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For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered vie

For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become billionares. It's that their focus on their goal allows exploitation to happen as a by product. It's not that Uber set out to exploit drivers, it's just that get their business to scale they had to lure drivers in with big incentives, and then in order to make their business viable they had to then force their costs down to the point where drivers are paid less than the cost of vehicle maintenance. It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people.

bob33212 6y ago
Right, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt as many small businesses as he could. He started with providing a wider range of books to people over the internet. For the person who wanted a specific book and was only able to get it on Amazon this is a "good" thing. For the local bookstore who is now bankrupt that is a "bad" thing. I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith that overall your company is a positive good for the world. That means that when you have a low performing employee you have to fire him even though you know that it may cause terrible consequences for him and his family.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
  - specialist 6y ago
    Yes, and: Everyone's the hero of their own story.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Small businesses are dying because of small business refusal to use technology. They would rather grumble about how "millennials won't pick up the phone anymore" to order things. In the case of small bookstores, they think it is enough to toss books on the shelf and wait for people to come browsing. Well, I can now browse from bed.
  - jariel 6y ago
    " dying because of small business refusal to use technology" This is a little glib. There's nothing most of these small business can do.
    - ghufran_syed 6y ago
      Really? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only thing they do is provide book ordering services, but amazon does it better, should amazon really feel bad about that? When you successfully pass an interview and get a job offer, do you feel bad enough for those who didn’t do as well that you turn down the job offer? EDIT: forgot to add, I suspect there are many things small bookstores could do in terms of building a local community (in-person and online) of people who love books, improving discovery options for new books from that community, that kind of thing. So maybe they should be doing that i.e. “do things that don’t scale” to try and delight their users more than amazon does, in a way where their lack of scale is an advantage?
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon seems to have just decided to lie down and die. Even big businesses facing Amazon have done very little to compete.
      - jariel 6y ago
        ""They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon"" This again, is glib. To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'. How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS? A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
- thorough 6y ago
  I’m working at my job doing just fine. My employer is pretty happy and so am I. Then a new guy comes along and says, “I can do thorough’s job better than he can.” My boss hires him and she agrees. At length, she decides to keep the new guy and fire me because he’s meeting her needs better than I am. She doesn’t need to pay me anymore. There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did. Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?
  - bambax 6y ago
    If the new guy doesn't follow regulations or doesn't pay taxes like you do (Airbnb, Uber) or if he somehow provides drugs to the boss and as a result she needs him day in and day out (Facebook), then this shouldn't have happened.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - bob33212 6y ago
    Exactly, you have to tell yourself that it is a net positive situation and move on.
- staunch 6y ago
  Amazon didn't kill small businesses. We killed them by using Amazon. And I'm glad to have participated. I much prefer Amazon passing the savings of time and money to me rather than some small business owner. The small businesses I was forced to use previously were inefficient, slow, overcharging, had terrible customer service, exploited employees, etc. As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switching to Netflix. Life is much better now for everyone who isn't a movie rental store owner, which is almost everyone. Small business doesn't mean good business and big business doesn't mean bad business. What matters to me is the net effect, and in most cases with Amazon, the net effect is very positive. The same is true for Google, Uber, and Facebook and most big tech successes. The ratio of bad:good is just worse for some of them than for others, making it harder to judge.
  - dzonga 6y ago
