4 ms·

The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear. Can you honestly point to Bezos and say he is

The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear. Can you honestly point to Bezos and say he is "worth" 196,100,000 times more to society than the Amazon warehouse worker who has $1000 in the bank? Did he put in 190 million man hours more than the Warehouse worker? Did he have ideas that were 190 million times better? What kind of IQ would you need to pull that off? It a matter of good ideas, some long hours no doubt, right time, right place and leverage the work of many thousands of others. Smart work, but not worth 190 million times his lowest paid. This level of wealth inequality is indicative of a broken system.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear No one knows how much someone is "worth to society". Not me, and not you. Not even Bezos. This is not even a well-defined question. But what we do know is that this is not what money measures, and attempts to politicize that -- to create some algorithm that decides what someone is worth to society, and then pay them according to that algorithm, always lead to terrible outcomes. In the same way, we don't know how good or evil Bezos is, and neither is money a measure of good points net evil points. The sooner we abandon these weird discourses around money, trying to endow it as some kind of metaphysical tally, or make it conform to some metaphysical tally, the better.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I like your comment. Discrete "worth to society" is indeed a vague and nebulous idea. And money doesn't measure that, nor serve as a cosmic measure of morality. If you remove wealth as being an indicator of worth to society, then Bezos has one less reason for such wealth. The only reason he has the money is that he played the game well. But society makes the rules of the game and I think they should change.

rsj_hn 5y ago

> The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear No one knows how much someone is "worth to society". Not me, and not you. Not even Bezos. This is not even a well-defined question. But what we do know is that this is not what money measures, and attempts to politicize that -- to create some algorithm that decides what someone is worth to society, and then pay them according to that algorithm, always lead to terrible outcomes. In the same way, we don't know how good or evil Bezos is, and neither is money a measure of good points net evil points. The sooner we abandon these weird discourses around money, trying to endow it as some kind of metaphysical tally, or make it conform to some metaphysical tally, the better.

_carbyau_ 5y ago
I like your comment. Discrete "worth to society" is indeed a vague and nebulous idea. And money doesn't measure that, nor serve as a cosmic measure of morality. If you remove wealth as being an indicator of worth to society, then Bezos has one less reason for such wealth. The only reason he has the money is that he played the game well. But society makes the rules of the game and I think they should change.