Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

by tonyonodi • 1 month ago

31 21 1 month ago

panny• 1 month ago

There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs. Ritchie created C. Ritchie created Unix. They both died in the same month, but Jobs was the billionaire and everyone wrote a story about his passing. Ritchie was not a billionaire, he simply did the work that changed the course of human history. It's not an isolated event either. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, but none became billionaires.

The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. It's just that if you do it, you rarely get the billion dollars.

coldtea4• 1 month ago

The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible.

What's "clearly possible" is to create a product. Or to create C.

It's not at all clear than anything of the sort "deserves" a billion dollars.

Except if we reduce it to the trivial "as a product it can be potentially worth billions of dollars in the market". But "is worth" doesn't equal "deserve".

One is an economic claim (which nobody disagrees with). The other is a ethical/moral claim, which many disagree about.

ForHackernews• 1 month ago

Norman Borlaug saved ~1 billion lives and did not become a billionaire.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/05/07/dr-norman-borlaug-he-sa...

pstuart2• 1 month ago

A longtime friend of mine celebrated his 60th birthday, and the party was at a large venue that was packed with family, friends, neighbors, and (ex-)colleagues who all showed up to show their love and care for him -- he is undoubtedly the richest man I know.

triceratops• 1 month ago

William Shockley invented the transistor, but [didn't become a billionaire]

In fairness that wasn't for lack of trying. Shockley founded a semi-conductor company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laborat...) and ran it so poorly that eight key people left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight), founded their own company (Fairchild Semiconductor) and became enormously wealthy. Two of the eight then went on to found Intel and became even wealthier.

AnimalMuppet• 1 month ago

Yeah. The problem is that knowing how to invent something like the transistor, and knowing how to run a company, are two very different skill sets and backgrounds.

coldtea4• 1 month ago

this pair of arguments makes a very tempting motte-and-bailey. The left can make the more dramatic argument that “all billionaires are cheaters”. Then if anyone points out that it’s possible to inherit a billion dollars as a baby, before you could possibly have done anything wrong, they can fall back to saying “ah, but clearly the baby didn’t deserve that billion dollars, which is what I was talking about all along”.

This is not a "motte-and-bailey", as the fact that you can't "deserve that billion dollars" is already part of the original "pair of arguments". In a true motte-and-bailey the second argument is implied, here both are given out straight.

Also, “all billionaires are cheaters” trivially doesn't include the baby which merely inherited the money as having actively cheated. It does however trivially include the parent who amassed the amount as a cheater. And thus, it makes inheriting the amount inheriting the fruits of cheating.

regularization• 1 month ago

the baby which merely inherited the money

How many babies inherit money? The earliest heirs usually get access to their inheritance is when they choose to at eighteen.

coldtea4• 1 month ago

That's a pedantic distinction that doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument.

"Baby which inherited the money" could just be baby born into wealth, or baby who will eventually inherit billions when it grows older and its parents die, or baby whose diseased mogul parent left a trust of billions for, or whatever....

k310• 1 month ago

IMO, it's not the money itself, but how the money was acquired, and what is done with it. For example,

1. By delivering useful products and services or sabotaging competitors, making money by promoting hate or spreading knowledge (HN, take a bow)

2. By actually enriching the consumer or creating addictive/dark patterns or charging usurious interest rates, setting traps, obsoleting products quickly and so on.

3. By pouring profits back into the company, creating opportunities and just giving a fair share to society that pays for the products and services, or fattening up on stock buybacks. (Think AI helping people who lost jobs to AI using AI to get jobs from AI HR agents)

4. Money buys influence, and laws and regulations favor the concentration of wealth over its flow back to society; hence the insane concentration of wealth in static assets, mega-yachts, real estate. Legislative capture.

5. Ultimately conscience and the "golden rule". Beyond a certain amount of wealth, actual happiness is somewhat asymptotic or decreasing, [0] the point being that it all becomes symbolic at some point, and that you'll always have less (fewer of those symbols) than someone else, signifying unhappiness unless you're "the one at the apex".

6. The greatest treasures are arguably "Treasures of the Heart" [1] and call that "the spiritual aspect of life" if you will, but all is eventually lost except the good we do with and for others (The Dennis Ritchies of this world). I prefer not to have an army of bodyguards, though I could use some household and yard help, which I can still afford until those billionaires sack Social Security for an even lower tax rate. (than zero?)

