Recently my working definition of ‘political opinion’ became “which parts of reality did the person choose to ignore”. At least this is my usual experience when debating with people who have strong political opinions. There usually exists a standard argument that an opposing side would use against them, and the typical responses to this argument are “that’s not the most important thing; now let’s talk about a completely different topic where my side has the argumentational advantage”. (LW calls it an ‘ugh field’.) Sometimes the argument is ‘disproved’ in a way that would seem completely unsatisfactory to people who actually spent some time thinking about it, but the point is that the person has displayed the virtue of “engaging with the opponent’s argument” which should finally make you stop talking about it.
Note that this is a general complaint about human behavior, not any specific political side, because this mechanism applies to many of them. Generally, ‘true belief’ sustains itself by filtering evidence; which is a process painfully obvious to people who filter evidence by different criteria.
More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly… he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
I am not blaming him for not solving all problems of the world in a single article, but other articles on his website also go in the similar direction. On the other hand, maybe that is merely picking one’s battles; he wants his website focused on one topic, the topic where he makes money. So I’m not sure what exactly is the lesson here… maybe that picking one’s battles and being mindkilled often seem similar from outside? (If I would know Paul Graham in real life, I could try to tell the difference by mentioning the other aspect in private and seeing whether he has an ‘ugh field’ about it or not.)
I’d say that his critics are annoyed that he’s ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they’re basing their assault on Income Inequality. “Come over here and fight, you coward!”
There’s not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it’s bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.
It’s possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It’s possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn’t include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn’t hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.
Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don’t get to continue to pretend they’re the same thing in full intellectual honesty.
“More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.”
Inheritance is how some people randomly get the weapon they can choose to use for (2).
I don’t have a problem with inheritance per se; I see it as a subset of donation, and I believe people should be free to donate their money.
It’s just that in a bad system, it will be a multiplier of the badness. If you have a system where evil people can get their money by force/fraud, and where they can use the money to do illegal stuff or to buy lobbists and change laws in ways that allow them to use more force/fraud legally… in such system inheritance gives you people who benefit from crimes of their ancestors, who in their childhood get extreme power over other people without having to do anything productive ever, etc.
I would posit that his actual children have a comfortably non-zero amount of influence over him, and that the rest of us have a non-zero-but-muchcloser-to-zero amount of influence over him.
Yeah, the idea of “I could have been a part of the legendary 1%, but my parents decided to throw me back among the muggles” could make one rather angry.
Imagine that your parents were uneducated and homeless as teenagers. They lived many years on the streets, starving and abused. But they never gave up hope, and never stopped trying, so when they were 30, they already had an equivalent of high-school education, were able to get a job, and actually were able to buy a small house.
Then you were born. You had a chance to start your life in much better circumstances than your parents had. You could have attended a normal school. You could have a roof above your head every night. You could have the life they only dreamed about when they were your age.
But your parents thought like this: “A roof above one’s head, and a warm meal every day, that would spoil a child. We didn’t have that when we were kids—and look how far we got! All the misery only made our spirits stronger. What we desire for our children is to have the same opportunity for spiritual growth in life that we had.” So they donated all the property to charity, and kicked you out of the house. You can’t afford a school anymore. You are lucky to find some work that allows you to eat.
Hey, why the sad face? If such life was good enough for them, how dare you complain that it is not good anough for you? Clearly they failed somewhere at your upbringing, if you believe that you deserve something better than they had.
(Explanation: To avoid the status quo bias of being in my social class—to avoid the feeling that the classes below me have it so bad that it breaks them, but the classes above me have it so good that it weakens their spirits; and therefore my social class, or perhaps the one only slighly above me, just coincidentally happens to be the optimal place in the society—I sometimes take stories about people, and try to translate them higher or lower in the social ladder and look if they still feel the same.)
to avoid the feeling that the classes below me have it so bad that it breaks them, but the classes above me have it so good that it weakens their spirits
It’s not a social class thing. It’s a human motivation thing. Humans are motivated by needs and if you start with a few $B in the bank, many of your needs are met by lazily waving your hand. That’s not a good thing as the rich say they have discovered empirically.
That, of course, is not a new idea. A quote attributed to Genghis Khan says
After us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold; they will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms the loveliest of women, and they will forget that they owe these things to us
and there is an interesting post discussing the historical context. The consequences, by the way, are very real—when you grow soft, the next batch of tough, lean, and hungry outsiders comes in and kills you.
The no-fortune-for-you rich do not aim for their children to suffer (because it ennobles the spirit or any other such crap). They want their children to go out into the world and make their own mark on the world. And I bet that these children still have a LOT of advantages. For one thing, they have a safety net—I’m pretty sure the parents will pay for medevac from a trek in Nepal, if need be. For another, they have an excellent network and a sympathetic investor close by.
It’s not a social class thing. It’s a human motivation thing.
Same difference. So there is an optimal amount of wealth to inherit to maximize human motivation, and it happens to be exactly the same amount that Gateses are going to give their children. (The optimal amount depends on the state of global economy or technology, so it was a different amount for Genghis Khan than it is now.)
I’d like to see the data supporting this hypothesis. Especially the kind of data that allows you to estimate the optimal amount as a specific number (not merely that the optimal amount is less than infinity).
They want their children to go out into the world and make their own mark on the world.
Which cannot be done if you have too much money. But will be much easier to do if you have less money. And you know precisely that e.g. 10^7 USD is okay, but 10^8 USD is too much.
Imagine that your goal would be to have your children “make their own mark on the world”, and that you really care about that goal (as opposed to just having it as a convenient rationalization for some other goals). As a rational person, would you simply reduce their inheritance to sane levels and more or less stop there? If you would spend five minutes thinking about the problem, couldn’t you find a better solution?
and it happens to be exactly the same amount that Gateses are going to give their children
You say this as if it’s a silly thing that no one could have good reason to believe. I’ve no idea whether it’s actually true but it’s not silly. Here, let me put it differently. “It just happens that the amount some outstandingly smart people with a known interest in world-optimization and effectively unlimited resources have decided to leave their children is the optimal amount.”
