overrun11

This is just nonsense. Anyone can sell the stock if they wish, there is no privilege for the high-net worth. Additionally, shareholders benefit from reduced share count because it increases their claim on future profits thereby increasing compounding.

Is there any evidence that Nordic countries have higher rates of rehabilitation? The original assertions were based on terrible data: Norway has a recidivism rate of 20% because it only counts convictions in the following 2 years whereas the US counts any arrest in the following 5.

Why would that be at all concerning? His grandson is guilty by blood?

This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:

"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.

Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."

Why does it matter? It eventually gets taxed through estate tax and at a higher rate than income. This obsession with taxing them _now_ only makes sense if the point is to punish the the rich.

So every enterprise becomes state owned? Ilya Sutkever's new company is already worth 32B so 31/32 of it should be owned by the government in your world? Who makes the decisions for it?

Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.

Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...

Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.

US big tech devs typically make 3x+ what the Euro equivalent does. A 4500 deductible isn't really materially relevant. I (a US dev) have a high deductible plan but my employer contributes substantially to it anyway.

Sure but HSA is often your own money that you contributed

The private company case is worse because now it's completely illiquid. This all strikes me as a rich person's idea of what poor people want. Someone making $15/hour wants the $15 not $10 + equity in a private company worth $5 which they cannot sell but gives them 1/1000 voting rights and maybe sometimes a 7 cent a quarter dividend subject to board approval and market whims.

Most workers are not sophisticated investors and I'd rather they put excess savings into broadly diversified index funds instead of low quality equity in whatever small business they happen to be working at.

Yes both the money and the stock are incentives and they are of equal value. You've still failed to explain why one is better than the other.

There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.

Anyone can invest in public companies, how is it unattainable? I genuinely do not know what you or the article writer are referring to when you make this point.

The company profiled, Central States Manufacturing, has compounded at 20% per year since its formation in 1988 (according to the article). In comparison, Amazon has compounded at 23% since its IPO in 1997. If you are lucky enough to be a worker at an employee owner company that has 1 in a million anomalous stock growth you will do very well. This is not surprising.

World wide public equities have grown at 5% real over the longest datasets available, 7% for US based companies. Even these numbers are misleading because company returns are heavily left skewed: a small minority of companies do tremendously well and the rest are stagnant or shrinking. From 1991 to 2020, 55% of US stocks underperformed 1 month T-bills. From 1926 to 2016, 4% of stocks have outperformed the total stock index.

I do not see what is so amazing about this? If you think that employees deserve a larger share of the spoils then you can advocate that they receive more of it directly as compensation, no employee owned corporation needed. If they will make the same on net but with some of it locked away in a single company's equity than you've just made those employees' economic situation _more_ precarious than it was before.

Non-employee equity ownership arises naturally but these articles always try to paint it as the result of the nefarious machinations of top-hat wearing capitalists. Suppose this company needs more capital than employees can raise but won't or can't take on new debt. Equity must be sold to outsiders.

The article also wrongly suggests that owning equity is exceptionally difficult without employee owned companies: "it's hard for most people to get ownership in something." But we have a whole public equities market that anyone can participate in and innovation has only made it easier over time. Index funds have made diversification automatic, fractional shares have solved daunting investment minimums and payment for order flow has eliminated transaction fees and concern about getting a fair fill price.

Your example assumes 100% gross profit margins which is unlike any company I've ever heard of.

I am apparently the only one that liked the article a lot. It's certainly a lot better than the original Graeber article which to me is a masterclass in stumbling over well known paradoxes and puzzles in economics and substituting in his own deranged ideas instead of the generally accepted answers among actual economists.

But these empirical findings do not contradict Coase's theory of the firm at all. Workers are paid to be available and do work as needed.

Everything Graeber brings up has an explanation in basic economic theory but he makes no attempt to meaningfully engage with it or even show he is aware an alternative explanation exists.

You'd think people on a startup accelerator forum would understand power laws.

Prices are signals carrying information about how valuable consumers find a product. When you artificially dampen the signal, you reduce the incentive to produce below the societally optimal amount.

This is the Econ 101 argument. If you think drug prices are "too high" then you need to refute it directly.

Your link says Novo earned 12B total in net profit not just from Ozempic. It seems like most of Novo's profits do not come from Ozempic so the profit from Ozempic would be substantially lower.

If the conclusion were the reverse then we wouldn't be reading about it.

> Google says that each worker it fired actively disrupted its offices, while the workers dispute the claims, saying some of those fired did not even enter the company’s office on the day of coordinated demonstrations against the company.

Isn't this a pretty critical point that the Washington Post should have looked into a bit more?

There's a fringe political theory popular among those influential in education policy that smart students need to be artificially constrained for the good of society. This view is deeply unpopular with the general public both right AND left.

Is it any wonder people are losing trust in this system?

The stats I've seen show that homeschooled students do substantially better on tests than their public school counterparts. I'm open to the possibility that those stats are wrong but you should at least address that if you're going to take the "homeschooling produces only indoctrination" line.

If most homeschoolers are flat-earthers teaching their children that fossils aren't real and are STILL crushing public schools on science, math and reading tests– then that is an embarrassing indictment of public schools.

Did you go to college? If so you probably also learned from people with almost no training in teaching. Somehow every college professor in America teaches just fine without this supposedly crucial "training on how to teach."

I also hope you aren't learning online from people like Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown), Salman Khan (Khan Academy) who also have no formal training. Side note: I can't name a single popular online teacher that keeps from a typical teaching background.

Not allowing people to criticize things without direct personal experience is a bizarrely high standard. I wonder if you hold others to this same standard on issues you agree with?

Individual teachers should definitely not be deciding curriculum as they are not experts in the fields they teach.

*guilty twice

Of course it's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to remove people from society so they cannot continue to inflict harm on others.

> People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations.

Having to get an office temp job for minimum wage at 24 isn't ideal but it's a stretch to call it "desperate" and somehow justifying pushing opiates.

> what it's like to be someone below the poverty line

Which he wouldn't have been with the job options he had available at the time.