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One approach might be to compare how much wealth someone is attempting to attain with how much they could conceivably be outperforming the average person. For
by harimau777 5y ago
One approach might be to compare how much wealth someone is attempting to attain with how much they could conceivably be outperforming the average person.
For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.
- jonfw 5y agoWhat if our elite 30x productivity person takes a significant risk? If he flips a coin and wins he should rightfully expect 60x And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person. For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day. The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person. If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.
- harimau777 5y agoI agree, it's perfectly reasonable for someone who takes a risk to receive more than I do. I could even see them receiving hundreds of times more than I do. That's a lot different than them receiving 8000 times more ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122 thousand).