I mean, sure, they may well have got it wrong. But they have obvious incentives to get it right, and should be at least as capable of doing so as anyone else.
And you know precisely that e.g. 10^7 USD is okay, but 10^8 USD is too much.
I doubt they would claim to know precisely. But they have to choose some amount, no? You can’t leave your children a probability distribution over inheritances. (You could leave them a randomly chosen inheritance, but that’s not the same.)
It seems like whatever the Gateses were allegedly planning, you could say “And you know precisely that doing X is okay, but doing similar-other-thing-Y is not” and that would have just the same rhetorical force.
couldn’t you find a better solution?
I don’t know. Could you? Have you? If so, why not argue “If the Gateses really had the goals they say, they would do X instead” rather than “If the Gateses really had the goals they say, they would do something else instead; I’m not saying what, but I bet it would be better than what they are doing.”?
Again, I’m not claiming that what the Gateses are allegedly planning is anything like optimal; for that matter, I have no good evidence that they are actually planning what they’re allegedly planning. But the objections you’re raising seem really (and uncharacteristically) weak.
But I’m not sure I’ve grasped what your actual position is. Would you care to make it more explicit?
1) Gateses had some true reason for donating most of the money—probably a combination of “want to do a lot of good”, “want to become famous”, etc. -- and they decided that these goals are more important for them than maximizing the inheritance of their children. I am not criticizing them for making that decision; I think it is a correct one, or at least in a good direction.
2) But the explanation that they want their children to “make their own mark on the world” is most likely a rationalization of the previous paragraph. It’s like, where the true version is “saving thousand human lives is more important for me than making my child twice as rich”, this explanation is trying to add ”...and coincidentally, not making my child twice as rich is actually better for my child, so actually I am optimizing for my child”, which in my opinion is clearly false, but obviously socially preferable.
3) What specifically would one do to literally optimize for the chance that their children would “make their own mark on the world”? I am not going into details here, because that would depend on specific talents and interests of the child, but I believe it is a combination of giving them more resources; spending more resources on their teachers or coaches; spending my own time helping them with their own projects.
4) I can imagine being the child, and selfishly resenting that my parents did not optimize for me.
5) However I think that the child still has more money than necessary to have a great life.
What specifically would one do to literally optimize for the chance that their children would “make their own mark on the world”? I am not going into details here, because that would depend on specific talents and interests of the child, but I believe it is a combination of giving them more resources; spending more resources on their teachers or coaches; spending my own time helping them with their own projects.
So there is an optimal amount of wealth to inherit to maximize human motivation, and it happens to be exactly the same amount that Gateses are going to give their children.
Who are you arguing against? I saw no one express the position that you’re attacking.
would you simply reduce their inheritance to sane levels and more or less stop there?
Huh? Who stopped there? Do you have any reason to believe that the Gates handed their kids a “small” check and told them to get lost?
Sure, it can be used for whatever purpose. So now we have an empirical question of what is the average usage of inheritance in real life. Or even better, the average usage of inheritance, as a function of how much was inherited, because patterns at different parts of the scale may be dramatically different.
I would like to read a data-based answer to this question.
(My assumption is that the second generation usually tries to copy what their parents did in the later period of life, only less skillfully because regression to the mean; and the third generation usually just wastes the money. If this is true, then it’s the second generation, especially if they are “criminals, sons of criminals”, that I worry about most.)
I don’t think it’s a question of more research being needed, I think it’s a an issue ofthe original two categories being two few and too sharply delineated.
Yeah, should have been (1) by creating value, (2) by taking value from others by force or fraud, (3) by being given value willingly by benevolently disposed others. Of these #3 is rather rare except for inheritance (broadly understood; parents may give their children a lot of money while still alive).
Make it “essentially two different ways how people or families get rich”, though, and the remaining cases of #3 are probably rare enough to ignore.
Here’s another case that isn’t so neatly fitted into Viliam’s dichotomy. Suppose your culture values some scarce substance such as gold, purely because of its scarcity, and you discover a new source of that substance or a new way of making it. You haven’t created much value because the stuff was never particularly valued for its actual use, but it’s not like you stole it either. What actually happened: everyone else’s gold just got slightly less valuable because gold became less scarce, and what they lost you gained. But for some reason gold mining isn’t usually considered a variety of large-scale theft.
Of course gold has some value. You can make pretty jewelry out of it, and really good electrical contacts, and a few other things. But most of the benefit you get if you find a tonne of gold comes from its scarcity-value rather than from its practical utility.
Printing money has essentially the same effect, but isn’t generally used directly to make individuals rich.
“Make it “essentially two different ways how people or families get rich”, though, and the remaining cases of #3 are probably rare enough to ignore.”
I think inheritance is an important case, because lack of inherited wealth, by default, is what leads to some people being excluded from becoming self-made millionaires like Mr Graham; and because inheritance isn’t inevitable, it’s something that can be adjusted independently of other variables.
“Here’s another case that isn’t so neatly fitted into Viliam’s dichotomy. Suppose your culture values some scarce substance such as gold, purely because of its scarcity, and you discover a new source of that substance or a new way of making it. You haven’t created much value because the stuff was never particularly valued for its actual use, but it’s not like you stole it either. What actually happened: everyone else’s gold just got slightly less valuable because gold became less scarce, and what they lost you gained. But for some reason gold mining isn’t usually considered a variety of large-scale theft.”
How natural resources are dealt with is an important point in political philosophy. If you think people are entitled to keep whatever they find, you end up with a conservative philosophy, if you think they should be shared or held in common you end up with a leftish one.
