To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
When the process that skews the wealth distribution has run this course, the billionaires and their cronies own everything and you have nothing do you think they'll show up to pay your child's education or your health care or your elderly care? They won't.
They'll kick you to the curb and remove democracy since any real democracy is a direct threat to them. Then they'll continue their lavish parties on their yachts while you and your family go hungry in the slums.
You know, who said our lord doesn’t have a sense of humor? He could have said it any other way lol.
I just don’t understand how we can not have a category in the DSM for wealth-fixation, because after … I don’t know, $100m, you have to be mentally ill to even be talking about, let alone pursuing, money. Shout out to Christ for being a radical pioneer on this issue.
Tech needs Jesus in ways tech is too corrupted to understand.
Fortunately Peter Thiel is really into Christianity, so we're good!
It's wild that people that get this special exception so that their labor isn't fairly taxed in the way the average person is are now happy that AI is eliminating busywork jobs and now feel randos working average jobs are somehow exploiting the system.
Not a threat, these people rarely feel truly threatened, but an obstruction.
— John Steinbeck
If anyone wonders why class consciousness seems to be impossible in the US, this and the parent comment lay it out. The belief in American exceptionalism and capitalism as a moral force and the defense of systemic racial hierarchies in a low trust society override all other concerns.
I pay for my child's education and healthcare myself, and expect to continue to so whether Bezos is a trillionaire, a pauper, or anything in between. It ultimately has very little impact on my life.
Generally speaking whether you realize this or not the economic system creates a competition between entities. And larger richer entities will subsume assimilate and destroy smaller entities when they're looking for that eternal growth with fixed resources.
The argument to this always is that "it's not a zero sum game". Except that in practice it is. Economies are growing tiny few percent per year perhaps while the rich people are growing their wealth 10-20% per year. This is only possible by changing the wealth distribution making it effectively a zero sum game.
That means wealthy individuals will outcompete poorer individuals for all resources such as housing, education, health care. Everything will be used to extract maximum wealth from the society until there's nothing more to take.
Don't compare this year to last year. Compare this year to 10 years ago. To 20 years ago. Then say it's a zero sum game. Ask yourself if you would switch places with John D. Rockefeller. I would not.
Amazon warehouse workers are paid enough to afford shelter (especially if they are working 7 days a week), or they are welcome to find a better job.
> Generally speaking whether you realize this or not the economic system creates a competition between entities. And larger richer entities will subsume assimilate and destroy smaller entities when they're looking for that eternal growth with fixed resources.
Yes, capitalism is competitive; that's the point. If a larger entity can perform better than a smaller one, then the smaller one doesn't need to exist.
> The argument to this always is that "it's not a zero sum game". Except that in practice it is. Economies are growing tiny few percent per year perhaps while the rich people are growing their wealth 10-20% per year. This is only possible by changing the wealth distribution making it effectively a zero sum game.
It's not a zero sum game, and you just pulled those numbers out of your ass.
> That means wealthy individuals will outcompete poorer individuals for all resources such as housing, education, health care. Everything will be used to extract maximum wealth from the society until there's nothing more to take.
One person can't consume so much healthcare, shelter, or education that it prevents others from accessing it. Claiming otherwise is absurd.
According to this website:
$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".
$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.
Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
Some interns make more than that.
I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
Jeff had similar compensation as jassy when he was ceo. It’s just that he is also the owner.
1. Bezos once said something along the lines of don’t judge me by how much money I have, rather look at how may other wealthy people I’ve made. That view may be over simplifying some things, but it’s not completely wrong either.
2. Jassy or Solomon are just employees at the end of the day. Well paid, but they didn’t create the company. The system rewards those that create the thing a lot more than those that run the thing.
3. I’m vastly more critical of trust fund folks than someone like Bezos. He created true value in the economy and has been rewarded for that. Trust fund folks that simply live off that income are generally not productive members of society. They live the lifestyle then live purely because of a rich relative and, with rare exception, would be unable to have earned that wealth themself as their performance in society is poor relative to those who created the wealth.