    this is mistaken: you need multiple small businesses because competition trumps everything. competition results in lower prices, better customer service. to amazon, though they've excellent customer support or used - you're just another customer. The small businesses you say were exploitative is because they were the only shot in town. i.e in a monopolistic position. multiple small businesses result in a robust economy. if one goes bust there's plenty to keep providing a similar service. MSB's enable other auxiliary business look at Japan | German's economy for an example - mutliple suppliers etc. more employment. Guess the jobs the masses work at amazon - drivers, warehouse workers. What amazon, provides could've been easily provided by a standardized api connecting different small merchants. some industries already do this - a flower shop needs roses, it can easily contact another flower shop to get roses to it's customers. everyone wins. netflix yeah was a net positive. it's content so end of day, it was going to be aggregated in Ben Thompson's terms. Uber is good for me as a consumer. But is it good for the driver, for the environment. if the US had robust public transportation, Uber wouldn't be necessary.
  - season2episode3 6y ago
    Small businesses are important for a whole host of intangible reasons. They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character. Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of small towns, and that’s sad because said towns were already shellacked by the death of manufacturing. It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s excellent customer experience, but the externalities involved are nontrivial and IMO outweigh the benefits.
- foobarian 6y ago
  I feel that what happened with tech is that there were two things occurring simultaneously: one, there were many new useful ideas possible to build with IT that were not possible before and that delivered genuine value. With companies like Amazon or Airbnb or Google you had genuinely motivated "builder" founders who were first to scale, kind of like when a dam breaks and the water rushes out. But, the second, more negative thing is that a lot of the inefficiencies removed by these companies were in the form of livelihoods for many people, or adherence to various regulations and laws that was a lot easier to omit with IT in the middle. Examples would be the Mom-and-Pop retail stores going out of business or Uber breaking taxi regulations. Like you said, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt Mom&Pop, it was just an unfortunate side-effect of using IT. The thing that I think pg is missing is that projects where this happens are exploitative to a degree, and is why they get rightfully criticized.
CPLX 6y ago
> It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people. I think it's even more simple than that. It's a failure to realize that everyone is the plucky hero doing things with good intentions in their story about themselves, and that others don't see him as he sees himself. So despite there being a world where the society is becoming increasingly unequal, where the average American struggles to feel financial security and those born without access to education or the right geography (or, perhaps, who just aren't as bright or ambitious) are merciless casualties of a "meritocracy" that excludes them, PG feels like he can't be the bad guy because he can't pinpoint any specific situation where he did something "wrong". His only fault, perhaps, is being a massive beneficiary of a system that is profoundly and deeply unfair and getting more that way every day, and he's not able to see that as something he's at fault for. So I have some sense of empathy and understanding for his perspective. But I think he would benefit greatly from really trying to dig into understanding what it might be like not to share his perspective and vantage point, as well as to do a better job understanding how different the world is for people now than it was in the early 1980's when he began his professional life.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  > His only fault, perhaps, is being a massive beneficiary of a system that is profoundly and deeply unfair and getting more that way every day, and he's not able to see that as something he's at fault for. If some unfair system exists, and you didn't do anything to create it (it existed before you were born), and you don't do anything to make it worse (and maybe occasionally try to make it a little better)... and the system massively benefits you... are you at fault? Why?
  - majormajor 6y ago
    You either contribute to improving it, worsening it, or keeping it the same. In two of those three cases, you are at fault (or continually become more at fault, more precisely, as the ratio of "how much it existed before you" shifts).
    - 6y ago
andy_ppp 6y ago
I think it's one of those things that happen to people isn't it, a lot like becoming increasingly conservative as you age... I wish I could find the quote but it's something like: "there's nothing like getting to the top of the system to make you think it's okay".