In case it wasn’t clear: So do I. But if we think of families rather than individuals as the holders of wealth, Viliam’s two ways of getting rich cover the available options fairly well; that’s all I was saying.
Well, but he’s writing an essay and has a position to put forward. Not being blind to counter-arguments does not require you to never come to a conclusion.
At a crude level, the pro arguments show the benefits, the contra arguments show the costs, but if you do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it’s worth it, you can have an express definite position without necessarily ignoring chunks of reality.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly… he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham’s essay rather than on the essays complaining about “economic inequality” without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your “ugh fields”?
In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they’re intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham’s essay rather than on the essays complaining about “economic inequality” without even bothering to make the distinction?
We hold someone like Paul Graham to higher standards than some random nobody trying to score political points. Isn’t Graham one of the leading voices in the rationalist/SV-tech/hacker tribe?
Ok, while we’re nitpicking Paul Graham’s essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about “poverty”, conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what’s considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.
Advances in technology have certainly improved living standards across the board, but they have not done much for the next layer of human needs—things like social inclusion or safety against adverse events. Indeed, we can assume that, in reasonably developed societies (as opposed to dysfunctional places like North Korea or several African countries) lack of such things is probably the major cause of absolute ‘poverty’, since primary needs like food or shelter are easily satisfied. It’s interesting to speculate about focused interventions that could successfully improve social inclusion; fostering “organic” social institutions (such as quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services) would seem to be an obvious candidate.
You have redefined “absolute poverty” to mean “absolute poverty on a scale revised to ignore the historic improvements”, i.e. relative poverty.
Advances in technology have certainly improved living standards across the board, but they have not done much for the next layer of human needs—things like social inclusion
The internet has done a great deal for that.
or safety against adverse events.
Which ones? Disease? Vast progress. Earthquakes and hurricanes? We make better buildings, better safety systems. Of course, we can also build taller buildings, and cities on flood plains, so the technology acts on both sides there.
focused interventions that could successfully improve social inclusion; fostering “organic” social institutions
Institutions that require focused interventions to foster them are the opposite of “organic”. Besides, “quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services” already exist. Actual religions, for example, and groups such as Freemasons.
You have redefined “absolute poverty” to mean “absolute poverty on a scale revised to ignore the historic improvements”, i.e. relative poverty.
I’m not ‘redefining’ the scale absolute poverty is measured on, or ignoring the historic improvements in it. These improvements are quite real. They’re also less impressive than we might assume by just looking at material living standards, because social dynamics are relevant as well.
I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word;
Sure, but does rent-seeking really explain the increase in inequality since, say, the 1950s or so, which is what most folks tend to be worried about and what’s discussed in Paul Graham’s essay? I don’t think it does, except as a minor factor (that is, it could certainly explain increased wealth among congress-critters and other members of the ‘Cathedral’); the main factor was technical change favoring skilled people and sometimes conferring exceptional amounts of wealth to random “superstars”.
I don’t know. Seems to me possible that people like Paul Graham (or Eliezer Yudkowsky) may overestimate the impact of technical change on wealth distribution because of the selection bias—they associate with people who mostly make wealth using the “fair” methods.
If instead they would be spending most of their time among African warlords, or Russian oligarchs, or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA, maybe they would have very different models of how wealth works.
The technological progress explains why the pie is growing, not how the larger pie is divided.
There are probably more people who got rich selling homeopathics, than who got rich founding startups. Yet in our social sphere it is a custom to pretend that the former option does not exist, and focus on the latter.
If instead they would be spending most of their time among African warlords, or Russian oligarchs, or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA, maybe they would have very different models of how wealth works.
If you look at the Forbes list there aren’t many African warlords on it.
There are probably more people who got rich selling homeopathics, than who got rich founding startups.
Which people do you think became billionaire’s mainly by selling homeopathics? Homeopathics is a competive market where there no protection from competitors that allows to charge high sums of money in the way startups like Google produce a Thielean monopoly.
If you look at the Forbes list there aren’t many African warlords on it.
It seems possible that African warlords’ wealth is greatly underestimated by comparing notional wealth in dollars. E.g., if you want to own a lot of land and houses, that’s much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US. If you want a lot of people doing your bidding, that’s much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US.
Money has more or less logarithmic utility. So selling homeopathics could still bring higher average utility (although less average money) than startups. For every successful Google there are thousands of homeopaths.
That depends on your goals. If you want to create social or political impact with money it’s not true.
Large fortunes get largely made in tech, resources and finance.
… or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA
I think the generalized concept is ‘politicians’. And yeah, that sounds likely. But I would say that it is a problem that the ones who make the rules and the ones who explain to everyone else what’s what all live in an environment where earning something honestly is weird is a problem. That there are some who are not in such a bubble is not the problem.
Oligarchs are the level above politicians. You can think about them as the true employers of most politicians. (If I can make an analogy, for a politician the voters are merely a problem to be solved; the oligarch is the person who gave them the job to solve the problem.) Imagine someone who has incredible wealth, owns a lot of press in the country, and is friendly with many important people in police, secret service, et cetera. The person who, if they like you as a wannabe politician, can give you a lot of money and media power to boost your career, in return for some important decisions when you get into the government.
This requires a good investigative journalist with good understanding of economics. Which I am not. I could tell you some names for Slovakia (J&T, Penta, Brhel, Výboh), which probably you would have no way to verify. (Note that the last one doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. These people in general prefer privacy, they own most of the media, and they have a lot of money to sue you if you write something negative about them, and they also own the judges which means they will win each lawsuit.)
I am not even sure if countries other than ex-communist use this specific model. (This doesn’t mean I believe that the West is completely fair. More likely the methods of “power above politicians” in the West are more sophisticated, while in the East sophistication was never necessary if you had the power—you usually don’t have to go far beyond “the former secret service bosses” and check if any of them owns a huge economical empire.)
I am not even sure if countries other than ex-communist use this specific model.