And how many have become more poor? I do not give a flying fuck about how many 5 percenter have made even more money. You either lift society as a whole or you let small part prosper at the expense of the rest.
Some time ago conditions in the US / Canada were that many small people got the opportunity (The American Dream or whatever the fuck it is called).
Now that window of opportunity keep shrinking.
So no, fuck you James
_What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_
It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wall.
It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.
I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.
A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.
If you feed this into a decent chatbot, or in an Ask HN, you might be surprised.
But yes, generally this is how druglords work.
It's like instead of growing out of being a toddler, he just became an oversized toddler who can use language to make himself sound like an adult. Makes total sense.
> What shaped your mindset?
Having to listen to literal toddlers bitching about other people's success and dressing their little emotional tantrums into moralistic language to make it seem like they deserve any form of respect.
Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality.
At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do.
There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
Also, who said anything about Amazon? Why are you myopic? The whole system is rotten to the core when a single person can make it in a minute more than 99% of world’s population and not use the money to advance the world. And before you mark (ha, get it?) me as a communist – I’m not against wealth and personal ownership. It’s one thing to own a Ferrari and an expensive home, and is another to live in a cookie clicker world watching number go up and doing nothing with it but multiply the money.
There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer.
Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on.
Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year)
Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American.
Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations.
But people carry on working.
Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
They’ll just counter it with an army of cheap tik tokers portraying you as soyjack and campaign of disinformation.
I sold shaving cream door-to-door to pay for textbooks.
I am speaking for myself and others like me.
> ...we always look up at the oligarchs or sideways at the Jones, but we never look at those who are not doing as well as us.
Which uses universal language to incorrectly declare the behavior of all humans. I assumed you were writing in good faith and reporting you find true and in my writing rejecting your claim.
Maybe there's no one doing worse than you but I doubt it because here you are, with clear, well written english. Do you not offer them a helping hand?
The real problem with your statement is that there are many of us who do look at and after those who are not doing as well as us (and some of those are quite wealthy). A group of us spend every Tuesday to collect food from stores with which to prepare a meal that we send to homeless encampments around town and then serve to anyone who shows up (usually around 100) for dinner. We provide a positive environment, build relationships, and help them to get clothes, toiletries, services, and emergency shelter. I and many others give substantial portions of our incomes to reduce poverty and disease across the world. I have been lucky to write software that has helped resolve the violence of genocide and open source software that has lifted businesses and made starting them more accessible. I have spent the core of my mind's considerations on trying to understand why the world functions as it does and how that can be improved, how we can move the standards higher, and how we can include everyone. In all of this there are many ways I have made decisions that make my wealth less, my comforts lower, and my time and mind more strained but I will not cease and I am not alone.
So... When you claim that everyone only looks to those who are doing better I assert that you can speak for yourself. The belief that it's all every person for themselves and dog eat dog is false. It's bad for hope and bad for seeing reality.
That's depressing and also embarrassing as a fellow dev
The issue is not that Jeff Bezos can buy an yacht and you can only buy an used RV for your weekend trips. The issue is that Jeff Bezos can buy a whole newspaper to shape public opinion and decide what laws get passed, and you can do nothing more than write a blog post about it.
If the last year has shown me anything, it’s moneys not all it’s cracked up to be on the power front.
But with a lot more power than him.
(At least for the moment)
https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-fell-in-2023-amid-a...
From the title of your page
40k is what you call rich?
Is Bezos taking money out of my pocket or preventing me from buying food, shelter, healthcare, or other services I need or want?
He risked it all and worked hard to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
I really don't get it.
How many people can do that? Not me.
The answer is simple: By definition only about 100-300 people.
There's only 100 of the "worlds biggest companies" (assuming this refers to the top 100). And companies are usually started by 1-3 people.
Similarly: There's usually only 4 participants in the top 4 of a tournament bracket.
(The question is a bit: what does "can" even mean in this context and the answer im hinting at here: It's not individual skill that creates companies ex-nihilo. It's our economic system that produces companies.)
