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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

And yet he's now one of the richest people in the world. As an employee, is Bezos really a million times more valuable than a typical Amazon engineer? That seems almost self-evidently unfair to me.

I think in a truly just society, the multiplier on the amount that a single individual could be compensated compared to his or her peers would have a hard cap. It would solve so many societal problems and also incentivize corporations to run more like collectives instead of fealties. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple would still exist, just as they do today; after all, their founders didn't get started out of the desire to make big bucks. But there wouldn't be any oligarchs on the other end of the pipe.

Not that it's likely to happen, of course! A person can dream...

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It's the reward for past work, not current.

Imagine kid A studies really hard during his youth and doesn't get to have any fun because he's working so hard. Kid B likes to slack off and party and do drugs. If Kid A grows up and makes it big, why does kid B deserve half? Why should he deserve any portion? You could tax kid A's wealth but you can't tax kid B's youth and pleasure. Why put a cap on on kid A's wealth if you are not putting a cap on kid B's leisure time? We put no such caps on anything else whether it be beauty, intelligence, number of friends, popularity even though all of these things cause disparity.

Well, I'm not necessarily suggesting that wealth be distributed equally throughout all society. But maybe we would be better off if wealth and ownership operated on a more human scale. Even in a massive company like Amazon, no matter how hard A works or how much B goes on Reddit, A will never be one million times more valuable than B. That sort of piece-of-every-pie money is an absurdity. In my fantasy economy, A could still be rewarded for their hard work, but perhaps on the order of millions instead of tens of billions. There's no intrinsic reason why people should be able to acquire material wealth with no upper limit.

I strongly believe that in order to build a better world, we have to stop thinking in terms of people "deserving" things and instead focus on what's better for society overall.

If you put an upper limit, you'll have people stop once they hit that limit. Why would you go after that billion dollar idea when you are hard capped at millions? Nobody would ever go after moonshots.

If we're talking about fantasy economies, IMO we should move to a system where we don't need money at all. Money is basically a way to partition access to limited resources among people. Except, outside of this planet, resources are near infinite. With complete automation and unlimited access to space, everything would be free with our only real cost being energy - which luckily, is also near infinite given the billions of stars in the universe. Something like Wall-E but less dystopian.

Companies would still be able to accumulate money, and moonshots could still be pursued under corporate control. People would pursue billion dollar ideas in order to strengthen the companies they created rather than to enrich themselves.

They can already do it now and they aren't. If you have to convince the board, the shareholders etc to take on a risk that has a high chance of failure, it has even less chance of happening.

If a person has enough control at a company so as to be able to unilaterally spend its money, its not much different than having the money yourself.

>If you put an upper limit, you'll have people stop once they hit that limit.

By that logic most scientists, philosophers and mathematicians from ancient times till now wouldn't have had the incentive to do anything.

Einstein didn't discover relativity because he thought he would become a billionaire. Isn't that a "moonshot".

But the people whose contribution is fractional compared to intellectual giants think their ability to sell, market etc should be awarded with insane amount of wealth.

The rampant egotism is forgetting that we stand on shoulders of giants, on the contribution of entire society from the discovery of fire, invention of wheel, language etc till now. To ignore the casual chain of determinism, and claim "I" alone did it through my "efforts" is insane.

Different people are motivated by different things.

While its true that scientists and engineers and everyone else have done a great deal in advancing things, the sad reality is that unless someone fronts the money, nothing will get done.

>the sad reality is that unless someone fronts the money, nothing will get done.

Its not the natural law of universe which cannot be changed. We humans create the systems of economic organization. So if you agree that profit is not main motivation for many creative jobs, then perhaps the optimization function of the economy should not be to optimize for monetary profits.

So perhaps other modes of economic organization be explored?

Well, the natural law here is that we need access to resources to do anything. And money is basically a proxy for it. Until we solve the resource problem, I think other economic systems would eventually run into trouble as well. Its human nature to try to game the system.

> Its human nature to try to game the system

Or is the system is designed to give wrong incentives?

I don't think we have enough evidence for what you take as "human nature". On the contrary the anthropological studies in Debt: The First 5000 Years Book by David Graeber, we have evidence of many primitive societies behaving more communal fashion.The resources though scarce is shared with the commune.

> We put no such caps on anything else whether it be beauty, intelligence, number of friends, popularity even though all of these things cause disparity.

there are natural limits on those things whereas there are not natural limits on capital accumulation because capital isn't natural.

I don't know what system you're defending, but capitalism has nothing to do with getting wealth proportional to your individual hard work. There are plenty of Kid Bs who have much more money and income than Kid As because of they have more leverage in the free market (funds, education, even luck). I know a bunch of them...

In Capitalism, you profit from owning the means of production, not from working hard. Obviously, it can help, but not necessarily. There are plenty of start-up CEOs who worked just as hard as Jeff Bezos their entire lives, but aren't multi-billionaires, or even millionaires.

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