Ah, well, that’s a rather important detail.
I’m not saying that your model is entirely wrong—just that it’s not universally applicable. By the way, another place where you are likely to find it is in Central and South America. However I think it’s way too crude to be applied to the West. The interaction between money and power is more… nuanced there and recently the state power seem to be ascending.
he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
He does something. He uses niceness as a filter for filtering out people from YCombinator who aren’t nice.
YCombinator has standardized term sheats to prevent bad VC’s from ripping off companies by adding intransparent terms.
I have heard it written that YCombinator works as a sort of union for startup founders whereby a VC can’t abuse one YCombinator company because word would get around within YCombinator and the VC suffer negative consequences from abusing a founder.
Yes. But for a person who is focused on the problem of “people taking a lot of value from others by force and fraud” this is like a drop in the ocean. Okay, PG has created a bubble of niceness around himself, that’s very nice of him. What about the remaining 99.9999% of the world? Is this solution scalable?
for new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. And not just not being at war. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create can’t be stolen.
If you take a single company YCombinator company like AirBnB I think it affects a lot more than 0.0001% of the world.
Is this solution scalable?
The solution of standardized term sheets seems to scale pretty well. The politics of standardized terms sheats aren’t sexy but they matter very strongly. Power in our society is heavily contractualized.
As far as for the norms of YCombinator being scalable, YCombinator itself can scale to be bigger. YCombinator is also a role-model for other accelerators due to the fact that it’s the only accelerator that produced unicorns.
Apart from that the idea that Paul Graham fails because he doesn’t singlehandily turn the world towards the good is ridiculous. You criticisze him because of not signaling that he cares by talking enough about the issue.
I think you get the idea of how effective political action looks very wrong. It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms.
Think globally but act locally. Make sure that your enviroment is well so that it can grow and become stronger.
So maybe it’s only 99.99% rather than 99.9999%. I don’t think this really affects Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value), and Paul Graham writes and acts as if it’s almost all cause 1, then maybe Paul Graham is doing the same thing he complains about other people doing and ignoring inconvenient bits of reality.
Note that PG could well be doing that even if when working on cause 1 he takes some measures to reduce the impact of cause 2 on it. It’s not like PG completely denies that some people get rich by exploiting or robbing others; Viliam’s suggesting only that he may be closing his eyes to how much of the world’s economic inequality arises that way.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value)
That may have been implied, but wasn’t stated. Is it actually Viliam’s point? I am not sure how true it is—consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low. Or consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
This is a tricky subject because Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value and so pretty much all wealth resulting from investment is “stolen”. If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics—who has the original rights to created value and how are they established?
Is it actually Viliam’s point? [that a larger fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from taking by force or fraud than from creating value]
I believe this, at least in long turn; i.e. that even if once in a while some genius creates a lot of wealth and succeeds to capture a significant amount of it, sooner or later most of that money will pass into hands of people who are experts on taking value from others.
No Marxism here, merely an assumption that people who specialize at X will become good at X, especially when X can be simply measured. Here X is “taking value from others”.
consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low.
Nope, that was merely the official propaganda. In fact, high-level Communists were rich. Not only they had much more money, but perhaps more importantly, they were allowed to use “common property” that the average muggle wasn’t allowed to touch. For example, there would be a large villa that nominally belonged to the state, but in fact someone specific lived there. Or there would be a service provided nominally to anyone (chosen by an unspecified algorithm), but in fact only high-level Communists had that service available and average muggles didn’t. High-level Communists were also in much better positions to steal things or blackmail people.
consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
How is this wealth distributed among the specific Chinese? It can be both true that “China” created the wealth, and that the specific “Chinese” who own it, mostly stole it (from the other Chinese).
Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value
My argument is completely unrelated to this. For me the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws so that the things they wanted to do are no longer crimes, but the things that other people wanted to do suddenly become crimes.
I disagree. As I mentioned, they did live better (more comfortably, higher consumption) than the peons, but not to the degree that I would call “rich”. I don’t believe that critics of communist regimes, both internal and external, called the party bosses “rich” either. For comparison, consider, say, corrupt South/Central American dictatorships.
Things have changed, of course. Putin is very rich.
the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws
You are worried about power, not wealth.
It’s true that wealth can be converted to power—sometimes, to some degree, at some conversion rate. But if you actually want power, the straightforward way is attempt to acquire more power directly.
There is also the inverse worry: if no individuals have power, who does? Is it good for individuals to have no power, to be cogs/slaves/sheep?
I’ll let Viliam answer that one (while remarking that the bit you quoted certainly isn’t what I claimed V’s point to be, since you chopped it off after the antecedent).
A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low
That’s not a counterexample; what you want is a case where economic inequality was high without a lot of value being taken by force.
the massive growth of wealth in China
Mostly a matter of real growth through technological and commercial advancement, I’ve always assumed. (Much of it through trade with richer countries—that comes into category 1 in so far as the trade was genuinely beneficial to both sides.) But I’m far from an expert on China.
If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics
It seems like one could say that about a very wide variety of issues, and that it’s more likely to prevent discussion than to raise its quality in general. As for the actual question with which you close: I am not convinced that moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
I am not so much asking for moral analysis as for precise definitions for “using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon”. That seems like a very malleable part which can be bent into any shape desired.
To get a bit more concrete I’m talking about the Soviet Russia of the pre-perestroika era, basically Brezhnev times.
Do you have something specific in mind? Of course party bosses lived better than village peons, but I don’t think that the economic inequality was high. Money wasn’t the preferred currency in the USSR—it was power (and access).
If a single person solves 0.01% of the worlds injustice that’s a huge success. You only need 10000 people like that to solve all injustice.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by distrupting industries. If Paul success in keeping the YC companies nice and successful he shifts the global balance towards the good.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting. As YC grows it might pick a few fights. You could call supporting DemocracyOS a fight against the established political system but it’s also simply building systems that work better than the established political system.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
If a single person solves 0.01% of the world’s injustice that’s a huge success.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by disrupting industries.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909
and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement.
