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There's a false dichotomy in a lot of these discussions. There isn't a contradiction between helping society and making money. Virtually every legal way I kno
by nirvana 14y ago
There's a false dichotomy in a lot of these discussions. There isn't a contradiction between helping society and making money. Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society.
The money you make comes from somewhere- generally customers who are parting with it. Why are they parting with it? Because they prefer what you're buying to the alternative.
People spend, in the aggregate, because it makes their lives better. Even hoarders drowning in needless stuff are spending the money to assuage the pain they would feel if they didn't.
The vast majority of software has a serious positive impact on the customers lives. We may wonder about Instagram, but instagram made a LOT of people happy. Making people happy is a positive benefit to society.
Plus, lets remember what money is. Money is a medium of exchange, its not the thing itself. It is a medium for trading your labor or your intellect. A ditch digger rents his body out at work in exchange for money. When he buys shoes, the money is simply they conveyance of the value from digging the ditch to the person selling the shoes.
When a software developer uses his brilliance to come up with a new program, he's trading his brainpower for whatever he ends up being with that money. Money is the medium that enables efficient transactions where barter failed. That's all.
Money is really another way of saying life.
People don't trade their life away, generally, except where it is profitable.
You make a billion bucks by making something people want? You've improved their lives probably by 7-9 billion dollars worth.
$7 for a movie? Worth more than $7 in entertainment to the person buying it... or they wouldn't buy it.
You don't get to be a millionaire by making people miserable.
(and I need to get a blog going, I think my comment is longer than the original article.)
- masenghi 14y ago>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society. HFT and Domain squatting are legal.
- aay4 14y agoThe people who make money doing this will spend the money on goods and services, which in turn benefits the people involved in providing them.
- Estragon 14y agoActually, the HFT people are more likely to sock their winnings away. Anyway, "I take money from people so that I can increase the national GDP by spending it" is not much of an argument for a socially valuable way of life.
- PKop 14y agoSock money away where, in their mattress? No, in the bank, money market, investments, etc. thereby increases the available funds for others to start businesses, take out loans, provide liquidity to the market. "Take money from people", you mean engage in a mutually beneficial and agreed upon transaction where you take money and give a product or service... yea not the same as theft.
- Estragon 14y agoI don't agree with "mutually beneficial" in either case, and "agreed upon" is murky in the case of HFT and at least somewhat misleading in the case of domain squatting. And "I take money from people to increase available funds for others' business purposes" is not much of an ethical argument, either.
- andrewfelix 14y agoYou're referring to "trickle-down economics" which is largely bunk.
- anc7937 14y agoNo, that's not. You have no idea what you're talking about. Keynesian economics, for instance, uses a similar example to justify government spending. You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords you really don't understand because you're just corroding the conversation.
- andrewfelix 14y ago>"You have no idea what you're talking about." >"You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords" Who's corroding the conversation? Keep it civil buddy.
- fredley 14y agoHence virtually? It's easy to pick out a few examples of people making money (often lots) that do have a detrimental affect on society, but it really is a very small number of people. Compare how many people you know who are making money through 'bad' jobs such as HFT and domain squatting, and compare it to the number of people you know who aren't.
- retube 14y agoHFT: provides liquidity and increases market efficiency (suppresses pricing inconsistencies) Domain squatting: allows market to set the value of a domain. Not sure what's wrong with either of these, or why they are any worse than any other business that seeks to take advantage of market inefficiencies or speculate on asset prices (after all, most businesses are some combination of the two)
- andrewfelix 14y ago> allows market to set the value of a domain By holding it hostage and waiting for the highest bidder?
- SamReidHughes 14y agoYes. That way the person who would use the domain more efficiently is more likely to get it. Remember that domains are not people, they're property, and it's okay to hold your own property hostage.
- nirvana 14y agoThis is why I said "Virtually". Seriously, think about what you've just said. Do you realize that you didn't even make a claim, you simply imply that these are somehow not beneficial to society as if it were a fact? Don't you realize that you should have made an argument here, if you're going to make that claim? Making a counter argument is simple: HFT adds liquidity giving better prices to traders, and domain squatting effectively provides a set of links to relevant sites when someone goes to a non-existent site. Shouldn't you have made an argument for your position, if it was worth making a comment? Are you really trying to derail the discussion into a debate about HFT and domain squatting? Do we really need to think of all the possible legal ways to make money that don't help society? How about recognizing that the point of my comment is correct, even if you manage to find some legal way to make money that "doesn't benefit society"?
- akiselev 14y agoWhile it is true that most of this discussion is a false dichotomy much of your claim is based upon the statement "Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society" which is coming from ignorance. I doubt you have a firm grasp of how many jobs there are, what kind of value they produce, or how to quantify that value (I don't think anyone has even a basic grasp of one of these factors let alone all three). However, one thing I don't understand is why everyone keeps talking about industries that fall largely outside of the scope of Silicon Valley. This post seems to be directed at entrepreneurs (I would guess that most employees of SV tech startups are paid more than the rest of the tech sector anyway) and it seems counterproductive to steer the discussion in the direction of the finance, law, medical, or any other industry which are (I would think) drastically different situations.
