[titzer]

You gotta wonder about the morality of a society that allows a person to amass 40,000 lifetimes of wealth and lets others starve. The ultra rich are a mathematical anomaly that exposes what a sham this "meritocracy" is. It is physically impossible to create $140 billion dollars of actual value for people in a single human lifetime (2.5 billion seconds). The only way is the amplification and exponentiation of that work through millions of other people, and to make the incremental cost of adding that value essentially zero. Which means that the market has absolutely failed to price the "goods" created by these people according to their incremental cost.

[Rury]

> the market has absolutely failed to price the "goods" created by these people according to their incremental cost.

Your right. The wealth Jeff has vastly comes from his ownership of his business, of which he alone didn't make it what it is today. Many workers helped contribute and make it what it is today, but they're not anywhere as wealthy as they're weren't fairly given part ownership in the business they contributed in making...

You could argue the workers were paid a wage which they could of invested into a share of ownership in the business, but it's still unfair. There's a limited amount of stock to go around (unless the company issues more stock), existing owners stand to benefit more when this happens.

Stock behaves just like money in regards to it's store of value. Print alot of it, without making goods, and it becomes worthless and vice versa.

Therefore for fairness, ideally companies should print stock equal to the growth in their value and given to those who made the value. But lol at this pipe dream, as share prices wouldn't ever change much, so existing owners would be against it as they wouldn't benefit from it (unless they also worked in adding more value). Nevermind the difficulties in objectively attributing value...

[icelancer]

>> physically impossible to create $140 billion dollars of actual value for people in a single human lifetime

Source? I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there. $140 billion is not that much when you compare the productivity gains just these four people have given the world.

[dntbnmpls]

> Source?

The reality of physics and human capability?

> I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this.

They had a part in it, but it's the people/ecosystem that creates the wealth, not an individual. Linus didn't create all the distros. He didn't install it on all the servers around the world.

> Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there.

They themselves didn't create $140 billion of anything. It took the efforts of hundreds of thousands/millions of people, along with highly favorable laws and the society in which they lived in. Also, Bezos and Gates destroyed a lot of businesses as well with their monopolistic practices. As a matter of fact, when it comes to gates/microsoft, I'd say it's an overall net negative as microsoft set back computing/computer literacy more than anything.

I thought the fallacy/myth of the "great man" nonsense died with Jobs. There were plenty of people who thought Apple was over when Jobs died. But I guess it's alive and well today.

What's the right wealth level for people? I don't know. Personally, I think the best way combat wealth inequality is to create laws to foster competition so that one company doesn't become a monopoly. But instead, we are in an era of mergers, monopolies and consolidation. So wealth inequality will inevitably continue to grow.

[icelancer]

>> They had a part in it, but it's the people/ecosystem that creates the wealth, not an individual. Linus didn't create all the distros. He didn't install it on all the servers around the world.

One is a much more replaceable skill than the other in this equation. That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

[dntbnmpls]

> One is a much more replaceable skill than the other in this equation. That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

What is? It takes as plenty of skill to build a distro ( along with the package management systems, etc ) as it does to write a kernel. I understand that to most people, "kernel" = magic, but it really isn't. Not to mention many people helped develop the linux kernel.

Linus deserves credit, but so does red hat, slackware, debian, etc. Without those distros and GNU project, nobody would know of linus or the linux kernel. And the vast majority most of the GNU/Linux OS ecosystem is non-linux.

> That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

The "great man" nonsense really has staying power. Using your logic, Torvalds' mother has contributed even more than torvalds to world productivity because she created linus...

[bjourne]

No! The burden of proof is on you. Please explain in detail exactly how Torvalds in 50 years of living has created $140 billion dollars of value. How many billions of value did he create this year? How many did he create last year? And so on.

[icelancer]

Uh, Linux and its derivations drive over half of the computing power in the world, yielding insane productivity gains for people of all classes, races, ages, and geographic locations.

I think that speaks for itself.

[bjourne]

Thanks for missing the point, uh. Explain exactly which of Torvalds actions that together created $150 billion of value. How many billions was uploading the Linux kernel to ftp in 1991 worth? How many billions was created when git was launched?

[icelancer]

There's no missing the point. Torvalds developing Linux rocketed productivity which as any economist can tell you is worth a lot, lot of money. The scale at which the Fed is pumping money into the economy hoping to get a fraction of that productivity should tell you how much its worth.

You disagree with economic principles and productivity. That's fine. There's nothing to continue to discuss, then.

[titzer]

TBH my original comment skirted the line on trolling, mostly because of its terseness. But it's a genuine thing to consider unquestioned, unstated assumptions like the idea that an inventor is entitled to a percentage of every single productivity gain everywhere that results from their invention, regardless of the incremental cost to them. You can see the discussion elsewhere in this thread about that. But maybe on your own time you can consider why you accept and defend this principle which so obviously benefits rich people and powerful corporations the most.

[titzer]

Thought experiment: we discover a whole new planet the size and population of Earth that just happens to run x86 computers, but no Linux. We introduce them to Linux, which can be copied onto every single one of them at essentially zero cost. Should Linus and co's fortune instantly double? Do they deserve a "cut" of every single person's productivity gain, forever, everywhere, in perpetuity?

This is the principle we are discussing.

[icelancer]

Linus isn't worth billions of dollars, so probably not. I imagine his net worth due to residuals would increase, and yes, he would be deserving of it.

[titzer]

Why aren't teachers or scientists billionaires?

[splintercell]

Because they don't scale.

This is like asking why JK Rowling is a billionaire but your neighbor who only sold 10 children's books is not.

Teachers and Scientists who scale are billionaires[1][2] or centimillionaires [3]

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/30/indias-newest-billionaire-is...

2. James Watson, Ronda Stryker, Gordon Moore

3. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, Noam Chomsky

[j7ake]

There is nothing about morality in the billionaires that are mentioned.

People find value in the companies they create and willingly give their money to the companies in exchange for their services. Nobody is forced to give money to these companies.

The huge amount of wealth that is created from this process comes in part from the globalization and scale of their operations.

The lobbying, tax loopholes, anticompetition behaviors are a separate issue. Many of these are patently unfair and true competition starts to break down.

[GaryNumanVevo]

You cannot dismiss the argument in one breath saying that no one is forced to give money to these companies and in the next breath say that anti-trust and lobbying is separate. It’s a fallacy of choice.

These companies and C-suite individuals are taking advantage of a system which serves capital first and foremost. Amazon is able to extract large amounts of value from both workers foreign and domestic within the laws written and lobbied by the capitalists of the last generation.

[stanfordkid]

Look, human nature is to actually amass wealth without creating value. We are lucky we live in a society where value creation and wealth acquisition are at least tangentially related.

The problem in my opinion is not that a single person gets so much wealth, but rather what they receive the wealth for. Amazon just made life easier for the masses to consume goods. IMO someone like Einstein deserves a lot more money and someone like Bezos less. The people inventing the actual science that then enables something like Amazon don't really get compensated -- and perhaps they should.