In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms.
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
people are largely too impatient
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
Most mainstream news sources
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
Recently my working definition of ‘political opinion’ became “which parts of reality did the person choose to ignore”. At least this is my usual experience when debating with people who have strong political opinions. There usually exists a standard argument that an opposing side would use against them, and the typical responses to this argument are “that’s not the most important thing; now let’s talk about a completely different topic where my side has the argumentational advantage”. (LW calls it an ‘ugh field’.) Sometimes the argument is ‘disproved’ in a way that would seem completely unsatisfactory to people who actually spent some time thinking about it, but the point is that the person has displayed the virtue of “engaging with the opponent’s argument” which should finally make you stop talking about it.
Note that this is a general complaint about human behavior, not any specific political side, because this mechanism applies to many of them. Generally, ‘true belief’ sustains itself by filtering evidence; which is a process painfully obvious to people who filter evidence by different criteria.
More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly… he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
I am not blaming him for not solving all problems of the world in a single article, but other articles on his website also go in the similar direction. On the other hand, maybe that is merely picking one’s battles; he wants his website focused on one topic, the topic where he makes money. So I’m not sure what exactly is the lesson here… maybe that picking one’s battles and being mindkilled often seem similar from outside? (If I would know Paul Graham in real life, I could try to tell the difference by mentioning the other aspect in private and seeing whether he has an ‘ugh field’ about it or not.)
I’d say that his critics are annoyed that he’s ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they’re basing their assault on Income Inequality. “Come over here and fight, you coward!”
There’s not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it’s bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.
It’s possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It’s possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn’t include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn’t hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.
Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don’t get to continue to pretend they’re the same thing in full intellectual honesty.
“More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.”
Which one is inheritance?
I think it would be counted as whichever way was used by whoever you got the inheritance from.
Inheritance is how some people randomly get the weapon they can choose to use for (2).
I don’t have a problem with inheritance per se; I see it as a subset of donation, and I believe people should be free to donate their money.
It’s just that in a bad system, it will be a multiplier of the badness. If you have a system where evil people can get their money by force/fraud, and where they can use the money to do illegal stuff or to buy lobbists and change laws in ways that allow them to use more force/fraud legally… in such system inheritance gives you people who benefit from crimes of their ancestors, who in their childhood get extreme power over other people without having to do anything productive ever, etc.
Can’t an inheritance be used as seed money for some wonderful world-enhacing entrepeneurship?
Bill Gates argues that it’s bad to inherent children so much money that they don’t have to work: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_and_melinda_gates_why_giving_away_our_wealth_has_been_the_most_satisfying_thing_we_ve_done
I think the world is a better place for Bill Gates thinking that way.
I never thought I’d find myself saying this: I don’t want to be Bill Gates’s kid.
Does that not-want take into consideration your changed capacity to influence him if you became his child?
How would I have any more influence than his actual child does?
I would posit that his actual children have a comfortably non-zero amount of influence over him, and that the rest of us have a non-zero-but-muchcloser-to-zero amount of influence over him.
Yeah, the idea of “I could have been a part of the legendary 1%, but my parents decided to throw me back among the muggles” could make one rather angry.
I bet Bill Gates’s children will still be comfortably in the 1%.
(I found one source saying he plans to leave them $10M each. It didn’t look like a super-reliable source.)
/snort
In such a case I would probably think that you failed at your child’s upbringing, much earlier than deciding to dispossess her.
Imagine that your parents were uneducated and homeless as teenagers. They lived many years on the streets, starving and abused. But they never gave up hope, and never stopped trying, so when they were 30, they already had an equivalent of high-school education, were able to get a job, and actually were able to buy a small house.
Then you were born. You had a chance to start your life in much better circumstances than your parents had. You could have attended a normal school. You could have a roof above your head every night. You could have the life they only dreamed about when they were your age.
But your parents thought like this: “A roof above one’s head, and a warm meal every day, that would spoil a child. We didn’t have that when we were kids—and look how far we got! All the misery only made our spirits stronger. What we desire for our children is to have the same opportunity for spiritual growth in life that we had.” So they donated all the property to charity, and kicked you out of the house. You can’t afford a school anymore. You are lucky to find some work that allows you to eat.
Hey, why the sad face? If such life was good enough for them, how dare you complain that it is not good anough for you? Clearly they failed somewhere at your upbringing, if you believe that you deserve something better than they had.
(Explanation: To avoid the status quo bias of being in my social class—to avoid the feeling that the classes below me have it so bad that it breaks them, but the classes above me have it so good that it weakens their spirits; and therefore my social class, or perhaps the one only slighly above me, just coincidentally happens to be the optimal place in the society—I sometimes take stories about people, and try to translate them higher or lower in the social ladder and look if they still feel the same.)
It’s not a social class thing. It’s a human motivation thing. Humans are motivated by needs and if you start with a few $B in the bank, many of your needs are met by lazily waving your hand. That’s not a good thing as the rich say they have discovered empirically.
That, of course, is not a new idea. A quote attributed to Genghis Khan says
and there is an interesting post discussing the historical context. The consequences, by the way, are very real—when you grow soft, the next batch of tough, lean, and hungry outsiders comes in and kills you.
The no-fortune-for-you rich do not aim for their children to suffer (because it ennobles the spirit or any other such crap). They want their children to go out into the world and make their own mark on the world. And I bet that these children still have a LOT of advantages. For one thing, they have a safety net—I’m pretty sure the parents will pay for medevac from a trek in Nepal, if need be. For another, they have an excellent network and a sympathetic investor close by.
Same difference. So there is an optimal amount of wealth to inherit to maximize human motivation, and it happens to be exactly the same amount that Gateses are going to give their children. (The optimal amount depends on the state of global economy or technology, so it was a different amount for Genghis Khan than it is now.)
