Being on this site implies disagreement with the idea that hard work correlates to better pay in a typical company. HN, to a great extent, reflects the ethos of startup culture in general and PG in particular. That, in turn, means that the median HN reader is on board with statements like "a large company can't accurately measure your work; no one incapable of measuring your work can compensate you appropriately for working hard" and "part of the point of joining or founding a startup is to let the market judge your hard work directly instead of filtering that judgment through layers and layers of corporate bureaucracy - even though you risk that that judgment may be 'your hard work is worth zero dollars.'"

This is not to say that I like that state of affairs - I agree with Keynes when he says "Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward." The fact that in the average company, effort and reward are distantly and indirectly related, I claim is a major, major, social and moral problem. That state of affairs corrodes the rule of law and attacks the stability of a society. Stability is a prerequisite to entrepreneurs getting interesting things done - remember the recent article here about Argentinian entrepreneurs and the crippling effects of a currency that collapses every decade or two? Stability means, to pull from PG's essays again, that honest accumulations of wealth won't be plundered. Stability of that sort is a prerequisite to rewarding entrepreneurship - and that sort of stability is disappearing in the US, generally on account of the very same people who are responsible for disconnecting effort and reward at typical corporations. The financier class (and the political class that they have purchased - in this regard, the last four US Presidents are clones of one another) is eating everyone's seed corn. That's deeply harmful to those of us who want to have our labor judged by the market, because without stability and the rule of law, it is impossible for markets to operate efficiently.