grenoire 6y ago
I think he should have kept the essays separate instead of trying to tie them in with shoddy argumentation. That way we could have taken his good YC advice and tear down that blindness he has fostered separately.
- postingpals 6y ago
  This is exactly right. You would think a scientist wouldn't sloppily throw out weak arguments like this. I guess he hasn't been a scientist for many decades, though.
postingpals 6y ago
Of course you don't look for people who are exploitative to become billionaires, that's like looking for someone who has grease stains on their shirt to become a chef. Graham is way off here.
Meekro 6y ago
California legislators made this kind of argument earlier this year as they tried to force Uber to reclassify their drivers as employees. California voters rejected that. Uber drivers themselves overwhelmingly wanted to keep their contractor status. Maybe they don't consider themselves exploited?
- diurnalist 6y ago
  There is some speculation (I haven't seen where the data for this preference for contractor status comes from other than "drivers surveyed") that the high preference is influenced by dark patterns in the ride-sharing apps, where the drivers are presented with in-app notifications very frequently until they indicate support. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-prop22-suit/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-pr... I'm sure many would not consider themselves exploited and prefer to be contractors, but I'm personally skeptical that the breakdowns of this opinion are as reported by the companies.
  - camgunz 6y ago
    Incredible that anyone reports this stat as useful. It's blatantly coercive. What driver wouldn't fear algorithmic reprisal from not indicating support?
- season2episode3 6y ago
  Or maybe Uber et al outspending their opponents on political advertising by hundreds of millions of dollars had something to do with it? Not to mention constant advertising for free in their apps. They had the “no on prop 22” people hopelessly outgunned. Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver app. There is/was legitimate concern that Uber et al would collect that info and retaliate. There is no recourse for this on the workers’ behalf because they don’t have a union! This is a TEXTBOOK example of why gig workers need to be given the right to collectively bargain. Now, thanks to prop 22, overturning its provisions needs a 7/8 majority in the state legislature. Aka, not gonna happen, and that’s by the design of some really cynical lawyers. More generally, the prop 22 campaign is an indictment of the referendum process, and how easily it can be abused in the absence of sensible campaign finance laws.
an_opabinia 6y ago
Maybe the more precise words are, where do the economic gains the company is concentrating into the hands of ownership come from? Where do you draw the line for how much rent is too much? Taxi drivers have always been undocumented and much poorer than the people they were driving. Uber didn’t change that, and nobody needs permission to boss a poor person around - go to a restaurant, send your kids to school, shop, you will be bossing poor people around. The remedy is immigration and labor law reform, that is something Uber actively worked against - and won! They care because the economic gain they are concentrating comes from people driving below minimum wage because they lack documents or work authorization. It had nothing to do with lures or whatever, everyone knows what the deal was. Cars could require no maintenance and people would still be screwed. Uber shut down its self driving car unit and none of that shit mattered. Nobody is out there designing cars that are cheaper, we already have $1,000 used cars, in fact all the effort pours into cars that are way more expensive. Uber blew a lot of money on incentives as long as Lyft does and vice versa, and people just drive for both and none of that shit mattered. The difference I’m trying to illuminate here is, a permanent subclass of undocumented worker is enshrined in the law. The difference between a W2 and 1099 employee is enshrined in the law. Uber spent a fortune maintaining the status quo, not creating a new one, they did not write those laws. Personally, I believe, like those guys in the 2006 Borat movie who wish they owned slaves, that people like this status quo, and that Uber could have spent 1/10th the money campaigning for Prop 22 and it still would have passed. People like cheap shit. They enshrine the divide in the law. Bernie Sanders was assailed by the NYTimes for his most divisive opinion, that if people are willing to work below minimum wage they will get the job, and that the government has enshrined that arrangement through immigration law - you’re just not seeing how deeply vested the average person is, not just Travis Kalanick is, in an exploitative status quo. Meanwhile we type this all out on iPhones. Would you rather they cost 5x as much? I don’t know, if phones cost so much more, if you could ban the exploitation of Chinese labor for real, 50% of the ultra high paying jobs of HN readers would cease to exist overnight. It would be like a pandemic hit software, instead of just Main Street. This shit is complicated, you can certainly point out that billionaires are bad people, but we all benefit from exploiting someone somewhere, and the road to justice will often visit the people who promote it. And maybe that’s why you and I aren’t out there protesting but those other people are.
