When we talk about him, personally, that's his wealth. He can give it to charity, use it to improve the world or burn it on pleasures. It's his money that society agreed to give him - it's society that owes him. I know the system has many flaws, FED etc. but this in general is how money works. You give something, and in exchange you get right to receive something.
When we talk about Amazon he decided to optimize for customer, not employee satisfaction. I'm not a fan of what Amazon is doing currently (as an e-commerce) but when you sum amount of welfare it provided over the whole humanity, it seems quite possible that it is a very positive number - I'm assuming unhappiness of employees counts negatively towards it. Apart from the whole economical aspect, creating work places and opportunities for other companies to create them, just looking at cheaper prices, let's say employee A earns $500 less than he could. And that per one employee we have 10,000 customers in similar living situation that saved $20. The net result for people in this life situation is $200,000 - $500.
And then there's difficult problem of general optimization function if you want to do whatever best you can for the humanity. Given GCRs associated with all of us living on the same rock, if you think about humanity as a whole and its future, it may turn out that space exploration has extremely high priority and it would be EV+ even if we would have to scarify lives of most of those currently alive.
I mean, if he is spending the money on space-tech, he is putting it back into someone's wages. So would it be better if he put it back in the pockets of the 500,000 workers who are already contributing to the economy (and they are already making slightly above market rate for their labor), or would you rather him invest in these new jobs?
An argument posits that there is a factual inconsistency that needs to be clarified through dialogue.
What you are proposing is a debate.
I AM NOT DEBATING - I am stating the fact that in American society the people have political vehicles to enforce cultural morality as codified through law.
And i continue this dialogue because it is important for people to recognize that using morality as a metric is arbitrary when discussion such matters necause at the end of the day morality varies from pers9n to person and culture to culture
That's...not how debate works. You can't just declare that you're not debating while continuing to debate, at least not when we're debating matters of opinion like moral responsibilities.
prerogative, and yeah - if you're the richest person on the planet it would be nice if the employees that got you there weren't living paycheck to paycheck.
It's not an iron law. Plenty of employers spend more money, in order to increase retention and productivity. Believe it or not, there are many employers who actually care and see their employees as human.
You're under the misconception that businesses should be run as charities and those businesses that are not are harming the world. This is simply not true.
Paying the market wage, meaning the best (lowest) price you can find that meets all of your requirements for quality of service, is still contributing to the global economy.
And by making your firm more productive, you are increasing the pool of goods/services that the world's consumers can divide amongst themselves. That's how for profit enterprises contribute to a rising standard of living.
They are not mutex. You can actually care about your employees, see them as human, and pay them an amount that you both mutually consent to, which is what Amazon is doing.
> You can actually care about your employees, see them as human
Amazon doesn't. That's the point.
You are wildly oversimplifying the iron law of wages. It does not say "it is morally acceptable for employers to treat employees as badly as they can possibly get away with."
No one is entitled to a job. They are willing to do the work asked of them in exchange for the pay they receive. They are not victims and Amazon is not mistreating them.
More generally, this idea that paying more is better for the world is misguided and over-simplistic. You can often reduce suffering in the world more by paying 100 very poor people sweat shop wages than 10 middle class people developed world wages, and that is the kind of choice you have to make when deciding how to spend your capital.
We cannot simply increase the wealth at our disposal and pay all 100 people high wages. Scarcity of resources is a reality we have to be mature enough to contend with, and that means looking at more than just the direct and immediate effects, and factoring in opportunity costs, to weigh the trade-offs.
If you want to argue that, due to scarcity, we can't maximize global quality of life without mistreating some people, that is least a coherent argument.
There is no coherent argument that Amazon isn't treating its employees poorly, even relative to other companies in the same fields. Read some articles about working conditions at Amazon. This one's a decent starting point: https://gizmodo.com/reminder-amazon-treats-its-employees-lik...
When we talk about him, personally, that's his wealth. He can give it to charity, use it to improve the world or burn it on pleasures. It's his money that society agreed to give him - it's society that owes him. I know the system has many flaws, FED etc. but this in general is how money works. You give something, and in exchange you get right to receive something.
When we talk about Amazon he decided to optimize for customer, not employee satisfaction. I'm not a fan of what Amazon is doing currently (as an e-commerce) but when you sum amount of welfare it provided over the whole humanity, it seems quite possible that it is a very positive number - I'm assuming unhappiness of employees counts negatively towards it. Apart from the whole economical aspect, creating work places and opportunities for other companies to create them, just looking at cheaper prices, let's say employee A earns $500 less than he could. And that per one employee we have 10,000 customers in similar living situation that saved $20. The net result for people in this life situation is $200,000 - $500.
And then there's difficult problem of general optimization function if you want to do whatever best you can for the humanity. Given GCRs associated with all of us living on the same rock, if you think about humanity as a whole and its future, it may turn out that space exploration has extremely high priority and it would be EV+ even if we would have to scarify lives of most of those currently alive.