4 ms·

Whilst I'm sympathetic to discussion of the wealth divide, a balanced treatment would be nice. The article tends to blame the rich, which really amounts to a cl

• _delirium 16y ago
  I'm not sure the latter is always true. One can be entrepreneurially successful in a lot of ways, not all of which involve providing genuine value. There's even been a lot of debate about that here lately (Mahalo is very profitable; is it providing any value to anyone but its owners?). One can also do a lot of great stuff, and also get rich doing it. Or, one could produce tons of value for other people, and not get rich doing it, like the collective editors of Wikipedia, volunteer contributors to thousands of open-source projects, and many scientists who publish their work freely have. I'm not sure how well the two ideas correlate overall, really. I'd hazard a guess that they correlate reasonably well up to some point (most people making $150k have probably produced better stuff than most people making $50k, with exceptions on both sides), but get wildly erratic past some cutoff, where it becomes more an issue of connections with other businessmen and government, and the feedback loop of "you need money to make money". Is Carlos Slim the world's most valuable human, for example? Is Bill Gates the 2nd-most-valuable?