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To argue that this is purely meritocratic requires you to argue that some individuals are thousands to tens to even hundreds of thousands of times more producti

by api 12y ago

To argue that this is purely meritocratic requires you to argue that some individuals are thousands to tens to even hundreds of thousands of times more productive, intelligent, or hard-working than everyone else. While differences do exist, framing the question that way makes it obvious that the very highest levels of the income ladder are largely a result of network effects and leverage rather than productive activity. Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee? I'm starting to see the rise of "market fundamentalism" over the past 35-ish years as part of the general trend toward the naturalistic fallacy over the same time period. If it's "natural," it's by definition good. So if the "natural" free market concentrates >50% of all wealth in <0.1% of hands, well dag nabbit that's what nature obviously intended and who are you to argue with nature? Wealth redistribution or other mitigating strategies are sort of like vaccination and GMO foods-- tampering with nature and "playing God."

onion2k 12y ago
Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee? A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. So a better question would be "Has Zuckerberg made a significant contribution to ad sales and market intelligence data gathering?", in which case the answer would be an obvious yes. Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.
- api 12y ago
  This creates a problem though: If you are a highly intelligent and motivated person, you have many choices about what to do. This suggests that doing the kind of basic R&D work that might lead to the invention of the WWW is a sucker's game. You shouldn't invent wheels. Instead you should invent Ferrari's using other peoples' wheels. This over time will lead to brain drain from the realms of basic research and invention. I'd posit this as a possible explanation for the decline of fundamental innovation since roughly 1970, which coincidentally is the era when the groundwork for this shift in wealth distribution really got laid with the emergence of the "new left" and the "new right." (What I call the reactionary left and the reactionary right -- note that in both cases the naturalistic fallacy is a cornerstone of these belief systems.) I'd count myself among the drained. I decided not to do a Ph.D partly because I didn't want to take a vow of poverty to do work to make other people rich. Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. The person who puts the icing on the cake is rewarded exponentially more than the person who baked it, who in turn is rewarded exponentially more than the person who made the flour, and so on. The folks rewarded exponentially most of all are the financiers who simply move money around to fund these activities. This seems unfair in virtually every case, but it's incredibly unfair in the realm of ideas, invention, science, and technology. In ordinary manual labor the difficulty of each step tends to be similar, while in intellectual realms the fundamental steps of invention and discovery are often exponentially harder than the ones closer to the end of the line. So for intellectual work, the relationship between difficulty and importance and compensation is really pathologically skewed.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    > Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. Right. That explains why there's so much more money in gas stations than oil wells. And why HP is so much bigger than Intel.
    - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
      Gas stations are consumers of the products of oil refineries and oil wells. HP is a consumer of Intel's chips. Free markets reward business to business sales very well.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  > A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. This analogy is ridiculous. But to follow through with it it should be rewritten like this: - Tim Berners-Lee invented the wheel, the tires, the diesel engine, the windshield and the electronic that allow to roll the window down by pressing a button, the airbag and the car charger, etc. He made the car safe and usable by anyone. For free. Then he designed how those cars should behave when on the same highway. - Mark Zuckerberg built a car a century or two after Tim introduced the world to the wonders of high speed travel, painted it blue and charged[0] people for riding it. [0] That was the plan but in the end he went with social graph thingie to try to be the next advertisement agency. > Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no. Society ? More like wall-street gamblers.
rattray 12y ago
Capitalism isn't just about creating value, but capturing the value you create. Tim Berners-Lee did little to capture the value he created (and I am grateful for it!).
- api 12y ago
  Exactly. I'm a fan of markets -- they are excellent systems for allocating resources and allowing permission-free innovation. But I am not a market fundamentalist, nor do I agree with the naturalistic fallacy argument that "because it turns out that way in the free market, it is therefore right." It seems like people have lost the ability over the past 30 years or so to think in non-fundamentalist terms. Everything must be absolute. It's idiotic. In complex systems, it's actually pretty rare for the optimum point to lie at the extreme end of any variable range. Fitness peaks are almost always found at some intersection point that represents a best compromise between multiple interacting tradeoffs. History seems to indicate that a free market economy with some amount of wealth redistribution represents an optimum, or fitness peak. Experiments in extreme free markets seem to devolve into pathologically ridiculous wealth concentration, while experiments in pure egalitarian socialism seem to succumb to free rider parasitism problems and corruption. The terminal state of pure capitalism seems to be corporate/financial feudalism, while the terminal state of pure socialism seems to be the mafia state (e.g. Putinistan or the Chinese kleptocracy). Neither extreme seems either desirable or stable, and both seem to devolve rapidly into some form of totalitarianism. I'd personally advocate a simple, completely impartial system like a universal basic income or a negative income tax along with some benefits like a basic level of universal health coverage and public education. Taxation should be progressive because it's precisely at the extreme ends of the income curve that the relationship between value creation and renumeration seems to break down and become most pathological, but that progressiveness should probably be rather skewed toward the high end. The taxation curve should probably look like a hockey stick.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    "History seems to indicate"... Citation please. Look very closely at the graph. Income inequality was falling before the income tax was instituted in 1917. And not a few years later it went haywire and income inequality basically maxed out in the runup to the great depression.
humanrebar 12y ago
> I'm starting to see the rise of "market fundamentalism" over the past 35-ish years as part of the general trend toward the naturalistic fallacy over the same time period. What 35 years are you talking about? Since the 1980s, there have been massive amounts of federal intervention into the financial industry (home loans, student loans, corporate bailouts). That's to say nothing of internationalization and its effect on certain categories of jobs. > was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee? Devil's advocate: maybe there's a big element of luck involved in getting ridiculous amounts of money. Why is that a bad thing? Maybe being talented is like entering the billionaire raffle. Why is paying everyone $100k more fair than paying everyone $50k and giving some the chance at being billionaires?
- lmm 12y ago
  > Devil's advocate: maybe there's a big element of luck involved in getting ridiculous amounts of money. Why is that a bad thing? Maybe being talented is like entering the billionaire raffle. Why is paying everyone $100k more fair than paying everyone $50k and giving some the chance at being billionaires? It's not more fair, but it's more efficient. The boost in happiness that you get from having a billion dollars rather than $50k is not 19999x bigger than the boost you get from having $100k rather than having $50k. If it's really just luck, then the argument against taxing all income above a certain threshold and redistributing it evenly is pretty weak.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    > The boost in happiness that you get from having a billion dollars rather than $50k is not 19999x bigger than the boost you get from having $100k rather than having $50k. That's one perspective. Another perspective is that letting luck play a role is a more cost efficient way to get people to take big risks. Maybe people wouldn't do some things (like move to Silicon Valley to re-imagine the way we do blah blah blah) without the chance of a big payday. And taxing the big payday at extremely high rates would mute the motivation to play for the jackpot. Would as many people play slots if winnings were taxed at 90%?