[0] Elon Musk: "I'm not happy"

Elon Musk gave ordinary people access to the biggest hate machine (and nufidier) in human history.

[1] Nichiren

Nichiren gave ordinary people access to the treasures of the Lotus Sutra, which opens the door to the innate Buddhahood/divinity in each person, and therefore, to happiness.

pstuart2• 1 month ago

The fact that SCOTUS fallaciously equated money with speech, billionaires have an outsized advantage in influencing the political landscape.

Paradigm2020• 1 month ago

Your point 5 and your footnote elon musk not happy contradict eachother.

Elon Musk also massively decreased the cost of spaceflight and accelerated the advent of electric cars.

People, despite other people's desire, are complicated and neither pure evil nor pure good.

techblueberry• 1 month ago

The thing that bugs me is like, how tone deaf can you be in the moment?

Mandatory disclaimer - im not a socialist and dont have a problem with wealth accumulation, but it really feels like in 2026. I would spend a lot of time thinking about how to thought lead around the good old traditional “business owners create jobs” and not “billionaires=good”. Also, in our regulatory captures, giving companies $60 billion dollars - it’s not the hardest working founders that win, it’s the best capitalized.

Sure Uber made a better product, but was it that or the subsidized rides that truly allowed them to capture the market.

So, I want people to dream big, but what happened to medium sized businesses where you could make $20 or so million dollars. Why advocate for consolidation in this scale?

lofaszvanitt• 1 month ago

Most of those people are actual viruses. Just like agent smith said in the Matrix. They gather exorbitant amount of money and what do they do with it? Muddy the waters, making sure noone comes close to them, feed absolute hogwash to the masses, even write books about it (This is the secret how you will succeed as an entrepreneur etc etc.). And more and more and more people fell for it. And they spend more and more time trying to untangle the bullshit. And that takes time and then they gave up. Viruses, nothing more, nothing less. There are exceptions, but very very few.

fsuts• 1 month ago

“ Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.

Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have,”

So in 21 years and 6500 companies (and turning away multiples more) he has seen 30 billionaires.

Now if you take some examples:

Zuckerberg stole the idea and then pushed his cofounder out

Uber drivers were recruited without sufficient vetting and committed crimes inc rape of women

Tesla put out self driving that led to deaths

And so on

I’ve previously worked for a company owned by the founder who became a billionaire at around 60 and he started the company in 20s and it was a solid company that looked after the employees and customers.

He could have been a billionaire much faster if he had been a scumbag

scotty792• 1 month ago

The skill that billionaires have is to stay on top of some self-inflating economic baloon while pushing other people off.

People who are billionaires now are people who were lucky enought to get on top of the baloons that actually flew and continue to self-inflate and stayed there while pushing everybody else off of them.

If the process of balloon selection wasn't mostly random, pg would have help found 30 conpanies instead of 6500.

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

How to earn a billion dollars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360

vinyl7• 1 month ago

I think another different perspective is that its not the fact that there are billionaires. The problem is that there are billionaires while the rest of world is decaying and getting worse. For better or for worse, billionaires doing the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" deal with society at large will prevent a lot of future problems for them.

scotty792• 1 month ago

Wealth is not a resource to be gathered or utilized. Wealth is just a number. Number that determines what fraction of future output of human civilization this person can command on a whim.

Letting one person have this amount of power is just wrong way to do things. There should be caps on that. Such amount of power should be under command of organizations, not individuals. Otherwise we are are stuck with living under a handful of spontaneous, random dictators, hoping they are benevolent and not incredibly stupid. While they constantly make idiotic and malevolent decisions that waste actual resources and human capital.

The question who deserves what and what was earned and how is almost irrelevant if the total outcome is this bad.

brador• 1 month ago

The point is to be a billionaire you must essentially pass a billion people asking for a mere dollar handout and give them nothing.

The starving, the down and outs, the unlucky, all who could really use that dollar for basic human needs. Mazlow.

That is where the “rich are cruel by definition” originates.

Paul Graham Is Strawmanning the Left's Argument Against Billionaires

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