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Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundre

• deleted 10y ago
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• andrepd 10y ago
  Absolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.
  • _cairn 10y ago
    Not saying that what you are implying is wrong, but empirically speaking working hard/relative merit do not correlate to proportionate monetary rewards in our current system. The idea of a pure meritocracy is an interesting one, I wonder what some of the outcomes would be.
    • tucaz 10y ago
      There is also the fact that money (and value) is not a zero sum game. Bezos making billions doesnt mean that the money was taken from someone else in the sense that that person cannot have it anymore. The opposite is also true. If he was poor it doesn't mean that I would have more money. Value creation is a weird but beautiful thing.
      • lawnchair_larry 10y ago
        I don't think that's the entirely the case. True it's not zero sum, but it's not free either. There is absolutely wealth transfer. For example, if he were poor, many middle class Seattle residents would have far more purchasing power in their current real estate market. Amazon have expanded rapidly and transplanted most of the cogs who are building the Bezos empire. The many displaced multi-generational residents of Seattle and San Francisco might not refer to this phenomenon as beautiful.
  • derwiki 10y ago
    But someone's got to be the hardest working and have the most merit... just like someone has to be the least hardest working and have the least merit.
    • 100ideas 10y ago
      You're saying net global merit is a zero-sum system?
  • perseusprime11 10y ago
    Perils of capitalism in it's absolute form. We celebrate these people for becoming rich and we will celebrate again for giving back their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
    • 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
      Are you suggesting we shouldn't thank them? Now that's a perilous idea.
      • andrepd 10y ago
        For accruing wealth for themselves? Why should we?
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    "Merit" could refer to many things, but yes, I think he directly/indirectly added more utility to people's lives than 100,000s of other people.
    • manmal 10y ago
      I don't think money is a good proxy for "adding utility to people's lives". It's a good proxy for "good at playing the money game". A nurse won't be paid $1B if she saves a CEO's life, and he is able to go and make his company billions as a result. A clever business person might, if she saves the CEO in some other aspect, as she can setup a provision first. That being said, I don't think money has much to do with merit, either. It's just the output of a function that you are either good at optimizing or not.
      • paulddraper 10y ago
        Yes, supply comes into it too. A nurse will be paid a substantial sum if she is one of very few that can save the CEO's life.
        • mcbits 10y ago
          The CEO can die and the company will continue functioning 95% as well. Or maybe 105%, or 10%, or 1,000%.
          • paulddraper 10y ago
            If he's eating the shareholder's money like that, they should fire him.
  • gozur88 10y ago
    Neither. He had money which he risked. Capitalism isn't about working harder, it's about getting a return on risk.
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    • andrepd 10y ago
      But this is what many people defend. And what do you say to the billions earning less than 5$ a day?
      • gozur88 10y ago
        I'll defend it myself. And to the billions earning less than $5/day I'd say "You'd still be earning $5/day if Jeff Bezos didn't exist."
  • flyinglizard 10y ago
    That's not about what he did do or did not do. In reality there's no concept of "fair pay" or "just earnings". In fact, Bezos doesn't even matter, personally. What matters is that he owns an asset (Amazon) that appreciated in value. Obviously, his "net worth" is tied to this holding. It appreciated because it provided desirable services. Now, preventing it can be done in two ways, and only two ways - either limit Amazon's appreciation in value (curb the company), or limit the person's holding in Amazon, meaning that if you started as a founder of a company having 50% of the total shares, your holdings will decline as the company's worth rises. Does this seem reasonable to you?
    • psyc 10y ago
      This isn't thinking far enough outside the tiny box of this specific economic order at this specific point in history. For example, we could have co-ops instead of corps.
      • thomaskcr 10y ago
        The vast majority of businesses fail, and many businesses go through cycles where they make less money than they spend. How can the average person take on the risk of not getting paid for years? One year of non-profitability would be a death sentence for a co-op if people can't get paid and flee. A corporation allows the average person to get paid while someone else takes on a risk with their money.
  • pfisch 10y ago
    He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people. Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.
    • psyc 10y ago
      That's a fantasy. An analogy taken too literally. People lionize John Galts and imagine that they are their organizations. They aren't. Just because he started it and called the shots doesn't mean he literally is Amazon. That's a fanciful way of thinking and it's disastrous for us mortals to take it literally. Amazon is all the people working there, who, while well-paid compared to all the other serfs, actually get a paltry share of the fortune they generate collectively.
