[sobellian]

Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.

[Twey]

Health is not a perk but an inelastic demand: a threat to withhold health is a threat of physical harm, and a negotiation in which one party's physical health is on the line is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from a negotiation held with a gun to that party's head.

[sobellian]

I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard discussions on how the government ought to raise funds for it. If you are saying that by negotiating terms of employment, any employer is intrinsically engaged in violence, that stance is pretty out there.

[Twey]

If those terms include the potential for predictable harms like lack of healthcare or housing if an agreement isn't reached, then yes, I think that is indeed an engagement in violence.

Now I'm not saying that the employer is necessarily morally culpable here — I'm sure most employers would like nothing more than to not have to worry about their employees' healthcare, and certainly I doubt many people enjoy having the ability to take it away. But it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to have a real negotiation when inelastic demands are (potentially) unmet. Someone under threat of losing health insurance or housing is negotiating under duress, contrary to the comment I replied to.

[cm2012]

Under this principle no human has ever been able to consent to anything in the history of the world. Certainly 99.99% of humans.

This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.

[Twey]

No human can _100%_ consent to anything (… probably: free will is tricky). Coercion is a continuum, not a binary.

I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.

But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.

[sobellian]

There can be labor monopsonies but it is not a rule; I promise you that the key employees at a SaaS startup tend to have plenty of options.

[Twey]

This effect is very much not limited to monopolies, though it's certainly easiest to see there. There's no step change from monopoly to competitive marketplace though. If you believe it's the company's moral duty to provide e.g. healthcare then in a non-monopoly situation that culpability is divided, though not abrogated (and beware the bystander effect!). From the employee's perspective, the spectre of physical harm is a bit further off, but it will still colour negotiations.

It's especially insufficient to generalize the working of the entire system from an example of a market in which employees currently have enough power to not really have to worry about the prospect of physical harm because it would be disadvantageous to the employers to cause it. Even if we take the current state of the SaaS startup market as reliable (which it isn't) the original argument was not limited to SaaS startup employees, and in other industries (including ones that are a bit down the pyramid from the SaaS companies) things are a lot less rosy for employees.

[sobellian]

A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable person would agree to amount to duress. This is a counterexample to the idea that any negotiation of employment involves duress. I don't need to disprove the existence of any coercive employment. But SaaS companies are especially relevant since pg specializes in showing people how to become billionaires through SaaS. If earning a billion dollars implies some measure of coercion we should be able to find that in a SaaS startup.

[inigyou]

That's not quite true, the police hold me down and lock me in a cell if I don't hand money to a landlord.

They don't hold me down and force me to hand money to a landlord, mind, they just lock me in a cell if I don't, so maybe it doesn't meet your standard of proof.

[sobellian]

You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with startups, is the claim that the founders are in cahoots with landlords in the Bay Area to hold employees captive?

[inigyou]

Being homeless is illegal in many countries, including the one where I live. If I am evicted because I can't pay rent, then obviously I also can't get a hotel room, and my existence is illegal

[CPLX]

I am making a meta-argument, and I do think that it’s inarguable.

My argument is this: the core disagreement here is about the allocation of resources between labor and capital.

I’m right. It is.

That doesn’t mean I have settled the argument about what those allocations should be which nobody has, it’s a core organizational element of politics.

But I think his argument is bullshit. It’s a purposeful misdirection because it refuses to recognize the terms of the discussion at all.

[sobellian]

I don't think pg would disagree that the politicians that discuss this want to allocate more resources to labor. But what he takes exception with specifically is the rhetoric used to justify this "reallocation." AOC's claim:

> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.

[cm2012]

One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.

[CPLX]

You could say that, but you also don't have to concede it.

In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.

For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.

This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.