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Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the intent of this post is.

Seemingly, it's to encourage people to start a company, because it's so easy now and you can get rich (look at all these people in the top 100 that got there by starting a company!)

But I'm not sure looking at the top 100 is a compelling argument. That's for the 0.0001%. How does the top 10% do? The top 25%? What about the median outcome?

More than that, what are the trade-offs? (hint: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/)

Now, I'm all for encouraging people to start their own companies. But this just strikes me as a not very good argument for it. Hell, using similar logic, there is a better case to be made to buy bitcoins and HODL (everyone that bought in 2012 an held made 1000x return!)

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I think the point of the article was to demonstrate that the "wealth disparity" we are seeing nowadays is not due to parasitic rent seeking behavior, but due to genuine creativity and the creation of things people want to buy, and also that this was the norm except for the mid to late 20th century.

I think the parent point stands, though. Using the 100 richest individuals as a proxy for measuring and commenting on wealth disparity isn't very helpful. These people have always been outliers. A meaningful discussion would look more broadly at the top 10%, 1%, and 0.1% groups and investigate why they have been accruing wealth at a much higher rate than the bottom 75%/50%/25%

I think it is more meaningful with regard to what the article is after, in that it shows the paths to the top very clearly and how that has changed over the years. You could get a clearer picture with your approach of how on average the paths upward have changed, but I don't think that was the goal of the article.

Pg looking at the top 100 people and giving his essay the heading "How People Get Rich Now", makes for a very distorted definition of "rich". How many hundreds of millions or billions does it take to be rich in his eyes?

When argumenting based on statistics, labeling of the graph or text is where the ideology really shines through.

I think the relevant part here is the discussion of the Gini coefficient.

There are those who argue that the increase in the Gini coefficient (i.e. increase in inequality of wealth or income distribution) means that the U.S. is diverging from its historical pattern of more equal wealth/income distribution and that this must be addressed.

Pg's counterargument is that this is actually mean-reversion, and that the comparanda are actually divergent.

This is somewhat important as it goes to the question of whether Gini coefficients tell us what they're relied on for, what a "good number" is, and if we do decide on a good number what the impact of the required policy changes would be.

Mean reversion to human historical norms is something we, I would think, most fervently wake up each morning to work to avoid. We have stuck our heads up out of the muck; on wards and up wards!

What number of companies are created vs those that made people rich? I think the numbers would paint a different picture than what is implied by the article narrative.

The top lotto winners gained their wealth from winning the lottery!

> But I'm not sure looking at the top 100 is a compelling argument.

It seems to be very compelling. Most people spend more energy writing about, worrying about, or praising Bezos, Musk, and Gates than they do the rest of the top 0.1% richest people combined. Perhaps it's not a good argument. But it's compelling.

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