by api 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago

Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee? A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. So a better question would be "Has Zuckerberg made a significant contribution to ad sales and market intelligence data gathering?", in which case the answer would be an obvious yes. Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.

api 12y ago
This creates a problem though: If you are a highly intelligent and motivated person, you have many choices about what to do. This suggests that doing the kind of basic R&D work that might lead to the invention of the WWW is a sucker's game. You shouldn't invent wheels. Instead you should invent Ferrari's using other peoples' wheels. This over time will lead to brain drain from the realms of basic research and invention. I'd posit this as a possible explanation for the decline of fundamental innovation since roughly 1970, which coincidentally is the era when the groundwork for this shift in wealth distribution really got laid with the emergence of the "new left" and the "new right." (What I call the reactionary left and the reactionary right -- note that in both cases the naturalistic fallacy is a cornerstone of these belief systems.) I'd count myself among the drained. I decided not to do a Ph.D partly because I didn't want to take a vow of poverty to do work to make other people rich. Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. The person who puts the icing on the cake is rewarded exponentially more than the person who baked it, who in turn is rewarded exponentially more than the person who made the flour, and so on. The folks rewarded exponentially most of all are the financiers who simply move money around to fund these activities. This seems unfair in virtually every case, but it's incredibly unfair in the realm of ideas, invention, science, and technology. In ordinary manual labor the difficulty of each step tends to be similar, while in intellectual realms the fundamental steps of invention and discovery are often exponentially harder than the ones closer to the end of the line. So for intellectual work, the relationship between difficulty and importance and compensation is really pathologically skewed.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. Right. That explains why there's so much more money in gas stations than oil wells. And why HP is so much bigger than Intel.
  - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
    Gas stations are consumers of the products of oil refineries and oil wells. HP is a consumer of Intel's chips. Free markets reward business to business sales very well.
johnchristopher 12y ago
> A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. This analogy is ridiculous. But to follow through with it it should be rewritten like this: - Tim Berners-Lee invented the wheel, the tires, the diesel engine, the windshield and the electronic that allow to roll the window down by pressing a button, the airbag and the car charger, etc. He made the car safe and usable by anyone. For free. Then he designed how those cars should behave when on the same highway. - Mark Zuckerberg built a car a century or two after Tim introduced the world to the wonders of high speed travel, painted it blue and charged[0] people for riding it. [0] That was the plan but in the end he went with social graph thingie to try to be the next advertisement agency. > Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no. Society ? More like wall-street gamblers.

