Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement.
It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.
Yeah, I'm curious why this essay was written. A week after having finished spending (evidently) quite a while writing two essays about economic inequality and your personal role in increasing society-wide inequality, why the sudden change to caring about spending time with your kids? And why the need to say this out loud?
This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned criticism (of which there was quite a bit). If pg wants to spend time with his kids, good for him, that's certainly going to be more fulfilling than arguing online. But throwing arguments over the fence and then proclaiming the desire to spend time with your kids genuinely does not seem fulfilling.
No, there's no connection with this essay and the last one. He's been thinking about writing about this topic for a long time. In fact, one of the things Paul and I talk most about is that life is short and we need to savor time with our kids and do things that are meaningful to us. So trust me when I say that, as PG's wife, I believe you are mistaken.
Dutch is a language of proverbs. One of them is 'High trees catch a lot of wind'. The further you stick your head out the bigger the chance that someone will try to score points of you, either by picking apart every word you wrote or by mis-interpreting if possible every little turn of phrase. This goes with the territory of being very visible, and Paul is now a fairly high tree in the tech landscape his essays offer easy hand-holds to those that wish to practice their written wrestling skills. This will likely get worse as YC goes on to more and more successes (pretty much un-avoidable with the speed the snowball has been going down-hill).
Since plenty of people reading Paul's essays are more than capable of figuring out the intent rather than taking pot-shots at the form in which that intent was cast I don't think given the choice between playing 'someone's wrong on the internet' and spending time with your kids there should even be a contest. On the other hand, action begets reaction and there isn't an essay that Paul wrote that did not have its share of discussion and picking apart so maybe simply accept that and totally ignore the responses?
Enjoy the time you have while you can, indeed, life is too short and I wished I could spend and had spent much more time with my kids. Before you know it they'll be borrowing your car keys and all those years that feel like they will last forever will have vanished.
Well don't lose your faith on HN's sense of humor, there are some of us who do get the joke :) maybe next time add a /sarcasm tag or such? I admit that it will water-down the effect, but it is better than nothing!
While it's possible that that caused pg to write this essay when he did, the position articulated in it is completely consistent with what he's been saying for a long time. And a glance at his Twitter feed makes it clear that he finds joy in being a dad and makes it a real priority.
Wide disagreement? Sure, the people who disagreed wrote essays, but people who agree are usually invisible (how do you write an essay about agreeing with some other essay? and why would you bother?). I think the reason some people got so riled up was that there was so much uncomfortable truth in those essays. Just as people usually don't bother to post when they agree with something, they usually don't bother to post when they disagree with something that is obviously nonsense. Graham's essay created the perfect storm by hitting a raw nerve with a vocal community -- but that doesn't mean there was "wide disagreement."
People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong. And as one of the hyper-rich he has a bully pulpit with which to broadcast his thoughts.
Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.
Regardless of my personal perspective, this is unfair. He stated a position which is not only widely disputed, but the dispute over which has an entire field of media and academics devoted to it, and which routinely splits the population roughly half and half (look at basically any election result in the western world). And he disagreed with your side. He's in the other 50% of the population from you.
To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)
This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.
This isn't really about red vs. blue -- the "red" side acknowledges massive wealth inequality as a genuinely bad thing as much as the blue does (recall the president most known for trust busting, and recall the 'R' next to his name -- Republicans like markets, not wealth inequality). The two sides just have different explanations for what causes it and what will resolve it. This is about understanding an issue. The essay is indefensible; many, many people have taken the opportunity to eviscerate it because it presents such an easy target. There are plenty of other HN threads for you to peruse if you need specifics.
Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.
I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.
Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.
I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.
You have your history all wrong. If you try to squeeze the Republican party of 1900's economic policy into the current American liberalism vs. conservatism spectrum (I say squeeze because obviously the political positions of that time were different than today's), they would be liberal, and the Democrats of that time would be conservative.
So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.
If you pay any attention to current political discussion, e.g. the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality. They describe it as a problem just as the Democrats do.
And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?
What? The New Deal was socialist, which is liberal on the American political spectrum. Calling it part of American conservatism is clearly untrue.
Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.
I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).
> [T]he new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?
The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.
> the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality.
That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.