      • pfisch 10y ago
        I never said he "was amazon". I am talking about his contribution to amazon. All those "serfs" are not really risking their own personal wealth. They take home their pay win or lose for amazon. They are not serfs. They are getting paid for their work.
      • ploxiln 10y ago
        Very complicated systems, like computer hardware and software systems, particularly services and distributed systems, do have this un-intuitive property of amplifying competence differences. healthcare.gov is one visible and notable example where thousands of "trained and certified professionals" made a huge mess, and like 10 volunteers from silicon valley cleaned it up. You could hire 100000 or 200000 such contracted professionals and the value produced would be even lower. Sure, most of the blame is with the management structure, which the ~10 volunteers bypassed and overrode. But the results stand. A few people in the right place can produce more value than orders of magnitude more people doing the wrong thing for whatever reason. EDIT to better address your point: very few people could have done as well as Bezos in his position. Take any of the CEOs HP has had in the last decade, put them at the head of Amazon, and it would have done a lot worse. Put them all there, it would have done worse. Bezos gets a huge value multiplier for practical reasons.
• y_u_no_rust 10y ago
  these people having so much means many aren't being paid.
• mjfl 10y ago
  I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence, whereas Jeff Bezos got rich because you gave him money in exchange for products. Like, "Hey, here's this cool electronic device called the Amazon Echo for $50." is a markedly different from "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terrifying.
  • milesrout 10y ago
    That's an incredibly naive view of things. To not recognise that Jeff Bezos's wealth is the product of a violent system is wilfully ignorant.
    • wtf_is_up 10y ago
      Not an argument.
  • greghatch 10y ago
    The negatives need not be so similar for the two to occupy the same space of vast property ownership concerns - namely that a single person has what many consider to be a troubling amount of wealth and power. EDIT: sentence structure change
    • ruleabidinguser 10y ago
      Sorry, why is it concerning? It seems concerning to me but only if you choose not to really engage with what it means.
      • DamnYuppie 10y ago
        Throughout human history there has never been a time where those in power, regardless of how obtained, didn't turn to violence and subterfuge to maintain it.
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• swah 10y ago
  Its pretty amazing that it isn't someone with a surname like Rockfeller or Ford...
• ohyes 10y ago
  Okay, but think of it this way. Bill Gates is worth 90 Billion, sure fine. What is the entire United States worth? GDP is 18 Trillion, expenditures are 4 trillion. So if you do something (admittedly kind of dumb), like take the GDP, subtract expenditures, let's pretend the earnings are 14 trillion? Valuing the US at 10x earnings, that would put it at a valuation of 140 trillion dollars. This is horribly incorrect, but I think it still makes a very important point. The richest person's entire net worth is orders of magnitude less than the yearly GDP of a moderately sized country. The key thing in monarchial feudalism is that a single person is the state (Imagine a person worth 'only' 14 trillion dollars, he's got his own airforce, navy, army). Jeff/Bill/Warren et al. aren't on that scale of wealth yet, and it seems that it would be difficult for them to get there without state intervention.
  • SwellJoe 10y ago
    "The richest person's entire net worth is orders of magnitude less than the yearly GDP of a moderately sized country." Economically speaking, the US is not a "moderately sized country". It is the richest country in the world. There are several moderately sized countries with lower GDP than Bill Gates net worth.
    • ohyes 10y ago
      I'm not considering US to be a moderately sized country. While you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), this was kind of a brain-fart on my part and not really important to the point. The point is that net worth includes the assumption of future earnings in the valuation. GDP is just one year's production. Bill gates is orders of magnitude less wealthy than Ukraine, for example, even though his net worth is similar to Ukraine's GDP.
      • SwellJoe 10y ago
        I think it is important to the point, that one man is worth the annual GDP of countries that have millions of people. A country is not a person...it's millions of people, and it's nonsensical to say, "Oh, it's not such a big deal, because a nation of millions makes as much in a year as this guy's whole net worth." That's a terrible argument for why the amount of money Bill Gates has is not absurd.
• sharun 10y ago
  If you want more blue whales you need more ocean. And if the ocean don't have its few blues, krill and algae explode and the whole system, sooner or later collapses. Nature has had a long time to find alternate ways of keeping ecosystems temporarily stable and everywhere you look in nature you see hierarchies prop up. The only difference with humans is we can "choose" who to collectively prop up.
