[jstummbillig]

I think this is super interesting (because the answer is not at all obvious to me): What do you mean by "through work alone"? Can it only be work if I can map a human hour cleanly onto someone paying an invoice for that hour?

[ForHackernews]

Yes. Investment gains are not work, inheritance is not work,capital appreciation is not work, winning the PayPal stocks lottery is not work.

[Ntrails]

> Investment gains are not work

Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the S&P 500. My work is picking the stocks, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.

Are those excess returns not work? What are they?

[atq2119]

Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.

[taffer]

> The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.

You could say the same about musicians and authors. Are they immoral as well?

[atq2119]

Yes, the same is absolutely true for many other professions. And artists are probably more aware than most, at least on average, how much luck plays a role.

But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.

[taffer]

I fail to see the moral problem with being able to write a book that millions or even billions of people can enjoy. To me that's a feature, not a bug.

[saghm]

> Are those excess returns not work? What are they?

Wealth extracted from a market, which is what the parent commenter said in the first place

[twoodfin]

What do you mean “extracted”? The wealth is sitting there in his 401(k) being risked through (highly) fractional ownership of various publicly traded business ventures.

[saghm]

I mean "not earned through work", as evidenced by your description of it "as as sitting there". Risk isn't the same as work.

[twoodfin]

What is being “extracted” from what?

I described it as “sitting there” to contrast my viewpoint that in fact it’s not being “extracted” from anything as far as I can tell.

[zarathustreal]

Do you think “work” means literally “manual labor”?

[hnthrow0287345]

>Are those excess returns not work? What are they?

Normally you'd get a low percentage fee instead of getting all of the returns unless you got that capital for free (inheritance?), so yes, you are a worker compared to the person controlling the capital.

[inigyou]

Say I dig a hole and then fill it back in and dig a hole and fill it back in and make a mud pie then throw it on the ground and then a stranger gives me $100. Is that work?

[ForHackernews]

You did something difficult and ultimately futile in exchange for money? Sounds like work to me.

[ForHackernews]

Are you good at picking stocks, or just lucky? How do you know?

Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the roulette wheel. My work is picking the numbers, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.

Are those returns not work? What are they?

[demorro]

Winnings.

[jstummbillig]

What if I build and run a SaaS?

[tomrod]

The common argument would be that, unless you set it up as a co-op/full profit share or never hire employees, you're extracting value (exploiting) from what your employees' labor earned the company.

Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

[jstummbillig]

So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition? We presume that people at large would be ready say "Oh yeah, in that case: You earned that billion dollars for sure, nothing wrong with any of that, go you"?

Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?

Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.

[tomrod]

Reasonable thoughts. Folks have been arguing about this forever. Both sides - community-focused and individual-focused -- have reasonable points on the ethics and morals of what they claim. Both sides want claim to a split of the pie produced by the efforts of individuals.

Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).

In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.

The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.

But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."

I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.

[inigyou]

I thought the problem with Cuba was it being embargoed because the USA is jealous it didn't get some profits several decades ago.

[lkjdsklf]

Do you have any examples of a singe company with only the founder as an employee that is worth a billion dollars?

Her point was being made about actual reality and not some hypothetical fantasy

[tomrod]

To be fair, reality is a special case (and not always the most interesting one) of general principles.

With recent advances in AI, it may be possible for someone to build a billion dollar single founder company.

[well_ackshually]

>So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition?

That's the fun part: they cannot make a billion dollars through their own work. It doesn't exist. Billions of dollars do not exist without either collaboration (extremely rare), or exploitation of others (see: every single YC company)

>Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?

Would you have made that billion without the employee ? If not, you did not earn it. Would your company have gone under if you didn't have someone handling those support tickets, what percentage of the survival of the company is linked to it, and why didn't you pay them nearly that percentage ? Congratulations on exploiting your employee.

[ForHackernews]

Building the SaaS is work, responding to customer support tickets is work; collecting rents every month on a capital asset you own is not work.