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Gave money to Amazon, which funneled it to a single individual. I think in a perfect society, this sort of cash flow would be severely tempered.

adventured 10y ago
> which funneled it to a single individual. You mean, which funneled a small fraction of it to a single individual. Bezos individually got more of it than anybody else, however to pretend that he got all of it, is silly. Total non-stock compensation paid by the business. Total stock compensation paid. Total investor return since inception. Total benefit to all consumers in convenience and savings. Total benefit to the investor return derived and that capital being put to further use in the economy. And on and on the calculation goes. The money has been funneled to hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of investors overall and millions of consumers (savings from aggressive margin pricing, or just value from various useful products Amazon has provided such as Prime), spanning decades. Bezos has likely gotten a low single digit percentage of all the value Amazon has created for everyone.
- archagon 10y ago
  And yet he's now one of the richest people in the world. As an employee, is Bezos really a million times more valuable than a typical Amazon engineer? That seems almost self-evidently unfair to me. I think in a truly just society, the multiplier on the amount that a single individual could be compensated compared to his or her peers would have a hard cap. It would solve so many societal problems and also incentivize corporations to run more like collectives instead of fealties. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple would still exist, just as they do today; after all, their founders didn't get started out of the desire to make big bucks. But there wouldn't be any oligarchs on the other end of the pipe. Not that it's likely to happen, of course! A person can dream...
  - guskel 10y ago
    It's the reward for past work, not current. Imagine kid A studies really hard during his youth and doesn't get to have any fun because he's working so hard. Kid B likes to slack off and party and do drugs. If Kid A grows up and makes it big, why does kid B deserve half? Why should he deserve any portion? You could tax kid A's wealth but you can't tax kid B's youth and pleasure. Why put a cap on on kid A's wealth if you are not putting a cap on kid B's leisure time? We put no such caps on anything else whether it be beauty, intelligence, number of friends, popularity even though all of these things cause disparity.
    - archagon 10y ago
      Well, I'm not necessarily suggesting that wealth be distributed equally throughout all society. But maybe we would be better off if wealth and ownership operated on a more human scale. Even in a massive company like Amazon, no matter how hard A works or how much B goes on Reddit, A will never be one million times more valuable than B. That sort of piece-of-every-pie money is an absurdity. In my fantasy economy, A could still be rewarded for their hard work, but perhaps on the order of millions instead of tens of billions. There's no intrinsic reason why people should be able to acquire material wealth with no upper limit. I strongly believe that in order to build a better world, we have to stop thinking in terms of people "deserving" things and instead focus on what's better for society overall.
      - rohit89 10y ago
        If you put an upper limit, you'll have people stop once they hit that limit. Why would you go after that billion dollar idea when you are hard capped at millions? Nobody would ever go after moonshots. If we're talking about fantasy economies, IMO we should move to a system where we don't need money at all. Money is basically a way to partition access to limited resources among people. Except, outside of this planet, resources are near infinite. With complete automation and unlimited access to space, everything would be free with our only real cost being energy - which luckily, is also near infinite given the billions of stars in the universe. Something like Wall-E but less dystopian.
        10y ago
824ueirwfjd 10y ago
> I think in a perfect society, this sort of cash flow would be severely tempered. The problem is if we had your society, there would be no Jeff Bezos or similar capitalistic-minded entrepreneurs to create these mega companies in the first place. Remember it started out small.
- archagon 10y ago
  I think most of the big players today would have started out just the same. People like Jobs & Woz, Page & Brin, Bezos, and Musk didn't get in the game to make billions, at least at first. They wanted to change the world, or maybe pursue an interesting opening, or perhaps chase after a fascinating new technology. In a more equal society, these instincts would hardly be curtailed. And even if you're right, maybe a world without mega-companies wouldn't be such a bad place after all?
  - rohit89 10y ago
    The fundamental issue here is human behavior. Whatever system you come up with, people will come up with ways to turn it to their advantage.
  - sobani 10y ago
    Musk is a nice example. He probably would've started the same, but Tesla and SpaceX wouldn't have existed / been the same as today. Remember that at some point Musk had poured all his wealth into those companies and they were one failure away from bankruptcy. If Musk had any less money after PayPal, he couldn't have done what he did.
    - archagon 10y ago
      In this alternate universe, PayPal could have morphed into PayPalphabet and spawned other companies corresponding to Musk's interests. I think that would still work fine as long as the money stayed within the company and out of executives' hands.
      - 10y ago

