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Ties in well with Paul Graham's essay "Mind the Gap": It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than anot

Ties in well with Paul Graham's essay "Mind the Gap": It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? [6] These things don't scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it's concentrated in one individual. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

asgard1024 12y ago
This Paul Graham's essay is hands down the best argument for libertarianism I have ever read. Yet, even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that), this doesn't entirely account for some 7 or so magnitudes of wealth and income disparities we see in the real world. The problem is, in modern society, almost nobody deserves to be paid for the work they do (I don't know about you, but my life would be exactly the same without Steve Jobs and random American athletes). We have automated almost everything, and the biggest chunk of productivity is due to capital (and innovations of our ancestors). So the question, how is this capital controlled and distributed, becomes central. (That's why many people here so oppose intellectual property - essentially the privatization of public information, which is analogous to land enclosures during 18th century.) So I think, if someone genuinely thinks that people should be paid based on value which they personally bring to society, he shoots himself to the foot. This value is probably too small for a living wage. That doesn't mean the improvements are not useful; it's just all the low hanging fruits have already been harvested.
- patio11 12y ago
  even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that) That's not very hard to imagine, at all. Take a guy who flunked out of 8th grade due to his inability to read. Point him at a computer. Ask him to fix a problem in a Ruby on Rails application which you've benchmarked an intermediate engineer at requiring 1 day. If the problem is solved within 1,000 days, he's within 3 orders magnitude of that engineer's productivity.
- deleted 12y ago
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asgard1024 12y ago

This Paul Graham's essay is hands down the best argument for libertarianism I have ever read. Yet, even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that), this doesn't entirely account for some 7 or so magnitudes of wealth and income disparities we see in the real world. The problem is, in modern society, almost nobody deserves to be paid for the work they do (I don't know about you, but my life would be exactly the same without Steve Jobs and random American athletes). We have automated almost everything, and the biggest chunk of productivity is due to capital (and innovations of our ancestors). So the question, how is this capital controlled and distributed, becomes central. (That's why many people here so oppose intellectual property - essentially the privatization of public information, which is analogous to land enclosures during 18th century.) So I think, if someone genuinely thinks that people should be paid based on value which they personally bring to society, he shoots himself to the foot. This value is probably too small for a living wage. That doesn't mean the improvements are not useful; it's just all the low hanging fruits have already been harvested.

patio11 12y ago
even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that) That's not very hard to imagine, at all. Take a guy who flunked out of 8th grade due to his inability to read. Point him at a computer. Ask him to fix a problem in a Ruby on Rails application which you've benchmarked an intermediate engineer at requiring 1 day. If the problem is solved within 1,000 days, he's within 3 orders magnitude of that engineer's productivity.
deleted 12y ago
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