- pclark 14y agoAcademia, Teaching, Charities & Not for profit organisations all improve society and you wouldn't do any of those if you wanted to be rich.
- nirvana 14y agoPeople have gotten rich doing all of those. For instance, the head of the Red Cross makes a lot of money. So do the leaders at United Way. Further, many of these organizations arguably don't improve society. For instance, the Red Cross monopoly on blood supply significantly drives up health care costs, primarily to the personal profit of the Red Cross bureaucracy. But this is all sidestepping my point. The idea that making money is to the detriment of society is the claim I wish to dispel. My point is not that you can't help society without getting rich-- its easy to prove you can. My point is, most ways of getting rich do significantly benefit society.
- Estragon 14y agoComing from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large government research grants. And the people who do this do very well financially. There are many individual academics for whom it's not about the money, but this institutional culture corrodes altruistic motives, and selects against them.
- _delirium 14y agoI do think this is a big problem (bigger than it was a few decades ago), but I think on average it's still not mostly about the money for most scientists. People don't go into physics because they want to get rich, but mainly because they want to research physics. At least, they shouldn't, because if your main goal is making money, the physics-professor route is far from the optimal one. I agree that incentives are increasingly selecting for empire-builders, though, which is money-related. There are some people who really want to manage a big, important physics lab, and are more ambivalent about the physics itself, and those people are nowadays being selected for.
- QuestionWriter 14y agoAgreed, most of the wealth generated by most businesses is enjoyed by its customers, not its owners. Take Google or Facebook - while they enjoy huge profits now, and will in the future, their profits are dwarfed by the wealth (search and connection) they have created for their users.
- cousin_it 14y ago> $7 for a movie? Worth more than $7 in entertainment to the person buying it... or they wouldn't buy it. What if the movie sucked but the person didn't know it beforehand? > You don't get to be a millionaire by making people miserable. Why not? I can think of several ways. You could make them miserable first by advertising, them sell your product as a remedy. Or sell a positional good and let your customers have bidding wars, even though the total sum of misery remains unchanged. Or sell a good with large negative externalities.
- andrewfelix 14y agoI work in Advertising. I make very good money. I am quite sure my work has little benefit to society. Most of what I do is deception.
- klbarry 14y agoCan you give some generic example of the deception that you do? Obviously mention no brands and change the products, but I'm curious to know what you consider deception.
- andrewfelix 14y ago>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society I respectfully disagree. Here are a few examples why: - In my country 1 in 4 people are employed by the government. Their income does not come from 'customers', it comes from tax payers. Many large gov. contracts are won through corruption. - The weapons industry makes money. It benefits from war. - Paper/oil/meat/mining industries are huge, they're largely fed by non renewable and increasingly precious resources. - The food industry is making money while systematically destroying peoples health and negatively shaping societies relationship with food. - etc etc. >"You don't get to be a millionaire by making people miserable." How quickly we forget. The housing market crash was created by a whole swathe of people getting rich while making people miserable. Financiers rarely consider the consequences of their decisions, they think about the bottom line.
- marcusf 14y agoI guess it's a difference in perspectives, because in your lists I definitely see things that help society: - Government provides services. Around here, it's healthcare, schools, universities, infrastructure, defense, a justice system, social services, plain governing, etc. - The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value) - Paper/oil/meat/mining provides tangible goods that while depleting a finite resource pool still provides value today to scoitey. - etc etc.
- jerf 14y ago"The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)" Actually this is another example of a rich person talking about how it's not about the money. You think weapons are intrinsically unethical, go and talk to the hundreds of millions of unarmed "ethnically cleansed" peoples in the 20th century. Are they dangerous? Sure, no question. Ethically negative? A lot tougher call. All of those beloved government institutions are fundamentally built on there being a strong government, and when it is all boiled down, that fundamentally depends on having a government that can defend you against foreign incursion. If that is easy to forget, it is only because you are abundantly supplied with defense.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago"Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society." Gambling does not help society, and it is legal: Buy a house for x, sell it to a fool that will pay 4x, who will sell it to a bigger fool for 6x. Now houses go back to x. The only problem is that the bigger fool is the normal American or European middle class that in not an expert on economics and it has been fooled will all their savings from experts with their own money(investment banks takes the money from banks because they are the same since it become legal). You can say: "I can choose not to buy a house". But then bailouts happen and you pay for it. Invest on a company, lets call it "makebook", x money lended from pension funds, "makebook" gives (1/10000)x profits a year, sell private stocks to bigger fools for 10x("internet""cloud","social" or any other magical word companies, are the future...), and let those sell again to bigger fools for 100x. Now the company make an IPO for $100B is never going to recoup, but middle class get crushed again. http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GRPN http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GRPN Also money printing makes a lot of money, it is the main way to "make" money in the world. I mean I agree with you in what it should be, but a big part of the world does not work that way.