• psyc 10y ago
  Funny to find this top comment, since I just had this exact train of thought an hour ago. It went something like this. It's a common unexamined platitude that it takes a huge amount of work, and especially sacrifice to be able to live well. That might well be true under certain conditions of, say, undeveloped agrarian civilizations. It shouldn't still be true of ours, and yet it is. Our infrastructure and supply chain create so much abundance of every imaginable thing, from necessities, to frivolities, to luxuries. There's no way that it actually requires a huge amount of toil and pious sacrifice for each person to earn their share of this abundance. And yet it does. Every time I try to discern why, it always comes back to the same thing. Everything is owned. On the very large scale, everything is owned by a relatively tiny handful of people. And those people absolutely depend, for their absurdly outsized fortunes, on everybody else working for them. The owners of everything want you to work for them. It's exactly as you say. It's feudalism. Wealth inequality is feudalism.
  • hamilyon2 10y ago
    The problem is that without those pople up there we lose quote a bit of efficiency as a sosiety. Game theory does not work out without owners.
    • orbifold 10y ago
      Such arguments are such nonsense, that you should probably not make them without going into much more detail. It is common knowledge that almost all macro economic models we currently have are very crude approximations, so you are in no position to deduce anything with the certainty and "it's game theory" attitude that you seem to have. In other words: Economics is not physics, there you say something like "Well, energy is always conserved" or "This does not work because of the second law of thermodynamics", you can't do that with "Game theory".
      • laughingman2 10y ago
        Yeah, the people the very people who will snigger at someone selling "quantum healing" defend economic theories which have no scientific rigor. And the worse part is the dominant theories operate in a manner that they are self fulfilling. Capitalism promotes monetary profits as the incentive because humans are self interested. is one among them, but is it the other way around? Is the system manufacturing behaviors that it takes for as a cause? I was reading Debt : The 5000 years, where the author, an anthropologists makes the case of how capitalism destroyed the communal behavior of tribes in different parts of the world.
• kyleblarson 10y ago
  You should start a company, grow it to a multi billion dollar market cap, and give away your generated wealth.
  • zaroth 10y ago
    That's pretty much exactly what Jeff will end up doing. He can either give it away or the government will take more than half of it. Unless he manages to crack that whole mortality thing.
    • thinkling 10y ago
      Many other multi-billionaires in the US have signed the Giving Pledge [0], promising to give away more than half of their net worth to charity. Gates, Paul Allen, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, Michael Bloomberg have all signed. Even Larry Ellison! But not (yet) Jeff Bezos, or for that matter Sergei Brin or Larry Page. [0] https://givingpledge.org/ https://givingpledge.org/
• obstinate 10y ago
  A person with a single dollar to their name will have a higher net worth than a significant fraction of the world. I have never found "more wealth than" to be a useful relation to think about.
  • Sone7 10y ago
    That fraction of the world is significant though. You're talking about millions of people who have so much less than nothing that they will have to work for years just to get to $0. With all our technology, our wealth, our sophistication; all the work of our ancestors and the sacrifices they made, all the works and understandings they developed, and the ability to transmit this knowledge at the speed of light and for damn near free; with the incredible bounties of the earth, the ocean, the sun, plants, animals, fungi - with all that, why should so many people be in such a hole, working their arses off as they make wealthy people wealthier? While you may feel privileged to have a single dollar to your name, 8 people have more dollars than 3.5 billion people. That points to real, catastrophic injustice endemic in our systems and societies, even our belief systems.
• GhostVII 10y ago
  His wealth doesn't really come at the cost of the wealth of others though - he has probably been a net benefit to society through job creation and investments and things like that. If wealth was a zero-sum game it would be different, but it is not.
• maverick_iceman 10y ago
  I don't see anything wrong in people becoming super rich by exploiting their talents in the free market. That's the opposite of feudalism. The alternative was tried in Soviet Union and Maoist China. The results were not exactly pretty.
  • myowncrapulence 10y ago
    There is no "alternative". Government can be approached from a million different ways. To say it's black or white (capitalism vs communism) is completely self-serving and offers no real insight into the fundamental complexity of human civilization.
• thomastjeffery 10y ago
  The problem is not that there are people with huge sums of money. The problem is that groups of those people have an acute control over legislation and policy.
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• Illniyar 10y ago
  It might or might not be unjust, but feudalism is all about the hierarchy of oaths- it is about distribution of power - you give power to those sworn to you and in turn they give it to those beneath them. Jeff bezos having lots of money is an oligarchy, not feudalism.