cactus2093 6y ago
Based on what I see in mainstream discourse from politicians and public figures that are pushing the "billionaires are bad" idea, I think you're making a much weaker form of the argument than many are. Most of the people who make this argument really do seem to see it as a group of Good and Bad people, and are arguing that all billionaires are in the Bad group. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC have said that repeatedly in no uncertain terms. And I think this PG essay addresses that form of the argument pretty directly. What you're talking is a much more interesting conversation to be having. How can we tweak the rules to avoid misaligned incentives? And would it actually be better to end the so-called "exploitation" if it would mean killing most of these jobs altogether, when the allegedly exploited people actually have an ok quality of life and are doing this work because they like it better than their alternatives?
aspaceman 6y ago
I like this comment. People don’t do good or evil because they choose to. They have incentives or goals that push and pull against others goals. Determining right and wrong often isn’t as simple as weighing those scales or determining which is correct. As both are “correct“ but in inherent conflict. We are forced to play zero sum games regardless of our own desire. In this case, being a good CEO means making decisions that are worse for your workers over time. The world is set up in such a way to bias you towards that conclusion unless you work against it. Does that mean you’re evil if you don’t? Or if you minimize your responsibility? Perhaps. But it’s still complicated. Thinking of the world as a massive weighted graph of wants, needs, and goals can be a helpful model.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
A more or less capitalist system is more or less self correcting. Yes, billionaires gain their wealth, and yes, workers, businesses and even governments can have a poor experience with it in the process of the billionaire's company succeeding. The exploitation is real and should be discussed and appropriately addressed. A couple of thoughts... New, billion-dollar business are, many times, transformational. Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, DropBox and Stripe all transformed the market they profit from. For sure, it is difficult if not impossible to foresee how the business activities will impact the general population et al. Without foreseeing that impact, it's also difficult to mitigate the impact that the billionaire may genuinely have a moral reaction to. Is it not the nature of the beast to grow as fast as possible, damn all torpedoes, while investors and boards of directors push the business leadership forward? Running at an all out sprint means you have no opportunity to identify these moral slights, let alone address them. Perhaps the boards of directors needs a 'Moral Consequence Committee' to keep an eye on it on behalf of the CEO. I am not asking that rhetorically, by the way. Give it some thought. The second thought is that in order for the business to prevail, it must provide real value to many, many customers and make their world a better place. Uber transformed the taxi experience and yes, may have wound up in the 'vehicular maintenance arbitrage' business for a while, but anyone with faith in market capitalism should believe that this will eventually balance out and Uber and its drivers will reach a mutually acceptable compensation level.
- camgunz 6y ago
  They're not, really. They lend themselves to monopolies and oligopolies, and lead to high levels of capital concentration and thus income inequality. Government intervention is required to correct this, but hasn't in over 40 years. I'm more or less making an appeal to authority to Piketty here but, people generally agree with him.
maram 6y ago
>For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. Why is it frustrating? PG discussed an important topic I found to be very relevant in the business world to this day. Being exploitive is praised in most if not all business schools! Cut throat, shark, shrewd, it’s even depicted in movies Wolf of Wall Street, the Founder (McDonald’s), greed is good... No self made billionaire, at least in the last 100 years, was ever portrayed fairly in movies or history books! Even Carnegie Mellon!!
bored 6y ago
He's just saying "an early sign of someone unlikely to become a billionaire is their tendency to exploit others" Whether existing billionaires exploit is a separate point.