Funny story: not being american, my red and blue are the other way around. I'd recommend not interpreting this in terms of US politics. I'd even more strongly recommend not making claims about the beliefs of the side which you don't support.
If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".
Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.
If you aren't interpreting this in terms of US politics you are completely missing the context, so it makes sense how you could have misunderstood the essay/issues. PG lives in the US, works in the US, every word of what he says is in that essay is about US economics/culture. His essay is a response to the US movement to recognize and deal with income inequality, one of the primary issues US politicans are handling in preparation for the US presidential election.
And you used two paragraphs to state a rhetoric 101 textbook's definition of "straw man" -- that's not what I'm doing.
He doesn't have a "bully pulpit" because he's hyper rich. He's been writing fantastic essays that have been widely shared for much longer than YC has existed (including one responsible for modern spam filters which made email usable again 16 years ago).
Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.
The Bayesian spam thing was already known before the essay.
Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.
This is the basic political argument that defines society.
>"His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped."
Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.
>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."
Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.
>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation
But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?
The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.
One loophole was the use of corporate benefits in lieu of higher pay. So yes, ideally you should organize to capture your value. Either in a startup, or a union, or a country, or a planet. Wealth is not capital. It is human ingenuity.
How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.
> But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time?
Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.
> People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting [sic] our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong.
What did he get wrong, specifically?
The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.
He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.
Really? I don't think that at all. Sikh guy here whos extended family back at home actually have to deal with poverty and could definitely use some just start up generating inequality in the area. There is just inequality.
In general I think you're right regarding uncomfortable truths riling people up, but my response to PG was more out of a desire to correct what I perceived to be incorrect thoughts on PG's part.
I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.
I read some "rebuttals" to the previous essay, and while there were definitely some valid points brought up, a lot of them seemed to me to have misinterpreted a lot of what was said. PG tweeted about feeling like a lot of his side of the "debate" was pointing out that he hadn't said something. [1]
From PG's essay "Economic Inequality": "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them... Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a rather breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty, its causes and its inhabitants. This blames poor people for being poor.
How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?
From later in the same essay: "Louis Brandeis said 'We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve."
Again: this sounds like PG saying "In the choice between fostering political power in people at large and concentrating money in the hands of those who already have it, I'll choose the latter." What's there to misinterpret?
I thought this essay, without context, was very sweet. Life is too short. But read as a non-response to critics of the "Income Inequality" essay it takes on a callous tone.
>> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources.
> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?
FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.
If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.
> if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
That argument is still missing the point. Variations you will always have, but no guarantee that the same people would come out on top, unless you believe that the hardest workers happen to mostly come from well-financed backgrounds and caucasian gene pools. There are many people who work hard all their life and never make it out of the slums. Working hard is not a differentiator, it's what gets you a seat at the table. On the way up everyone works hard. Slackers don't even compete. The difference between those who make it to the top and those who don't is mostly not effort, it is opportunity, and good instincts to leverage that opportunity. In a truly fair world the people who came out on top would be an almost completely different set of people than those who are at the top today.
I feel like the criticism of the essay was not because of its content but its theme. It felt like a defense of the current system, whether taken narrowly as SV or broadly as global capitalism. This struck a nerve because most people in their gut know that the current system is fundamentally unfair and needs to be replaced by something better. It cannot be a good system that made it so that the set of people who own as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion all fit on a yacht, and not even a very big one. People got angry because they thought he was defending the way things are, even if his actual position was more nuanced.
It's a weird essay. I think it goes wrong from the very beginning. From the second paragraph:
[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.
I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.
The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.
Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.
I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.
How is the idea that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income a "breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty"?
It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income and it's also true technology acts as a lever and is increasing the variation in productivity between people.
At no point did PG say anything like what you claim it "sounds like" he is saying. The essay was an argument to attack rent-seeking, and other bad behaviors, but not the variation in productivity. It also argued that even if all rent-seeking were eliminated, there would still be variations in income because some people are far more productive than the average.
>>How is the idea that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income a "breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty"? It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income...
No. Productivity has nothing to do with income. You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory. That doesn't mean you will make a lot of money.
Income inequality exists and has been growing because those at the top have been reaping the increases in productivity of those at the bottom. In fact that's the entire debate: employee productivity has massively increased since the 70s, but wages have not reflected this.
