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PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated

by giaour 11y ago

PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it—not just morally, but also practically, in the sense that it is harder to eradicate." This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.

invalidOrTaken 11y ago
> PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate. > He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways. But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to: “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice. (Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.) But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”. Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it. * * * Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him. From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis. As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
  - dang 11y ago
    The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site. Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet. Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves. (Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.) In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
      - apsec112 11y ago
        "I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan."" - Christopher Hitchens
        deleted 11y ago

by giaour 11y ago

invalidOrTaken 11y ago

> PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate. > He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways. But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to: “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.

jacobolus 11y ago
Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice. (Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.) But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”. Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it. * * * Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him. From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis. As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
- dang 11y ago
  The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site. Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet. Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves. (Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.) In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
    - apsec112 11y ago
      "I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan."" - Christopher Hitchens
      - deleted 11y ago