adventured 10y ago

> which funneled it to a single individual. You mean, which funneled a small fraction of it to a single individual. Bezos individually got more of it than anybody else, however to pretend that he got all of it, is silly. Total non-stock compensation paid by the business. Total stock compensation paid. Total investor return since inception. Total benefit to all consumers in convenience and savings. Total benefit to the investor return derived and that capital being put to further use in the economy. And on and on the calculation goes. The money has been funneled to hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of investors overall and millions of consumers (savings from aggressive margin pricing, or just value from various useful products Amazon has provided such as Prime), spanning decades. Bezos has likely gotten a low single digit percentage of all the value Amazon has created for everyone.

archagon 10y ago
And yet he's now one of the richest people in the world. As an employee, is Bezos really a million times more valuable than a typical Amazon engineer? That seems almost self-evidently unfair to me. I think in a truly just society, the multiplier on the amount that a single individual could be compensated compared to his or her peers would have a hard cap. It would solve so many societal problems and also incentivize corporations to run more like collectives instead of fealties. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple would still exist, just as they do today; after all, their founders didn't get started out of the desire to make big bucks. But there wouldn't be any oligarchs on the other end of the pipe. Not that it's likely to happen, of course! A person can dream...
- guskel 10y ago
  It's the reward for past work, not current. Imagine kid A studies really hard during his youth and doesn't get to have any fun because he's working so hard. Kid B likes to slack off and party and do drugs. If Kid A grows up and makes it big, why does kid B deserve half? Why should he deserve any portion? You could tax kid A's wealth but you can't tax kid B's youth and pleasure. Why put a cap on on kid A's wealth if you are not putting a cap on kid B's leisure time? We put no such caps on anything else whether it be beauty, intelligence, number of friends, popularity even though all of these things cause disparity.
  - archagon 10y ago
    Well, I'm not necessarily suggesting that wealth be distributed equally throughout all society. But maybe we would be better off if wealth and ownership operated on a more human scale. Even in a massive company like Amazon, no matter how hard A works or how much B goes on Reddit, A will never be one million times more valuable than B. That sort of piece-of-every-pie money is an absurdity. In my fantasy economy, A could still be rewarded for their hard work, but perhaps on the order of millions instead of tens of billions. There's no intrinsic reason why people should be able to acquire material wealth with no upper limit. I strongly believe that in order to build a better world, we have to stop thinking in terms of people "deserving" things and instead focus on what's better for society overall.
    - rohit89 10y ago
      If you put an upper limit, you'll have people stop once they hit that limit. Why would you go after that billion dollar idea when you are hard capped at millions? Nobody would ever go after moonshots. If we're talking about fantasy economies, IMO we should move to a system where we don't need money at all. Money is basically a way to partition access to limited resources among people. Except, outside of this planet, resources are near infinite. With complete automation and unlimited access to space, everything would be free with our only real cost being energy - which luckily, is also near infinite given the billions of stars in the universe. Something like Wall-E but less dystopian.
      - 10y ago

824ueirwfjd 10y ago

> I think in a perfect society, this sort of cash flow would be severely tempered. The problem is if we had your society, there would be no Jeff Bezos or similar capitalistic-minded entrepreneurs to create these mega companies in the first place. Remember it started out small.

archagon 10y ago
I think most of the big players today would have started out just the same. People like Jobs & Woz, Page & Brin, Bezos, and Musk didn't get in the game to make billions, at least at first. They wanted to change the world, or maybe pursue an interesting opening, or perhaps chase after a fascinating new technology. In a more equal society, these instincts would hardly be curtailed. And even if you're right, maybe a world without mega-companies wouldn't be such a bad place after all?
- rohit89 10y ago
  The fundamental issue here is human behavior. Whatever system you come up with, people will come up with ways to turn it to their advantage.
- sobani 10y ago
  Musk is a nice example. He probably would've started the same, but Tesla and SpaceX wouldn't have existed / been the same as today. Remember that at some point Musk had poured all his wealth into those companies and they were one failure away from bankruptcy. If Musk had any less money after PayPal, he couldn't have done what he did.
  - archagon 10y ago
    In this alternate universe, PayPal could have morphed into PayPalphabet and spawned other companies corresponding to Musk's interests. I think that would still work fine as long as the money stayed within the company and out of executives' hands.
    - 10y ago