> You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory.
You are using a non economic definition of productivity, and he is using the economic one. In Economics, productivity is the value of what is produced, not the quantity.
This is really the heart of the debate: what is the origin of wealth? Is it mostly productivity, people working hard and reaping the benefits? Or is it mostly opportunity, people being in the right place at the right time, and reaping the benefits?
Where you fall on pg's essay is defined by your answer to that question.
Keeping in mind that PG is a venture capitalist -- as in, a financier -- how should we apply your interpretation of his essay to PG himself? His current job is incubating companies and then collecting returns, so are you saying that PG was arguing that he is the problem?
A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).
If you truly don't think he is contributing to wealth creation, I can only surmise that you really don't understand the job he performs and the wealth created by people who are good at that particular job.
Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.
His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.
He's providing incredible value/wealth to the startups he advises and invests in. I'd also argue that his essays are a great deal of wealth given to the world.
No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
If we found a way to give everyone the same opportunities, there'd still be economic inequality. Is inequality what we should attack? It's probably better to attack the undesirable causes directly. The essay made this point clearly.
> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy.
If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?
You are missing the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition. PG's argument is that being driven is necessary, not sufficient. You have to be driven to get rich doing a startup, but being driven on its own is not enough. Thus, you can be driven and poor.
He then weakens his claim even further, as quoted in the parent: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality" such that he admits doing something really productive is not the only source of inequality. So, there is really nothing in there that implies either of things you suggest.
PG strongly implies that wealth can be created by anyone with enough drive and determination. Put another way, if you are not creating and amassing wealth, it's because you don't want it hard enough. To quote from his essay:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
No, it doesn't imply that at all. It doesn't say anything about the people that aren't creating and amassing wealth. It simply says, of the people that are getting rich, most of them are driven. The thing you could get away with saying it implies is that you could have all of the other positive attributes and opportunities of those people, but not be driven and fail. It doesn't say anything the people without the opportunity or positive attributes to get rich, because being driven is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency ]
From the perspective of that quote, the people getting rich in finance that would be switching into startups already have the combination of sufficient positive attributes and opportunities, including the necessary condition of drive/determination. If they lacked those things, they wouldn't be in that group of people that would have gotten rich in startups.
PG points out that being driven is not a necessary condition for being rich: "there are a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a lot who get rich by playing games that though not crooked are zero-sum."
Since the skills necessary to succeed in finance are distinctly different from those necessary to succeed as a startup founder, I assumed that the essay was attributing success to the one attribute it specifically calls out: determination.
I read it as claiming that there are lucky driven people, unlucky driven people, lucky undriven people, and unlucky undriven people. And then that most rich people fall into the first category.
This is totally compatible with all poor people being in the second category, and no poor people being lazy (3rd and 4th categories).
(I disagree with his essay, but for different reasons than this.)
I see what you mean, but wouldn't that make PG's point a tautology? If the difference is "productivity," and "productivity" is defined as the intersection of luck and drive that make people rich, then all PG is saying is that "the irreducible core of [economic inequality]" is having come into possession of wealth.
It really seems like one can either read PG's essay as a Randian screed or as poorly argued cant. I saw it as the former, but I can understand reading it as the latter.
> then all PG is saying is that "the irreducible core of [economic inequality]" is having come into possession of wealth.
Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive.
Seems true to me, although entirely irrelevant to the topic of real world inequality.
So then he's back to saying that inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others. Another way to phrase that would be to say that those with less money are simply less driven. Put in uncharitable terms, they would be poor because they were lazy.
It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
> [saying] inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others [=== saying] those with less money are simply less driven.
Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).
You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."
Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.
> Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
This is in the context of a hypothetical universe where "the only way left to get rich is to start startups." In that universe, PG asserts that the driven will do well, thereby creating inequality. Since we know inequality exists, some will have done less well, and "determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
To go back to what you said earlier, this isn't directly relevant to real world inequality. But the essay posits this hypothetical world as a parabolic justification for economic inequality. The essay acknowledges that "few successful founders grew up desperately poor" but refuses to engage in any discussion of why. It will only examine a simplified universe, which allows the author to make implications about the real world and then hand wave any reactions away when others engage with those implications.
