Hacker News Reader

Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

While inequality is not inherently a bad thing, we are starting to see the corrosive effects letting a few have too much.

I've gotten to the point where it feels like we need a Net Worth Limit. Cap it at $250 million let's say. The rich still get to enjoy a post-scarcity lifestyle, and the rest of society doesn't hang in the balance of whether our billionaire gods are benevolent or not. I doubt Jobs, Zuck and Gates would have said "Forget it" if they knew they only had the opportunity to acquire a quarter of a billion dollars. And if they did, they are probably not the sort you want to have more money than that anyway.

View on HN

The concept that one has to contend with is the assumption is order to get $N in compensation one has to provide >$N value back to society. Ex: I make $100k as a engineer, I am actually building >$100k in software per year...

By restricting ultra productive people to a capped return we're effectively disincentivizing these people from providing additional value once they've hit their cap.

additionally you can forsee the fixed per capita cap will be gamed. $250M for me, and for my spouse, and each next of kin, and each parent / uncle aunt etc. Suddenly neopotism is all over the place.

> disincentivizing these people from providing additional value ...

but the question i have is whether these people who are ultra rich really did provide the value to society that their wealth suggests.

Did bezos or zuckerberg create value? Or did they just extracted the residual value from their employees?

May be instead of a wealth cap, the cap needs to be applied at income (and also make capital gains into income). Your wealth total is uncapped, but you as a person, could not possibly have created more value than $X per year. Where X is set can be debated, but i would expect it to be less than $10mil.

What if someone really does produce that kind of value, even by your standards? Wouldn't that be a great thing for society? Would you really want to prevent that from happening?

> Or did they just extracted the residual value from their employees?

It's really hard to know the alternate history w/o Zuck, but the theory goes that these employees would have been employed in less valuable ways w/o him. Thus there is some marginal value add he brought to the table of which he captures a portion of... Of course all of this is up for debate...

The rationale is that the entrepreneur/organization bringing the greatest value to market is able to subsequently pay employees the most as well and employees will naturally migrate to their greatest opportunity. Whether it's starting their own business, staying at their current job or changing employers/careers it is up to individuals to decide their own best path.

The productivity is coming from the capital, not the people.

How do you cap Bezos at $250 million without taking Amazon away from him?

> I doubt Jobs, Zuck and Gates would have said "Forget it" if they knew they only had the opportunity to acquire a quarter of a billion dollars.

They might have if they knew their companies would be taken away from them at the first sign of success. Jobs was worth well over 250 million in 2001 (probably earlier thanks to Pixar, but cannot confirm at the moment). You would have taken Apple away from Steve Jobs before the iPhone was a pipe dream, and Pixar away from him before Finding Nemo.

Bill Gates was worth 1.25 billion in 1987, and I'm not even going to start talking about what Microsoft did after 1987 (tbf there's a case to be made that MS wasn't so great for the world after 1987, but my point that founders would totally say "Forget it" stands).

So what if they would have said "forget it", what amazing, life changing inventions would we be missing today?

Slim laptops with dust-sensitive keyboards? Windows 10 telemetry? The world moves on without larger than life characters.

Zuckerberg saying forget it would have been a great thing for everyone except Facebook and its employees, not sure why you even bothered to put him on the list.

I've had this thought before, but always come back to what happens after they hit that limit?

That's an idea worth considering perhaps.

The question is, will a cap like this produce a net negative or net positive to society?

On one hand, what's the incentive to keep being productive and innovative once the cap is reached? If we can come up with some (besides money), and they are good and desirable, it may offset some of the negative effects.

I always think of it like we don't let private citizens posses atom bombs in the US (even if they are really good people who would never use them for evil). A shotgun is fine though. Too much power in a single individual unbalances society.

But I'm really not sure what the net effects would be. Besides, as other posters have pointed out, the system would almost certainly be gamed. The hazard of too much wealth does seem real though.

Is that really the question - if it's good or bad for society? You ever read "the ones who walk away from omelas"? I'm willing to put up with a lot of really bad things to avoid getting societies hands dirty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com