I’d like to see the data supporting this hypothesis. Especially the kind of data that allows you to estimate the optimal amount as a specific number (not merely that the optimal amount is less than infinity).
Which cannot be done if you have too much money. But will be much easier to do if you have less money. And you know precisely that e.g. 10^7 USD is okay, but 10^8 USD is too much.
Imagine that your goal would be to have your children “make their own mark on the world”, and that you really care about that goal (as opposed to just having it as a convenient rationalization for some other goals). As a rational person, would you simply reduce their inheritance to sane levels and more or less stop there? If you would spend five minutes thinking about the problem, couldn’t you find a better solution?
You say this as if it’s a silly thing that no one could have good reason to believe. I’ve no idea whether it’s actually true but it’s not silly. Here, let me put it differently. “It just happens that the amount some outstandingly smart people with a known interest in world-optimization and effectively unlimited resources have decided to leave their children is the optimal amount.”
I mean, sure, they may well have got it wrong. But they have obvious incentives to get it right, and should be at least as capable of doing so as anyone else.
I doubt they would claim to know precisely. But they have to choose some amount, no? You can’t leave your children a probability distribution over inheritances. (You could leave them a randomly chosen inheritance, but that’s not the same.)
It seems like whatever the Gateses were allegedly planning, you could say “And you know precisely that doing X is okay, but doing similar-other-thing-Y is not” and that would have just the same rhetorical force.
I don’t know. Could you? Have you? If so, why not argue “If the Gateses really had the goals they say, they would do X instead” rather than “If the Gateses really had the goals they say, they would do something else instead; I’m not saying what, but I bet it would be better than what they are doing.”?
Again, I’m not claiming that what the Gateses are allegedly planning is anything like optimal; for that matter, I have no good evidence that they are actually planning what they’re allegedly planning. But the objections you’re raising seem really (and uncharacteristically) weak.
But I’m not sure I’ve grasped what your actual position is. Would you care to make it more explicit?
My actual position is that:
1) Gateses had some true reason for donating most of the money—probably a combination of “want to do a lot of good”, “want to become famous”, etc. -- and they decided that these goals are more important for them than maximizing the inheritance of their children. I am not criticizing them for making that decision; I think it is a correct one, or at least in a good direction.
2) But the explanation that they want their children to “make their own mark on the world” is most likely a rationalization of the previous paragraph. It’s like, where the true version is “saving thousand human lives is more important for me than making my child twice as rich”, this explanation is trying to add ”...and coincidentally, not making my child twice as rich is actually better for my child, so actually I am optimizing for my child”, which in my opinion is clearly false, but obviously socially preferable.
3) What specifically would one do to literally optimize for the chance that their children would “make their own mark on the world”? I am not going into details here, because that would depend on specific talents and interests of the child, but I believe it is a combination of giving them more resources; spending more resources on their teachers or coaches; spending my own time helping them with their own projects.
4) I can imagine being the child, and selfishly resenting that my parents did not optimize for me.
5) However I think that the child still has more money than necessary to have a great life.
My whole point is that (2) is a rationalization.
OK, I understand. Thanks.
Does this work? I don’t know; I have no children.
Who are you arguing against? I saw no one express the position that you’re attacking.
Huh? Who stopped there? Do you have any reason to believe that the Gates handed their kids a “small” check and told them to get lost?
Sure, it can be used for whatever purpose. So now we have an empirical question of what is the average usage of inheritance in real life. Or even better, the average usage of inheritance, as a function of how much was inherited, because patterns at different parts of the scale may be dramatically different.
I would like to read a data-based answer to this question.
(My assumption is that the second generation usually tries to copy what their parents did in the later period of life, only less skillfully because regression to the mean; and the third generation usually just wastes the money. If this is true, then it’s the second generation, especially if they are “criminals, sons of criminals”, that I worry about most.)
I don’t think it’s a question of more research being needed, I think it’s a an issue ofthe original two categories being two few and too sharply delineated.
Yeah, should have been (1) by creating value, (2) by taking value from others by force or fraud, (3) by being given value willingly by benevolently disposed others. Of these #3 is rather rare except for inheritance (broadly understood; parents may give their children a lot of money while still alive).
Make it “essentially two different ways how people or families get rich”, though, and the remaining cases of #3 are probably rare enough to ignore.
Here’s another case that isn’t so neatly fitted into Viliam’s dichotomy. Suppose your culture values some scarce substance such as gold, purely because of its scarcity, and you discover a new source of that substance or a new way of making it. You haven’t created much value because the stuff was never particularly valued for its actual use, but it’s not like you stole it either. What actually happened: everyone else’s gold just got slightly less valuable because gold became less scarce, and what they lost you gained. But for some reason gold mining isn’t usually considered a variety of large-scale theft.
Of course gold has some value. You can make pretty jewelry out of it, and really good electrical contacts, and a few other things. But most of the benefit you get if you find a tonne of gold comes from its scarcity-value rather than from its practical utility.
Printing money has essentially the same effect, but isn’t generally used directly to make individuals rich.
“Make it “essentially two different ways how people or families get rich”, though, and the remaining cases of #3 are probably rare enough to ignore.”
I think inheritance is an important case, because lack of inherited wealth, by default, is what leads to some people being excluded from becoming self-made millionaires like Mr Graham; and because inheritance isn’t inevitable, it’s something that can be adjusted independently of other variables.
“Here’s another case that isn’t so neatly fitted into Viliam’s dichotomy. Suppose your culture values some scarce substance such as gold, purely because of its scarcity, and you discover a new source of that substance or a new way of making it. You haven’t created much value because the stuff was never particularly valued for its actual use, but it’s not like you stole it either. What actually happened: everyone else’s gold just got slightly less valuable because gold became less scarce, and what they lost you gained. But for some reason gold mining isn’t usually considered a variety of large-scale theft.”