rattray 12y ago

Capitalism isn't just about creating value, but capturing the value you create. Tim Berners-Lee did little to capture the value he created (and I am grateful for it!).

api 12y ago
Exactly. I'm a fan of markets -- they are excellent systems for allocating resources and allowing permission-free innovation. But I am not a market fundamentalist, nor do I agree with the naturalistic fallacy argument that "because it turns out that way in the free market, it is therefore right." It seems like people have lost the ability over the past 30 years or so to think in non-fundamentalist terms. Everything must be absolute. It's idiotic. In complex systems, it's actually pretty rare for the optimum point to lie at the extreme end of any variable range. Fitness peaks are almost always found at some intersection point that represents a best compromise between multiple interacting tradeoffs. History seems to indicate that a free market economy with some amount of wealth redistribution represents an optimum, or fitness peak. Experiments in extreme free markets seem to devolve into pathologically ridiculous wealth concentration, while experiments in pure egalitarian socialism seem to succumb to free rider parasitism problems and corruption. The terminal state of pure capitalism seems to be corporate/financial feudalism, while the terminal state of pure socialism seems to be the mafia state (e.g. Putinistan or the Chinese kleptocracy). Neither extreme seems either desirable or stable, and both seem to devolve rapidly into some form of totalitarianism. I'd personally advocate a simple, completely impartial system like a universal basic income or a negative income tax along with some benefits like a basic level of universal health coverage and public education. Taxation should be progressive because it's precisely at the extreme ends of the income curve that the relationship between value creation and renumeration seems to break down and become most pathological, but that progressiveness should probably be rather skewed toward the high end. The taxation curve should probably look like a hockey stick.
- dnautics 12y ago
  "History seems to indicate"... Citation please. Look very closely at the graph. Income inequality was falling before the income tax was instituted in 1917. And not a few years later it went haywire and income inequality basically maxed out in the runup to the great depression.

humanrebar 12y ago

> I'm starting to see the rise of "market fundamentalism" over the past 35-ish years as part of the general trend toward the naturalistic fallacy over the same time period. What 35 years are you talking about? Since the 1980s, there have been massive amounts of federal intervention into the financial industry (home loans, student loans, corporate bailouts). That's to say nothing of internationalization and its effect on certain categories of jobs. > was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee? Devil's advocate: maybe there's a big element of luck involved in getting ridiculous amounts of money. Why is that a bad thing? Maybe being talented is like entering the billionaire raffle. Why is paying everyone $100k more fair than paying everyone $50k and giving some the chance at being billionaires?

lmm 12y ago
> Devil's advocate: maybe there's a big element of luck involved in getting ridiculous amounts of money. Why is that a bad thing? Maybe being talented is like entering the billionaire raffle. Why is paying everyone $100k more fair than paying everyone $50k and giving some the chance at being billionaires? It's not more fair, but it's more efficient. The boost in happiness that you get from having a billion dollars rather than $50k is not 19999x bigger than the boost you get from having $100k rather than having $50k. If it's really just luck, then the argument against taxing all income above a certain threshold and redistributing it evenly is pretty weak.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > The boost in happiness that you get from having a billion dollars rather than $50k is not 19999x bigger than the boost you get from having $100k rather than having $50k. That's one perspective. Another perspective is that letting luck play a role is a more cost efficient way to get people to take big risks. Maybe people wouldn't do some things (like move to Silicon Valley to re-imagine the way we do blah blah blah) without the chance of a big payday. And taxing the big payday at extremely high rates would mute the motivation to play for the jackpot. Would as many people play slots if winnings were taxed at 90%?