra Klein says there are good (Silicon Valley) and bad (Wall Street) rich people regarding income and wealth inequality. However if you're using the gross measure of income and wealth inequality, rich people all contribute the same way, in proportion to their wealth and income. Paul Graham is correct to focus on finer-grain factors, which are implicit in Ezra Klein's good-bad dichotomy but which he misses by going after inequality rather than a concept of justice, whether that justice be just deserts or equity.
- ergothus 11y agoFinance provides the value of liquidity - ensuring that those that need money have the opportunity to connect with those that have money to invest. Startups provide the value of coming up with new quality of life options for society. Given that financiers have stopped adding real value and instead have introduced new risks, I don't see the two groups as contributing the same way. Thousands of startups that try and fail are still more valuable to society than people creating artificial opportunities to make the rich richer and society to bail out failures.
- jackcosgrove 11y agoThen critique finance based upon some theory of justice, rather than using statistics like wealth and income inequality that obscure how the money was made. I'm not claiming the two industries are morally equivalent. I am claiming they are equivalent in their contributions to wealth and income inequality.