[lajhsdfkl]

I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things (except Shockley and that point is moot since the coinventors/creators reaped the rewards).

Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money?

What our system rewards are practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on.

[coldtea]

>I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things

Obvious under the current system maybe.

Obvious that it should be so, and that it's better that it's so, or that it can only ever be so? Not so much.

I, for one, think that society would be so much better if production of value like what Einstein did or what Tesla did etc, was rewarded with richness, rather than selling something.

For one, we'd have gotten rid of fucking SPAM email and social media leeching on private data to sell ads...

[dwaltrip]

> I, for one, think that society would be so much better if production of value like what Einstein did or what Tesla did etc, was rewarded with richness, rather than selling something.

Unfortunately, there's no mechanism for doing this in a decentralized, dynamic fashion.

The great strength of markets is their decentralized and dynamic nature. They are the original hivemind and crowd-sourced wisdom. Of course, they have many weaknesses (especially with the corruptibility of governments). But for now, it seems these weaknesses are best handled by continually attempting to apply layers of patches and one-off fixes, instead of altering it fundamentally. Perhaps advanced AI will enable a new paradigm... although I would certainly not want to rush into such an enormous change.

I do agree that we can do a better job of rewarding and incentivizing fundamental research and innovation. But it's not going to be easy. Part of the problem is that it often take significant hindsight to know which breakthroughs are the most important.

[coldtea]

>The great strength of markets is their decentralized and dynamic nature. They are the original hivemind and crowd-sourced wisdom.

The problem is that markets optimize for one thing, to the detriment of all others: profit.

Anything else (e.g. more inventions, etc) is a byproduct. If avoiding it will bring more profit, that's totally fine for the actors involved.

And it's not even long term profit (which, because of costs to reputation and such, will require more good behavior) -- quick term profit is equally good a motive under such a market system, human costs and externalities be damned.

Under such a system, if people could sell baby milk mixed with chlorine to make a profit, they would (and they have -- among countless of other examples of putting profit first).

We should create and foster decentralized and dynamic systems that optimize for a better world in aspects that we want -- instead of piggybacking on a naturally occurring decentralized system based on greed like monkeys.

[pjc50]

> Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money?

> What our system rewards are practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on.

Hmm. The first statement either tautologous or ignores the importance of inheritance and marriage; the second one ignores the importance of property.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/sunday-times-rich-list-2017-ri...

In addition to fairly standard retail I can see: gambling, property, inheritance, diamonds, inheritance (Earl Cadogan, Duke of Westminster, Heineken), property, actual inventions (Dyson, Rausing), corruption/oil oligarchy (Abramovich, Usmanov, Blavatnik), and war profiteering (Fredriksen).

[lajhsdfkl]

Thank you for posting an argument against a point I've never made. Hmmm, it's almost as if I didn't state that selling things was the only way to make money.

[pjc50]

You said "you won't get rich unless you sell something" upthread?

[api]

Your last paragraph is no longer really correct. The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes. You don't build a company for customers but for the next round of investors, and your product is its stock. In the extreme these can be highly clever and polished versions of the "big store" scam where nearly all actual value is flimsy or illusory.

This is because all the money is now at the top. Your customers are the ones who can pay.

A related phenomenon is Internet companies where the user is the product. Advertisers and others who want user data or access to attention have far more money to spend than users. Computing has transformed into a surveillance platform to monetize users because users are not the ones paying for anything.

[lajhsdfkl]

> The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes

The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.

[amarkov]

You're mixing up levels of indirection. Financing the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy isn't itself an example of "practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on".

You can say that what our system rewards is always derived from practical products the average person wants, but that doesn't seem like a useful way to think about things.

[lajhsdfkl]

Can you explain to me in simple words what you are refuting in your comment?

Nowhere did I suggest that the only way to become rich was to sell practical products. I will state that this is the primary way people acquire vast amounts of money and that whether people become rich via second order and abstract systems such as financing makes no difference. Ultimately the products would not exist without the financial system that was in place.

[amarkov]

It's a lot easier to get a $250k position at Morgan Stanley than build a business generating $250k in profit. If more people go the latter route, that's just a matter of a larger denominator, not an indication of what's actually being rewarded.

[api]

The last part about value for customers is optional for as long as there are deeper pocketed investors. Given the concentration of wealth at the top that might be a long long time. I also edited my comment to mention user monetization, which is a related phenomenon.

[lajhsdfkl]

> The last part about value for customers is optional for as long as there are deeper pocketed investors

I don't understand what you mean by this? Is this a comment about the current startup funding phenomenon?