bob33212 6y ago

Right, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt as many small businesses as he could. He started with providing a wider range of books to people over the internet. For the person who wanted a specific book and was only able to get it on Amazon this is a "good" thing. For the local bookstore who is now bankrupt that is a "bad" thing. I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith that overall your company is a positive good for the world. That means that when you have a low performing employee you have to fire him even though you know that it may cause terrible consequences for him and his family.

SQueeeeeL 6y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
- specialist 6y ago
  Yes, and: Everyone's the hero of their own story.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Small businesses are dying because of small business refusal to use technology. They would rather grumble about how "millennials won't pick up the phone anymore" to order things. In the case of small bookstores, they think it is enough to toss books on the shelf and wait for people to come browsing. Well, I can now browse from bed.
- jariel 6y ago
  " dying because of small business refusal to use technology" This is a little glib. There's nothing most of these small business can do.
  - ghufran_syed 6y ago
    Really? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only thing they do is provide book ordering services, but amazon does it better, should amazon really feel bad about that? When you successfully pass an interview and get a job offer, do you feel bad enough for those who didn’t do as well that you turn down the job offer? EDIT: forgot to add, I suspect there are many things small bookstores could do in terms of building a local community (in-person and online) of people who love books, improving discovery options for new books from that community, that kind of thing. So maybe they should be doing that i.e. “do things that don’t scale” to try and delight their users more than amazon does, in a way where their lack of scale is an advantage?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon seems to have just decided to lie down and die. Even big businesses facing Amazon have done very little to compete.
    - jariel 6y ago
      ""They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon"" This again, is glib. To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'. How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS? A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
thorough 6y ago
I’m working at my job doing just fine. My employer is pretty happy and so am I. Then a new guy comes along and says, “I can do thorough’s job better than he can.” My boss hires him and she agrees. At length, she decides to keep the new guy and fire me because he’s meeting her needs better than I am. She doesn’t need to pay me anymore. There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did. Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?
- bambax 6y ago
  If the new guy doesn't follow regulations or doesn't pay taxes like you do (Airbnb, Uber) or if he somehow provides drugs to the boss and as a result she needs him day in and day out (Facebook), then this shouldn't have happened.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- bob33212 6y ago
  Exactly, you have to tell yourself that it is a net positive situation and move on.
staunch 6y ago
Amazon didn't kill small businesses. We killed them by using Amazon. And I'm glad to have participated. I much prefer Amazon passing the savings of time and money to me rather than some small business owner. The small businesses I was forced to use previously were inefficient, slow, overcharging, had terrible customer service, exploited employees, etc. As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switching to Netflix. Life is much better now for everyone who isn't a movie rental store owner, which is almost everyone. Small business doesn't mean good business and big business doesn't mean bad business. What matters to me is the net effect, and in most cases with Amazon, the net effect is very positive. The same is true for Google, Uber, and Facebook and most big tech successes. The ratio of bad:good is just worse for some of them than for others, making it harder to judge.
- dzonga 6y ago
  this is mistaken: you need multiple small businesses because competition trumps everything. competition results in lower prices, better customer service. to amazon, though they've excellent customer support or used - you're just another customer. The small businesses you say were exploitative is because they were the only shot in town. i.e in a monopolistic position. multiple small businesses result in a robust economy. if one goes bust there's plenty to keep providing a similar service. MSB's enable other auxiliary business look at Japan | German's economy for an example - mutliple suppliers etc. more employment. Guess the jobs the masses work at amazon - drivers, warehouse workers. What amazon, provides could've been easily provided by a standardized api connecting different small merchants. some industries already do this - a flower shop needs roses, it can easily contact another flower shop to get roses to it's customers. everyone wins. netflix yeah was a net positive. it's content so end of day, it was going to be aggregated in Ben Thompson's terms. Uber is good for me as a consumer. But is it good for the driver, for the environment. if the US had robust public transportation, Uber wouldn't be necessary.
- season2episode3 6y ago
  Small businesses are important for a whole host of intangible reasons. They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character. Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of small towns, and that’s sad because said towns were already shellacked by the death of manufacturing. It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s excellent customer experience, but the externalities involved are nontrivial and IMO outweigh the benefits.
foobarian 6y ago
I feel that what happened with tech is that there were two things occurring simultaneously: one, there were many new useful ideas possible to build with IT that were not possible before and that delivered genuine value. With companies like Amazon or Airbnb or Google you had genuinely motivated "builder" founders who were first to scale, kind of like when a dam breaks and the water rushes out. But, the second, more negative thing is that a lot of the inefficiencies removed by these companies were in the form of livelihoods for many people, or adherence to various regulations and laws that was a lot easier to omit with IT in the middle. Examples would be the Mom-and-Pop retail stores going out of business or Uber breaking taxi regulations. Like you said, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt Mom&Pop, it was just an unfortunate side-effect of using IT. The thing that I think pg is missing is that projects where this happens are exploitative to a degree, and is why they get rightfully criticized.

CPLX 6y ago

> It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people. I think it's even more simple than that. It's a failure to realize that everyone is the plucky hero doing things with good intentions in their story about themselves, and that others don't see him as he sees himself. So despite there being a world where the society is becoming increasingly unequal, where the average American struggles to feel financial security and those born without access to education or the right geography (or, perhaps, who just aren't as bright or ambitious) are merciless casualties of a "meritocracy" that excludes them, PG feels like he can't be the bad guy because he can't pinpoint any specific situation where he did something "wrong". His only fault, perhaps, is being a massive beneficiary of a system that is profoundly and deeply unfair and getting more that way every day, and he's not able to see that as something he's at fault for. So I have some sense of empathy and understanding for his perspective. But I think he would benefit greatly from really trying to dig into understanding what it might be like not to share his perspective and vantage point, as well as to do a better job understanding how different the world is for people now than it was in the early 1980's when he began his professional life.