If you think it was a justification of inequality then you are reading it wrong. His argument is that there are good things which inherently produce inequality, so it is too non specific of a target. We're better off attacking rent seeking and poverty than inequality as a whole.
PG claims that if all other avenues to wealth are shut off, then the driven and determined will "do well" at starting startups. That is not at all the same as saying that all successful startup founders are driven.
If the game is more equitable the tall centers or the driven founders will do better. If bribing the ref/lawmakers is an option then this is less true.
It does imply that, actually. This is a life or death topic for millions worldwide and he decided to trample all over by making an argument in a vacuum. There is a great deal of circumstance, nepotism, and luck that goes into success, and the essay read as very juvenile coming from someone as wealthy as he is.
Generally as a matter of rhetoric one does not pick out a single attribute to predicate of a class of people, unless one wishes to imply that other classes do not possess the attribute, or that the attribute is a sufficient condition for membership in the class.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".
Draw a 2x2 matrix of people who "got rich" (i.e. experienced significant rise in wealth) and are "fairly driven". This will give you four groups:
1) Got rich and weren't driven.
2) Got rich and were driven.
3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.
4) Stayed poor but were driven.
pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.
Is that the gist of the argument?
The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me). The topic of economic desparity has become such a hot and emotional one that it seems impossible to have an honest conversation about what it really looks like, what are the causes and effects, etc. It seems very important to me that we drop the tribalism and fighting so that we can have an honest /argument/ about this topic.
There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
>Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me).
He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?
I skimmed the linked article and searched it for "envious losers" but didn't find the phrase you mention. It did have a nasty tone, and seemed more like a personal attack and attempt to incite anger than a reasoned response to the ideas presented.
The article presents, as an image (presumably for archiving purposes in case the tweet is deleted), a tweet from pg saying, and I quote:
@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.
(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")
As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.
"How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?"
I don't see how he advocated a position that poor people deserve to be poor. He advocated a position where being rich is ok. These are two different things. It also focuses discussion on economics - eliminating mega-wealth should not be made priority, but the focus should be placed on poverty minimization.
He suggests that social mobility is highly correlated with non-laziness (whether expressed through hard work, not hard but smart work, natural curiosity, drive to tinker with stuff, or ability to deliver on a project started without letting the inertia set in).
That does not mean that poverty is correlated with laziness.
The only logical conclusion that follows is that laziness is not highly correlated with social mobility, e.g. people who are poor and lazy have not statistically been exposed to much social mobility.
You're using the colloquial definition of productivity while PG was using the economic definition. The economic definition has nothing to do with how hard you work--it has to do with your economic output. Bill Gates working at McDonalds would be tremendously unproductive (by the economic definition). A farmer who works the land manually is much less productive than one who uses a tractor, even though the manual laborer is probably working "harder" than the technology-enabled one.
I tend to read with a charitable eye, so I don't take the same meaning as yourself. But, he's chosen an expression that allows a lot of interpretation.
The way I read it, I assume we're talking about a cohort, and the point is, on average, the least lazy of the cohort will probably do better.
The least lazy people participating in a ponzi scheme get more money?
Obviously not, so what you're assuming and/or implying is that life is fair, that the rich deserve their success and the poor are lazy, which is exactly the point people are arguing, so you're begging the question.
You can choose to spend your debate time defending the sanctity of the original point, or you can choose to follow the ideas that are brought to you. You can look for the kernel of intent, or you can try to swat people away for making logical fallacies.
Debate isn't always about winning. Sometimes it can just be a back and forth exploration of an interesting subject area. But you have to treat it that way.
I quoted PG paragraph by paragraph in my response... seems hard to misinterpret things that way. I think PG probably had more thoughts on the issue of income inequality which perhaps he thought were clear in his essay, but in fact were not clear to readers primed by awkward wording at the start.
It's pretty hard to misinterpret a lot of the things he wrote, though.
I think this is true but hardly surprising. The average participant in an argument on the Internet is interested not in the truth but in winning. Who wins an Internet argument is thought by that participant to be decided by the audience, which is less clever than the debaters and wants quick, emotionally satisfying resolutions. It is therefore a winning strategy for him or her to ignore nuance and instead attack straw men and try to humiliate the opponent. Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement is inverted on Twitter.
Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.