  • Retra 10y ago
    Board of directors hires a CEO. Gives them funding and requires they produce a return. CEO hires upper management. Gives them funding, requires return. Upper management hires middle management. Funding, demands return. Etc... This is a hierarchy of oaths. It's just not as ceremonial as you've put it. It's also not directly agrarian (and territorial) as you'd expect from a medieval feudalist regime, but the basic structure is still present.
• Aron 10y ago
  Amazon quite frequently makes my life better. On the other hand, I can't remember ever experiencing a difficult situation because Bezos is rich.
  • bromuro 10y ago
    > Amazon quite frequently makes my life better because you can finally buy more things and own more things and consume more things. how does this make your life better?
    • vixen99 10y ago
      That is not your call since you're not in a position to assess the profound meaning of the word 'better' in the mind of another individual. In my case 'consuming' a lot of books costs money and definitely makes my life better but someone else's choices are for them to make and not for me to pontificate over.
    • saiya-jin 10y ago
      you are clearly envy-trolling but I'll bite - if things like education, portable device with access to all of human knowledge so far, buy clothing, basic equipment to your hourse/apartment, sporting equipment, buy camera to capture your happy moments for rest of your life, enjoy your favorite movies and so on... yes, it improves lives a bit or more, on super-massive scale.
• puranjay 10y ago
  It boggles my mind to think that a single individual is worth more than entire countries.
  • thinkling 10y ago
    You're confusing capital with annual income. You can't buy a country for the value that it produces in a year.
• jcchen 10y ago
  Sorry, I couldn't disagree more. While Jeff Bezos' upbringing isn't exact destitute, his rise from a modest background[1] to extreme riches is evidence to me that the American system still works to some degree. No offense but I think going all the way to conflating this with feudalism slightly discredits and damages efforts to fix real problems in our society such as increasing wealth gap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_educ...
  • croon 10y ago
    Examples of something isn't proof of a system working. I'm more inclined to say that the low number of examples is proof that the system ISN'T working. There should always be motivators (like money) for people to work harder, take risks, invent things, and fill a spectrum. I'm not sure if that spectrum needs to be in factors of millions though, instead of say, 100-1000s. And I'm not saying anything about Bezos in particular. He really is self-made, but for everyone of him there are 100s of (patently less rich) inherited top 0.1%:ers. But did he work millions of times harder than someone else? Did he risk that much? I'll gladly work TWICE as much/hard for 5-10 times the reward. A lot of people do, for diminishing returns.
  • peletiah 10y ago
    Owning a 25,000-acre farm is a modest background and his rise therefore evidence that the American system still works? Rather sounds like he was born into a sufficiently privileged environment and all the benefits that come with it (Mainly an educated background and discipline to work hard). A Jeff Bezos from a "lesser" background might have strayed from this path earlier due to the circumstances of his upbringing. Of course the status quo is hardly comparable with a feudalist system, but the stark inequality you are born into is very much - and even more so the difference in wealth and power between "regular people" and the super-rich.
• fanzhang 10y ago
  Thought experiment: if you could destroy half of Bezo's wealth with the push of a button, would you do it? (Not dollars, but actual wealth -- imagine he has thousands of houses and you are allowed to legally demolish them with the push of a button). It would reduce inequality, and increase everyone else's relative economic standing, and probably make many people feel better in comparison.
  • afterburner 10y ago
    Why destroy? Why not tax it and use it?
  • JCharante 10y ago
    But why? He earned it.
    • saiya-jin 10y ago
      it's a good comment when you look at half posts here - pure envy how unfair the world is, how he doesn't deserve it and so on. it doesn't matter how hard he worked (from 0), how talented he is. no, he has too much and should burn in hell and have his money taken from him. it's one of the more sad days on HN - I held general audience here in higher esteem. well back to work
• petre 10y ago
  Stop worrying about inequality. It fixes itself. http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/apocalypse-is-the-only-path-to-equality-says-the-new-p-1792442570 http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/apocalypse-is-the-only-path...
• cperciva 10y ago
  According to Oxfam, you too have more wealth than hundreds of millions of people. They're counting net worth, and lots of people are in debt. If you use a metric which is more in line with subjective wealth -- say, assets or sustainable annual consumption -- then the it doesn't seem anywhere near as crazy. Basically, Oxfam is exploiting a bug in how people misunderstand wealth.
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• acalderaro 10y ago
  Should we celebrate that a single individual has provided millions of dollars worth of value to society through innovation and willful exchange by all parties? Or should we be saddened that most of society fails to provide similar value, despite having similar access to education, ability, and capital?