I think we can both agree that hard work and one of a kind achievement like this should be rewarded. But I suspect we will disagree on whether the reward should have a limit or not. I don't want Bezos to give up his wealth and live on 50k/year. But I don't want him to be so wealthy he can influence politics both home and abroad.
Should he be able to won every single media corporation? He shouldn't and he can't, because there are laws to protect against monopolies. Same thing for factories and farms.
Should he control politicians? No, but in theory people still control politicians since they can vote them out. If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed, perhaps the solution would be to impose more transparency and harsher penalties for that.
The problem is that bribery is completely legal in the United States, donating money to a PAC is completely legal and without a limit. I'm not talking about money under the table in a suitcase kind of thing - I'm talking about the situations like recent OpenAI donation of $25M to Trump's PAC - do you think after such donation he is more likely to do what OpenAI wants, or what his voters want? It's not even about Trump specifically - the entire American system is structured in such a way that this is allowed, billionaries from both sides donate to politicians to help them win and achieve their goals, this is the real power of the money they make and this is the problem I have with it.
>> I'm for freedom.
Someone already decides that you pay taxes on the money you make, and presumably will come and take it from you by force if you don't pay - the only difference is the percentage value. Or are you commenting from somewhere that doesn't have a functional tax system?
And a lot of what he did risk was other people's money.
Which is how Amazon works anyway. Everyone who relies on Amazon - the authors, the drop shippers, the small traders, the warehouse staff, the drivers, the white collar employees - can be rug-pulled at any moment for any random reason.
And Amazon lives off indirect government welfare. Pay at the low end is so miserly nearly a quarter of employees rely on SNAP.
What exactly did he risk that justifies this reward?
> and worked hard
How hard exactly? How much harder than a doctor, firefighter, waiter, or just your average joe could he possibly have worked to justify earning a million times more.
> to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
No, he really, really shouldn't. Not that much, not even remotely that much.
> I really don't get it.
It is absolute poison for society, for the whole of humanity, that a single person can own that much, hold that much power, with zero accountability.
No he didn't. He tried a business venture like thousands of other founders on this site, and got insanely lucky.
Was he lucky? He had an intuition that books could be sold on the internet because you don't need to test them out before buying. Luck might have been part of it, but I hadn't thought of that in 1990-something, I was playing AOE II all day instead.
The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.
If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?
On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take a little money from very many others and that adds up.
Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making a profit is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.
In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror.
We did this. All of us.
Bezos and related are personally responsible for creating the system that allows this.
Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.
Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.
I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
Bezos is making a lot of money. But it doesn't mean it makes the world better. Prime or AWS can still work fine without having Bezos making tons of money
No fuck it.
I mean I know(at the back of my head) that HN is owned by Y Combinator which is all about creating startups that explode and make you a billionaire. But personally I come here for the actual hacking - gameboy games running on a pregnancy test, that kind of thing. Bezos making more money than GDP of a small country in a day is a thing that kinda deserves us shaking our fists at it - it means the global system is broken, if one man can have this kind of power. But in a way, it's nothing new - emperors and khans had more riches than any current billionaire, comparatively. On the other hand, they were actual rulers, not just "regular" citizens.
I don't get the outrage. Our system needs incentives to get people to do great work. If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?
There is 1 Amazon. It's not easy to create Amazon from scratch.
Are you allowed to think that the reward that Bezos is reaping isn't proportional to his achievements?
Who should decide what's proportional, though? Should there be a committee that says, Bezos is capped at X billions, and any money he makes after that gets confiscated?
If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.
How about a government that acts for the good of the people, rather than for the companies?
> gets confiscated?
funny way to refer to taxation
And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.
Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".
That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.
What is proportional? Shall we crown him god? Allow him to keep slaves? Put him on a pedestal? Do you even know how much is it: a billion? If you strip him off 95% of his wealth, he’ll still have more than you can achieve in your 10 lives. He is disproportionately well compensated.