How natural resources are dealt with is an important point in political philosophy. If you think people are entitled to keep whatever they find, you end up with a conservative philosophy, if you think they should be shared or held in common you end up with a leftish one.
In case it wasn’t clear: So do I. But if we think of families rather than individuals as the holders of wealth, Viliam’s two ways of getting rich cover the available options fairly well; that’s all I was saying.
Well, but he’s writing an essay and has a position to put forward. Not being blind to counter-arguments does not require you to never come to a conclusion.
At a crude level, the pro arguments show the benefits, the contra arguments show the costs, but if you do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it’s worth it, you can have an express definite position without necessarily ignoring chunks of reality.
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham’s essay rather than on the essays complaining about “economic inequality” without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your “ugh fields”?
In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they’re intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).
We hold someone like Paul Graham to higher standards than some random nobody trying to score political points. Isn’t Graham one of the leading voices in the rationalist/SV-tech/hacker tribe?
Ok, while we’re nitpicking Paul Graham’s essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about “poverty”, conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what’s considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.
Advances in technology have certainly improved living standards across the board, but they have not done much for the next layer of human needs—things like social inclusion or safety against adverse events. Indeed, we can assume that, in reasonably developed societies (as opposed to dysfunctional places like North Korea or several African countries) lack of such things is probably the major cause of absolute ‘poverty’, since primary needs like food or shelter are easily satisfied. It’s interesting to speculate about focused interventions that could successfully improve social inclusion; fostering “organic” social institutions (such as quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services) would seem to be an obvious candidate.
You have redefined “absolute poverty” to mean “absolute poverty on a scale revised to ignore the historic improvements”, i.e. relative poverty.
The internet has done a great deal for that.
Which ones? Disease? Vast progress. Earthquakes and hurricanes? We make better buildings, better safety systems. Of course, we can also build taller buildings, and cities on flood plains, so the technology acts on both sides there.
Institutions that require focused interventions to foster them are the opposite of “organic”. Besides, “quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services” already exist. Actual religions, for example, and groups such as Freemasons.
I’m not ‘redefining’ the scale absolute poverty is measured on, or ignoring the historic improvements in it. These improvements are quite real. They’re also less impressive than we might assume by just looking at material living standards, because social dynamics are relevant as well.
Sure, but does rent-seeking really explain the increase in inequality since, say, the 1950s or so, which is what most folks tend to be worried about and what’s discussed in Paul Graham’s essay? I don’t think it does, except as a minor factor (that is, it could certainly explain increased wealth among congress-critters and other members of the ‘Cathedral’); the main factor was technical change favoring skilled people and sometimes conferring exceptional amounts of wealth to random “superstars”.
I don’t know. Seems to me possible that people like Paul Graham (or Eliezer Yudkowsky) may overestimate the impact of technical change on wealth distribution because of the selection bias—they associate with people who mostly make wealth using the “fair” methods.
If instead they would be spending most of their time among African warlords, or Russian oligarchs, or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA, maybe they would have very different models of how wealth works.
The technological progress explains why the pie is growing, not how the larger pie is divided.
There are probably more people who got rich selling homeopathics, than who got rich founding startups. Yet in our social sphere it is a custom to pretend that the former option does not exist, and focus on the latter.
If you look at the Forbes list there aren’t many African warlords on it.
Which people do you think became billionaire’s mainly by selling homeopathics? Homeopathics is a competive market where there no protection from competitors that allows to charge high sums of money in the way startups like Google produce a Thielean monopoly.
It seems possible that African warlords’ wealth is greatly underestimated by comparing notional wealth in dollars. E.g., if you want to own a lot of land and houses, that’s much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US. If you want a lot of people doing your bidding, that’s much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US.
On the other hand the African warlord has to invest resources into avoiding getting murdered.
Yup. It’s certainly not clear-cut, and there are after all reasons why the more expensive parts of the world are more expensive.
Money has more or less logarithmic utility. So selling homeopathics could still bring higher average utility (although less average money) than startups. For every successful Google there are thousands of homeopaths.
That depends on your goals. If you want to create social or political impact with money it’s not true. Large fortunes get largely made in tech, resources and finance.
I think the generalized concept is ‘politicians’. And yeah, that sounds likely. But I would say that it is a problem that the ones who make the rules and the ones who explain to everyone else what’s what all live in an environment where earning something honestly is weird is a problem. That there are some who are not in such a bubble is not the problem.
Oligarchs are the level above politicians. You can think about them as the true employers of most politicians. (If I can make an analogy, for a politician the voters are merely a problem to be solved; the oligarch is the person who gave them the job to solve the problem.) Imagine someone who has incredible wealth, owns a lot of press in the country, and is friendly with many important people in police, secret service, et cetera. The person who, if they like you as a wannabe politician, can give you a lot of money and media power to boost your career, in return for some important decisions when you get into the government.
So, can you tell us who employs Frau Merkel? M. Hollande? Mr. Cameron? Mr. Obama? Please be specific.
This requires a good investigative journalist with good understanding of economics. Which I am not. I could tell you some names for Slovakia (J&T, Penta, Brhel, Výboh), which probably you would have no way to verify. (Note that the last one doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. These people in general prefer privacy, they own most of the media, and they have a lot of money to sue you if you write something negative about them, and they also own the judges which means they will win each lawsuit.)
I am not even sure if countries other than ex-communist use this specific model. (This doesn’t mean I believe that the West is completely fair. More likely the methods of “power above politicians” in the West are more sophisticated, while in the East sophistication was never necessary if you had the power—you usually don’t have to go far beyond “the former secret service bosses” and check if any of them owns a huge economical empire.)
Ah, well, that’s a rather important detail.