waterhouse 6y ago
> His only fault, perhaps, is being a massive beneficiary of a system that is profoundly and deeply unfair and getting more that way every day, and he's not able to see that as something he's at fault for. If some unfair system exists, and you didn't do anything to create it (it existed before you were born), and you don't do anything to make it worse (and maybe occasionally try to make it a little better)... and the system massively benefits you... are you at fault? Why?
- majormajor 6y ago
  You either contribute to improving it, worsening it, or keeping it the same. In two of those three cases, you are at fault (or continually become more at fault, more precisely, as the ratio of "how much it existed before you" shifts).
  - 6y ago

andy_ppp 6y ago

I think it's one of those things that happen to people isn't it, a lot like becoming increasingly conservative as you age... I wish I could find the quote but it's something like: "there's nothing like getting to the top of the system to make you think it's okay".

grenoire 6y ago

I think he should have kept the essays separate instead of trying to tie them in with shoddy argumentation. That way we could have taken his good YC advice and tear down that blindness he has fostered separately.

postingpals 6y ago
This is exactly right. You would think a scientist wouldn't sloppily throw out weak arguments like this. I guess he hasn't been a scientist for many decades, though.

postingpals 6y ago

Of course you don't look for people who are exploitative to become billionaires, that's like looking for someone who has grease stains on their shirt to become a chef. Graham is way off here.

Meekro 6y ago

California legislators made this kind of argument earlier this year as they tried to force Uber to reclassify their drivers as employees. California voters rejected that. Uber drivers themselves overwhelmingly wanted to keep their contractor status. Maybe they don't consider themselves exploited?

diurnalist 6y ago
There is some speculation (I haven't seen where the data for this preference for contractor status comes from other than "drivers surveyed") that the high preference is influenced by dark patterns in the ride-sharing apps, where the drivers are presented with in-app notifications very frequently until they indicate support. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-prop22-suit/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-pr... I'm sure many would not consider themselves exploited and prefer to be contractors, but I'm personally skeptical that the breakdowns of this opinion are as reported by the companies.
- camgunz 6y ago
  Incredible that anyone reports this stat as useful. It's blatantly coercive. What driver wouldn't fear algorithmic reprisal from not indicating support?
season2episode3 6y ago
Or maybe Uber et al outspending their opponents on political advertising by hundreds of millions of dollars had something to do with it? Not to mention constant advertising for free in their apps. They had the “no on prop 22” people hopelessly outgunned. Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver app. There is/was legitimate concern that Uber et al would collect that info and retaliate. There is no recourse for this on the workers’ behalf because they don’t have a union! This is a TEXTBOOK example of why gig workers need to be given the right to collectively bargain. Now, thanks to prop 22, overturning its provisions needs a 7/8 majority in the state legislature. Aka, not gonna happen, and that’s by the design of some really cynical lawyers. More generally, the prop 22 campaign is an indictment of the referendum process, and how easily it can be abused in the absence of sensible campaign finance laws.

an_opabinia 6y ago

Maybe the more precise words are, where do the economic gains the company is concentrating into the hands of ownership come from? Where do you draw the line for how much rent is too much? Taxi drivers have always been undocumented and much poorer than the people they were driving. Uber didn’t change that, and nobody needs permission to boss a poor person around - go to a restaurant, send your kids to school, shop, you will be bossing poor people around. The remedy is immigration and labor law reform, that is something Uber actively worked against - and won! They care because the economic gain they are concentrating comes from people driving below minimum wage because they lack documents or work authorization. It had nothing to do with lures or whatever, everyone knows what the deal was. Cars could require no maintenance and people would still be screwed. Uber shut down its self driving car unit and none of that shit mattered. Nobody is out there designing cars that are cheaper, we already have $1,000 used cars, in fact all the effort pours into cars that are way more expensive. Uber blew a lot of money on incentives as long as Lyft does and vice versa, and people just drive for both and none of that shit mattered. The difference I’m trying to illuminate here is, a permanent subclass of undocumented worker is enshrined in the law. The difference between a W2 and 1099 employee is enshrined in the law. Uber spent a fortune maintaining the status quo, not creating a new one, they did not write those laws. Personally, I believe, like those guys in the 2006 Borat movie who wish they owned slaves, that people like this status quo, and that Uber could have spent 1/10th the money campaigning for Prop 22 and it still would have passed. People like cheap shit. They enshrine the divide in the law. Bernie Sanders was assailed by the NYTimes for his most divisive opinion, that if people are willing to work below minimum wage they will get the job, and that the government has enshrined that arrangement through immigration law - you’re just not seeing how deeply vested the average person is, not just Travis Kalanick is, in an exploitative status quo. Meanwhile we type this all out on iPhones. Would you rather they cost 5x as much? I don’t know, if phones cost so much more, if you could ban the exploitation of Chinese labor for real, 50% of the ultra high paying jobs of HN readers would cease to exist overnight. It would be like a pandemic hit software, instead of just Main Street. This shit is complicated, you can certainly point out that billionaires are bad people, but we all benefit from exploiting someone somewhere, and the road to justice will often visit the people who promote it. And maybe that’s why you and I aren’t out there protesting but those other people are.