I didn't read it as him suggesting that he'd stop writing, just that he'd make a conscious effort to stop defending himself from online attacks. I agree that it would be terrible if he quit writing his essays.
I think you're interpreting pg correctly. But isn't posting an essay "arguing online"?
An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.
I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
I don't know what you mean by bubbling. The overall essay produces a quite useful heuristic. Perhaps the specific example is inspired by recent experience... But it has power for me.
It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.
Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.
I think Paul Graham is just sharing his thoughts openly. He has his up and downs like everyone, but he has a public too. It's his way of sharing his inner thoughts and he's got all the rights to express himself.
Nope, you've completely missed the point. This entire conversation is a waste of time, for example. And yes, I am self-aware and realize that I'm adding zero value too. People will reference his "long-form" for years, while this conversation will be forgotten within days. Don't waste your time on things that add zero value, or are quickly forgotten.
I disagree. This is an important topic in life. Too bad he published this one just after the previous ones about wealth inequality.
Having lost my parents some time ago and having two kids I can concur with his sentiments fully and can confirm they are spot on.
The incentive to respond to acidic comments and trolls in online discourse is a pervasive feature of the medium - and it seldom creates any value. Thus it's a perfect example of useless bullshit. The discussions are usually ephemeral in nature - quickly forgotten - and not influential. This is not to say there are no influential discussions - but that at the heat of the moment most discussions feel more important than they really are.
Graham’s essay that got dumped on was hardly an “original thought”. The whole “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” schtick is as old as civilization, and Graham’s version was a particularly lazy and poorly argued one.
I think PG highlighted pretty well the mechanisms which drove away wealth inequality in the last century. I think PG commented only on the upper end on the wealth distribution scale and was of the opinion it is not a problem. He did not comment it's ok for people to be poor. These issues are not completely linked. Economics are not a zero sum game. The wealth distribution curve can hypothetically have any shape. That it tails to ridiculous numbers in the larger end is not the problem. The problem is the price level in the society, and how the wealth distribution is spread in relation to this average level. I don't think he expressed any opinions on the shape of this distribution. And this has at least three things of concern, not one. The average price level , the shape of the wealth distribution and the total wealth in the society are all dynamic.
Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.
The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw concern for the truth out the window and optimize for indignation, other standards drop as well. I don't know if it's true that sharks go crazy when they smell blood, but that's what this effect reminds me of. It seems to be worse these days, and the Principle of Charity might be a rampart against it.
It's worth trying, but it probably won't work. The bitterness in this thread can't be countered with social pressure, and you can't ban people for appearing disingenuous. They believe what they're writing. These comments aren't coming from people in a mindset to observe their own actions from a distance, which is what the Principle of Charity requires.
When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and that it's a moral imperative to change the minds of whoever opposes them, "zealot" is one way to describe this situation. It seems to be the underlying force behind all this bitterness.
Scrolling down in hopes of finding a reasonable comment is a recipe for disappointment. Worse, it adds fuel: Many of these comments are from people fed up with zealotry.
Ideally, the mean-spirited comments would be whisked away to the bottom of the thread, where they belong. But they're not offtopic so they can't be detached.
I've often wished for a way to view a thread without any nesting, i.e. like /newcomments but for one specific thread. That way I could at least come back later without having to scroll past the same tired meanness. It'd be a lot easier to spot the gems posted as replies.
You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.
That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.
Check how long I've been here. Not only did I know all of that, but it's the entire reason why I left a reply, and why I've stayed on the site. The goal was to characterize the problem for you in a way that you may not have considered, and I was trying to be thorough about it. (I also tried to come up with some new idea so that it wouldn't read as a complaint, even if it was probably a bad one.)
Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.
I find it odd that a comment urging us to interpret others' words charitably begins by attacking the motives of the author of a comment under discussion. If you were jacobolus, would you find this response charitable?
It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.
PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it—not just morally, but also practically, in the sense that it is harder to eradicate."
This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.
> PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it.
Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate.
> He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it
This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways.
But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to:
“we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward”
Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.
Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice.
(Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.)
But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”.
Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it.
* * *
Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him.
From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis.
As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site.
Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet.
Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
(Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.)
