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"I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely." No, you wouldn't; that's the whole point. Suppose that there are two options: an open market

"I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely." No, you wouldn't; that's the whole point. Suppose that there are two options: an open market and a closed market. If it's a closed market, there's a high barrier to entry, and so only ten people are in the market. If it's an open market, anyone can join who wants to, and so there are a hundred people. However, you must not be able to benefit from joining the open market, or else more people would join and drive wages down. And, if you were one of the ten people in the closed market, you still wouldn't be any better off, because the high wages of the closed market would be counteracted by the difficulty of getting into the market (see: "medical doctor"). There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. EDIT: Your reply is potentially valid, but only if the market we're talking about is so large that opening it up will raise salaries outside of it. The startup market is only ~0.1% of the US economy, so I don't think this applies.

_delirium 17y ago
Distribution of wealth isn't necessarily the same in both situations, though, so things can really be materially better in one situation vs. the other for different sets of people. The closed-market situation leads to more divergent outcomes: you have wealthy people who are in profitable markets, and non-wealthy people who are kept out due to high barriers. Reducing market barriers makes that rigid in-v-out dichotomy harder to maintain, which is better for the people who would have been out in the closed-market situation. They can still only profit a little, but before they couldn't profit at all. Markets where capital is a requirement also tend to result in rich-get-richer effects, where you have to have money to enter profitable markets, which then make you more money. Low-barrier markets make it harder to get a return out of capital, and force people to get returns from other things, like their tech skills. (Of course, tech skills are probably correlated with wealth too, but not to the same extent that literally having piles of money is.)

_delirium 17y ago

Distribution of wealth isn't necessarily the same in both situations, though, so things can really be materially better in one situation vs. the other for different sets of people. The closed-market situation leads to more divergent outcomes: you have wealthy people who are in profitable markets, and non-wealthy people who are kept out due to high barriers. Reducing market barriers makes that rigid in-v-out dichotomy harder to maintain, which is better for the people who would have been out in the closed-market situation. They can still only profit a little, but before they couldn't profit at all. Markets where capital is a requirement also tend to result in rich-get-richer effects, where you have to have money to enter profitable markets, which then make you more money. Low-barrier markets make it harder to get a return out of capital, and force people to get returns from other things, like their tech skills. (Of course, tech skills are probably correlated with wealth too, but not to the same extent that literally having piles of money is.)