| The essay is just a collection of incorrect notions pushed all over the place by the intellectuals and media. The author failed to even try to look himself on the real data and went with templates that were proven wrong again and again. Few points:
1. "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." - author does not understand the difference between statistical categories and real flesh and blood people. If he did, he would have known that real people move between statistical categories over time, which makes absolute sense: you start career with no experience and debt to pay if you have a college degree, then over years you gain skills that allow you to get better pay. There is no "rich" and "poor" when judging statistical categories, because in this sense there always be newly graduated people starting their careers at lower payed jobs. That's how the world works, you can't get Staff Software Engineer position in Google without proving that you're at least have skill for Junior. 2. "Most people don't have the safety net or mental bandwidth to even consider entrepreneurship." - Entrepreneurship is tough and definitely not for all. But, not having money at first was never a problem. Reading some history of big companies you may see that they often started on campus or in garage. Therefore main prerequisite is mental toughness, and building of something people want. 3. "It's less a tutorial or analysis and more a thinly veiled attempt to ease concerns about wealth inequality." - PG correctly pointed out that individuals become wealthy by creating giant amount of new wealth and then capturing some small part of it. For example Amazon, you use it everyday, it has the best pricing, so get immense value from it. Bezos captures some part of the value that Amazon created for all consumers. 4. "basic needs" - It's often a tactic of demagogues to hide behind undefined terms to push their vision. Having a fridge or microwave is a basic need? Is having a car or 2 cars also a basic need? Both of these would have been considered luxuries 50 years ago, and still people were living without them. The point is that setting arbitrary standards imposed by third-parties is not basic needs. In this case, you could define anything as basic need and always have 15-20% of people that don't meet your arbitrary standard. 5. "a small minority of people" - And again, PG provided an approach that will work for every individual. If you create something immensely valuable, and capture some small fraction of it, you get rich. If you do not create, then you don't become rich. But, that is not the problem of society that you yourself did not create anything. As is usual with such types of articles, the author positions himself on some moral high ground. He claims that his aim is to help the poor, but since the author did not create big amount of wealth and he could not donate large sums to philantropy (which wealth individuals do a lot), then the only approach is to steal money from people who created it with hard work, and give to people who did not work, did not create wealth and likely will never do. |