In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
"I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan."" - Christopher Hitchens
You're acting as if the correctness of pg's views is relevant to your misconduct on this site. But the two have nothing to do with each other. It's against the values (and rules) of HN to misrepresent what someone said or personally attack them in order to vent your spleen, regardless of how wrong they are.
> “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle
Yes, in the society and economy we are discussing this is a universally accepted principle.
Bob is a farmer. He has the same amount of land as his neighbor, but he works twice as hard, and grows twice the number of crops to sell in a year. He has twice the income. No one would reasonably claim that he's entitled to none of what he produced. Bob's greater productivity than his neighbor is a source of income inequality - he earns twice as much!
There is a mainstream view that society has the right to tax Bob's income, so he does not receive all of what he creates. That's the debate: how much is fair? Maybe it's fair for Bob to have twice the income of his neighbor, or maybe less than twice as much. Unless Bob gets the same as his neighbor, there's income inequality because of differences in productivity.
No farmer is going to singlehandedly earn a million times what his neighbor earns. However, because of technology, this is now possible in some industries. For example, Notch is a game designer, and he singlehandedly makes a game that sells 20 million copies. Notch now has a vast income that far exceeds the typical game designer. Is this bad? What is bad about 20 million people choosing to give Notch their money in exchange for his game? I don't see anything wrong or unjust about this.
PG's essay points out that income inequality is a complex phenomenon, with multiple causes, some that are good (small groups or individuals creating amazingly valuable things) and some that are bad ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential"). PG's essay from my perspective serves to make the point that perhaps not all income equality is bad, and that there deserves to be more thought on the topic of "how much is bad?" or "what causes of income inequality are bad?", instead of treating income inequality as a one-dimensional issue that is intrinsically bad.
From my perspective, PG's point is fair. Income inequality is not intrinsically bad: when people work hard, improve, and become more productive, they earn more, leading to income inequality. This incentive to improve and produce is good, in my opinion. Perhaps what we as a society should be tackling are bad problems like "kids with no chance of reaching their potential", rather than considering income inequality to be a problem ipso facto.
I am not sure this analogy illuminates differences in productivity and resulting inequality as described. If everyone on earth had the same equal piece of land then it can be argued that the tax rate (as property taxes are) would not be on the income but fixed on the basis of the size of the land. So whatever Bob gets out of his land he would pay the same fixed amount of tax that Tom does.
But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.
Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.
None of those PG communicates with believe that all income inequality is bad.
This is exactly one of the main problem with the essay. He argues against a position only very very few people really have. But it goes further than that.
PG is right claiming that you can't stop how technology creates inequality. But he is wrong if he believe that this wealth is created purely from risk taking and hard work. Of course those who are wealthy mostly work hard, but so does everyone else.
But the real issue of course is that if we can't stop technology to keep pushing wealth for some into extremes and for others to keep stalling then the wealth created is mostly due to luck and access to the right people and some timing. Not unlike a Powerball ticket but just of being born into the right context.
And so if PG wanted to show he actually understood the issue.
Instead of arguing against some straw man he could have spent some time on using his otherwise amazing ability, to think out of the box, to put forward some thoughts on how society could deal with this. Then he would have at least shown some understanding of the people he was talking about.
Instead he basically says. It's going to continue like this, but don't worry it's better than the alternatives and it's going to be good again.
Why would anyone who doesn't stand to benefit from this ever accept such a position?
I just don't see PG's thoughts as well developed here as they are in other areas and no amount of historical context is going to change that.
Who are your family members that are poor? I hate it when a specific class of people tries to get us feel bad about inequality when we personally know through our extended families what poverty actually is and that inequality isn't whats propelling it, it's what's saving us. The just types of inequality of course bring us more.
Lots of people will pick fights with people who have an audience (like pg) just so they can borrow that audience for a short while.
I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?
In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.
If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.
If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven.
It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.
It certainly doesn't seem like a radical idea. Most of the responses started out with some variation of "well, we didn't mean literally all income inequality is bad. Obviously some income inequality is good. We just have too much. No one actually wants perfect income equality. pg is arguing against a strawman". In that sense, he successfully pointed out that the shorthand phrase "income inequality" causes equivocation when taken literally, where both sides of it are using to mean different things.
Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?".
Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS.
I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...
> If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven.
Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal.
Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal?
Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you?
No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons.
The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)
It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.
Anyway good luck!