My reasoning for thinking that treating them as distinct is a poor model is that it indicates a missing level of abstraction, or perhaps just an incorrect splitting of the reality of human interactions (both status and finance). It’s not carving reality at the joints.
I’d probably advise starting with the actual argument you want to make, and then generalize from that, rather than (or really, in addition to) first-principles pondering. If you’re trying to understand your intuition about billionaires, pick a few that you admire and a few you don’t, and see if you can identify the clustering criteria. My suspicion is that ALL of them are incredible organizers, visionaries, etc. AND incredibly privileged from birth, with no hesitation to make use of their extractive capabilities. So any differences in your opinion of them must be some other things.
Thanks; I’ll give this some thought. The initial conversation involved someone else arguing that the people working in Amazon warehouses deserved to be getting the money from Amazon, as opposed to Jeff Bezos, and that didn’t seem right to me, even though I couldn’t refute that the warehouse workers were doing a large percentage of the actual day-to-day work.
By thinking about it this way, I can refute with the point that work is compensated by wages, while investment is compensated by shares. Even though the warehouse workers (or stonemasons building the bridge) are doing labor, they aren’t bearing the risk of the enterprise, either monetarily (in investments that could become worthless) or personally (in years of their life “invested” in getting the enterprise started, or being the name in the headlines if it all fails).
My reasoning for thinking that treating them as distinct is a poor model is that it indicates a missing level of abstraction, or perhaps just an incorrect splitting of the reality of human interactions (both status and finance). It’s not carving reality at the joints.
I’d probably advise starting with the actual argument you want to make, and then generalize from that, rather than (or really, in addition to) first-principles pondering. If you’re trying to understand your intuition about billionaires, pick a few that you admire and a few you don’t, and see if you can identify the clustering criteria. My suspicion is that ALL of them are incredible organizers, visionaries, etc. AND incredibly privileged from birth, with no hesitation to make use of their extractive capabilities. So any differences in your opinion of them must be some other things.
Thanks; I’ll give this some thought. The initial conversation involved someone else arguing that the people working in Amazon warehouses deserved to be getting the money from Amazon, as opposed to Jeff Bezos, and that didn’t seem right to me, even though I couldn’t refute that the warehouse workers were doing a large percentage of the actual day-to-day work.
By thinking about it this way, I can refute with the point that work is compensated by wages, while investment is compensated by shares. Even though the warehouse workers (or stonemasons building the bridge) are doing labor, they aren’t bearing the risk of the enterprise, either monetarily (in investments that could become worthless) or personally (in years of their life “invested” in getting the enterprise started, or being the name in the headlines if it all fails).