cactus2093 6y ago

Based on what I see in mainstream discourse from politicians and public figures that are pushing the "billionaires are bad" idea, I think you're making a much weaker form of the argument than many are. Most of the people who make this argument really do seem to see it as a group of Good and Bad people, and are arguing that all billionaires are in the Bad group. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC have said that repeatedly in no uncertain terms. And I think this PG essay addresses that form of the argument pretty directly. What you're talking is a much more interesting conversation to be having. How can we tweak the rules to avoid misaligned incentives? And would it actually be better to end the so-called "exploitation" if it would mean killing most of these jobs altogether, when the allegedly exploited people actually have an ok quality of life and are doing this work because they like it better than their alternatives?

aspaceman 6y ago

I like this comment. People don’t do good or evil because they choose to. They have incentives or goals that push and pull against others goals. Determining right and wrong often isn’t as simple as weighing those scales or determining which is correct. As both are “correct“ but in inherent conflict. We are forced to play zero sum games regardless of our own desire. In this case, being a good CEO means making decisions that are worse for your workers over time. The world is set up in such a way to bias you towards that conclusion unless you work against it. Does that mean you’re evil if you don’t? Or if you minimize your responsibility? Perhaps. But it’s still complicated. Thinking of the world as a massive weighted graph of wants, needs, and goals can be a helpful model.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

A more or less capitalist system is more or less self correcting. Yes, billionaires gain their wealth, and yes, workers, businesses and even governments can have a poor experience with it in the process of the billionaire's company succeeding. The exploitation is real and should be discussed and appropriately addressed. A couple of thoughts... New, billion-dollar business are, many times, transformational. Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, DropBox and Stripe all transformed the market they profit from. For sure, it is difficult if not impossible to foresee how the business activities will impact the general population et al. Without foreseeing that impact, it's also difficult to mitigate the impact that the billionaire may genuinely have a moral reaction to. Is it not the nature of the beast to grow as fast as possible, damn all torpedoes, while investors and boards of directors push the business leadership forward? Running at an all out sprint means you have no opportunity to identify these moral slights, let alone address them. Perhaps the boards of directors needs a 'Moral Consequence Committee' to keep an eye on it on behalf of the CEO. I am not asking that rhetorically, by the way. Give it some thought. The second thought is that in order for the business to prevail, it must provide real value to many, many customers and make their world a better place. Uber transformed the taxi experience and yes, may have wound up in the 'vehicular maintenance arbitrage' business for a while, but anyone with faith in market capitalism should believe that this will eventually balance out and Uber and its drivers will reach a mutually acceptable compensation level.

camgunz 6y ago
They're not, really. They lend themselves to monopolies and oligopolies, and lead to high levels of capital concentration and thus income inequality. Government intervention is required to correct this, but hasn't in over 40 years. I'm more or less making an appeal to authority to Piketty here but, people generally agree with him.

maram 6y ago

>For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. Why is it frustrating? PG discussed an important topic I found to be very relevant in the business world to this day. Being exploitive is praised in most if not all business schools! Cut throat, shark, shrewd, it’s even depicted in movies Wolf of Wall Street, the Founder (McDonald’s), greed is good... No self made billionaire, at least in the last 100 years, was ever portrayed fairly in movies or history books! Even Carnegie Mellon!!

bored 6y ago

He's just saying "an early sign of someone unlikely to become a billionaire is their tendency to exploit others" Whether existing billionaires exploit is a separate point.