5 ms·

If you want people to fight inequality with you, you have to first prove to them it's actually a problem. It's a bit of a leap to convince somebody that just b

If you want people to fight inequality with you, you have to first prove to them it's actually a problem. It's a bit of a leap to convince somebody that just because Bill Gates is much richer than the typical person, somebody more deserving must have gone without for him to get so rich.

zepto 9y ago
Yeah - especially when the opposite is much more likely to be true.
greggman 9y ago
Random semi-related anecdote Japanese video game companies pay like 1/3rd or less what USA video game companies pay in salary. AFAIK similar things are true for other industries. Maybe not as bad as 1/3rd but that's not relevant to the point below. In Japanese school (17 years ago) my teacher brought up the topic that CEOs don't get paid as much in Japan so it's more equal. My response at the time was "why do I care that my USA CEO makes 100x my salary and my Japanese CEO only 10x, the 100x CEO is still managing to pay me 2x to 3x more than the 10x CEO." How true that is overall I have no idea. I can say that video game programmers in Japan with 15 years experience make less than interns at Google.
- Frondo 9y ago
  What I don't get is how people can hear "the CEO makes 100x what I make" and not then think "there's a lot of money in this company, I should be paid a heck of a lot more". Cause you know it's not just the CEO that's taking a big chunk of change. Why be content with what you're given, even if it's a lot, when you could be demanding more, cause you know it's there?
  - greggman 9y ago
    Actually I thought the opposite. I thought, AFAIK this Japanese company is making similar income to USA companies, why can't they pay similar salaries. I've never found out the answer. It could be an answer like taxes are high or other costs are high. It could be the fact that you can't easily get rid of bad employees in Japan and that eats up costs. It could be that they don't pay for experience, they hire out of college with no experience, especially Japanese colleges which have a reputation for not teaching anything, that would mean maybe the company costs are years of training their inexperienced employees up to western graduate levels. I have no idea and I'd love to know. But, whatever it is I think I'd like them to fix it so they start paying similar salaries to their USA counterparts.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
It's not a leap at all. MS lost an anti-trust case. There were good legal and ethical reasons why MS in general and Gates in particular had to admit in a public courtroom that "cutting off the oxygen supply" to their competitors meant destroying other companies and other people's livelihoods. Aside from that, once a company gets big enough it effectively becomes a kind of proxy mini-government in its market space, and smaller entrepreneurs either work with it and pay tribute for market access, or sometimes simply pay for the right to continue to exist. And even then there's no guarantee that they really will be allowed to exist. This is what inequality means. It's not just about poor people having no money and rich people having plenty of money. It's about inequality of power and influence.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  What you say is true, but it's also true that convincing people of this reality is hard. There's a counterfactual world somewhere where everyone is slightly better off because the MSFT monopoly was broken, and tech progressed faster than it did in our world, but people find that kind of thought process tricky, and it involves making enemies of someone rich and powerful in our actual world.

zepto 9y ago

Yeah - especially when the opposite is much more likely to be true.

greggman 9y ago

Random semi-related anecdote Japanese video game companies pay like 1/3rd or less what USA video game companies pay in salary. AFAIK similar things are true for other industries. Maybe not as bad as 1/3rd but that's not relevant to the point below. In Japanese school (17 years ago) my teacher brought up the topic that CEOs don't get paid as much in Japan so it's more equal. My response at the time was "why do I care that my USA CEO makes 100x my salary and my Japanese CEO only 10x, the 100x CEO is still managing to pay me 2x to 3x more than the 10x CEO." How true that is overall I have no idea. I can say that video game programmers in Japan with 15 years experience make less than interns at Google.

Frondo 9y ago
What I don't get is how people can hear "the CEO makes 100x what I make" and not then think "there's a lot of money in this company, I should be paid a heck of a lot more". Cause you know it's not just the CEO that's taking a big chunk of change. Why be content with what you're given, even if it's a lot, when you could be demanding more, cause you know it's there?
- greggman 9y ago
  Actually I thought the opposite. I thought, AFAIK this Japanese company is making similar income to USA companies, why can't they pay similar salaries. I've never found out the answer. It could be an answer like taxes are high or other costs are high. It could be the fact that you can't easily get rid of bad employees in Japan and that eats up costs. It could be that they don't pay for experience, they hire out of college with no experience, especially Japanese colleges which have a reputation for not teaching anything, that would mean maybe the company costs are years of training their inexperienced employees up to western graduate levels. I have no idea and I'd love to know. But, whatever it is I think I'd like them to fix it so they start paying similar salaries to their USA counterparts.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

It's not a leap at all. MS lost an anti-trust case. There were good legal and ethical reasons why MS in general and Gates in particular had to admit in a public courtroom that "cutting off the oxygen supply" to their competitors meant destroying other companies and other people's livelihoods. Aside from that, once a company gets big enough it effectively becomes a kind of proxy mini-government in its market space, and smaller entrepreneurs either work with it and pay tribute for market access, or sometimes simply pay for the right to continue to exist. And even then there's no guarantee that they really will be allowed to exist. This is what inequality means. It's not just about poor people having no money and rich people having plenty of money. It's about inequality of power and influence.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
What you say is true, but it's also true that convincing people of this reality is hard. There's a counterfactual world somewhere where everyone is slightly better off because the MSFT monopoly was broken, and tech progressed faster than it did in our world, but people find that kind of thought process tricky, and it involves making enemies of someone rich and powerful in our actual world.