> 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.
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.