I’m not saying that your model is entirely wrong—just that it’s not universally applicable. By the way, another place where you are likely to find it is in Central and South America. However I think it’s way too crude to be applied to the West. The interaction between money and power is more… nuanced there and recently the state power seem to be ascending.
Except that, well, you know, in Soviet Russia the politician is above the oligarchs :-D
He does something. He uses
nicenessas a filter for filtering out people from YCombinator who aren’tnice. YCombinator has standardized term sheats to prevent bad VC’s from ripping off companies by adding intransparent terms. I have heard it written that YCombinator works as a sort of union for startup founders whereby a VC can’t abuse one YCombinator company because word would get around within YCombinator and the VC suffer negative consequences from abusing a founder.Yes. But for a person who is focused on the problem of “people taking a lot of value from others by force and fraud” this is like a drop in the ocean. Okay, PG has created a bubble of niceness around himself, that’s very nice of him. What about the remaining 99.9999% of the world? Is this solution scalable?
EDIT: Found a nice quote in Mean People Fail:
If you take a single company YCombinator company like AirBnB I think it affects a lot more than 0.0001% of the world.
The solution of standardized term sheets seems to scale pretty well. The politics of standardized terms sheats aren’t sexy but they matter very strongly. Power in our society is heavily contractualized.
As far as for the norms of YCombinator being scalable, YCombinator itself can scale to be bigger. YCombinator is also a role-model for other accelerators due to the fact that it’s the only accelerator that produced unicorns.
Apart from that the idea that Paul Graham fails because he doesn’t singlehandily turn the world towards the good is ridiculous. You criticisze him because of not signaling that he cares by talking enough about the issue.
I think you get the idea of how effective political action looks very wrong. It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms. Think globally but act locally. Make sure that your enviroment is well so that it can grow and become stronger.
So maybe it’s only 99.99% rather than 99.9999%. I don’t think this really affects Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value), and Paul Graham writes and acts as if it’s almost all cause 1, then maybe Paul Graham is doing the same thing he complains about other people doing and ignoring inconvenient bits of reality.
Note that PG could well be doing that even if when working on cause 1 he takes some measures to reduce the impact of cause 2 on it. It’s not like PG completely denies that some people get rich by exploiting or robbing others; Viliam’s suggesting only that he may be closing his eyes to how much of the world’s economic inequality arises that way.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
That may have been implied, but wasn’t stated. Is it actually Viliam’s point? I am not sure how true it is—consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low. Or consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
This is a tricky subject because Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value and so pretty much all wealth resulting from investment is “stolen”. If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics—who has the original rights to created value and how are they established?
I believe this, at least in long turn; i.e. that even if once in a while some genius creates a lot of wealth and succeeds to capture a significant amount of it, sooner or later most of that money will pass into hands of people who are experts on taking value from others.
No Marxism here, merely an assumption that people who specialize at X will become good at X, especially when X can be simply measured. Here X is “taking value from others”.
Nope, that was merely the official propaganda. In fact, high-level Communists were rich. Not only they had much more money, but perhaps more importantly, they were allowed to use “common property” that the average muggle wasn’t allowed to touch. For example, there would be a large villa that nominally belonged to the state, but in fact someone specific lived there. Or there would be a service provided nominally to anyone (chosen by an unspecified algorithm), but in fact only high-level Communists had that service available and average muggles didn’t. High-level Communists were also in much better positions to steal things or blackmail people.
How is this wealth distributed among the specific Chinese? It can be both true that “China” created the wealth, and that the specific “Chinese” who own it, mostly stole it (from the other Chinese).
My argument is completely unrelated to this. For me the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws so that the things they wanted to do are no longer crimes, but the things that other people wanted to do suddenly become crimes.
I disagree. As I mentioned, they did live better (more comfortably, higher consumption) than the peons, but not to the degree that I would call “rich”. I don’t believe that critics of communist regimes, both internal and external, called the party bosses “rich” either. For comparison, consider, say, corrupt South/Central American dictatorships.
Things have changed, of course. Putin is very rich.
You are worried about power, not wealth.
It’s true that wealth can be converted to power—sometimes, to some degree, at some conversion rate. But if you actually want power, the straightforward way is attempt to acquire more power directly.
There is also the inverse worry: if no individuals have power, who does? Is it good for individuals to have no power, to be cogs/slaves/sheep?
I’ll let Viliam answer that one (while remarking that the bit you quoted certainly isn’t what I claimed V’s point to be, since you chopped it off after the antecedent).
That’s not a counterexample; what you want is a case where economic inequality was high without a lot of value being taken by force.
Mostly a matter of real growth through technological and commercial advancement, I’ve always assumed. (Much of it through trade with richer countries—that comes into category 1 in so far as the trade was genuinely beneficial to both sides.) But I’m far from an expert on China.
It seems like one could say that about a very wide variety of issues, and that it’s more likely to prevent discussion than to raise its quality in general. As for the actual question with which you close: I am not convinced that moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
I am not so much asking for moral analysis as for precise definitions for “using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon”. That seems like a very malleable part which can be bent into any shape desired.
Well, that would be for Viliam to clarify rather than for me, should he so choose. It doesn’t seem excessively malleable to me, for what it’s worth.
I am contesting this.
The first part, or the second, or both?
Second.
To get a bit more concrete I’m talking about the Soviet Russia of the pre-perestroika era, basically Brezhnev times.
Do you have something specific in mind? Of course party bosses lived better than village peons, but I don’t think that the economic inequality was high. Money wasn’t the preferred currency in the USSR—it was power (and access).
If a single person solves 0.01% of the worlds injustice that’s a huge success. You only need 10000 people like that to solve all injustice.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by distrupting industries. If Paul success in keeping the YC companies nice and successful he shifts the global balance towards the good.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting. As YC grows it might pick a few fights. You could call supporting DemocracyOS a fight against the established political system but it’s also simply building systems that work better than the established political system.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement. In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
[EDITED for slightly more precise wording.]