
A reply to Russell Okung - abdullahkhalids
http://paulgraham.com/okung.html
======
tkiley
I'm surprised at how primitive the response to pg's essay has been. None of it
seems to respond to the central point of the essay (which is that economic
inequality has many causes, and we should specifically attack the bad causes,
not inequality itself).

In spite of all the noise, I do disagree with the central point.

Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth
is opportunity and political influence. Therefore economic inequality is
inequality of opportunity and political influence. Persistent
intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition.

Inequality - a bad thing - can be caused as a byproduct of good activity. It's
still bad. It's a negative externality, like environmental pollution. In fact,
there's some striking parallels - a buildup of inequality, like a buildup of
pollution, can trigger the collapse of the ecosystem.

We need to agree that inequality is categorically bad so we can have a real
discussion of how to keep it under control. It would be crazy to argue that
farming is good so farm-related pollution does not need to be controlled.
Likewise with startups and inequality.

~~~
raldi
_> Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad.
Wealth is opportunity and political influence._

Paul directly addressed this in his reply to Klein
([http://paulgraham.com/klein.html);](http://paulgraham.com/klein.html\);)
Ctrl-F "the conversion of money into political power"; in brief, he says that
if you're upset that economic inequalities leads to unequal political
influence, attack _that_. Fight to remove the political influence that wealth
currently has.

If we lived in a world where everyone has the same opportunities for social
mobility (i.e., universal free education from daycare to PhD, unbiased hiring
processes) and the same political influence (no SuperPACs, no lobbyists,
mandate that no citizen spends more than $100 / year on political donations,
and perhaps give every citizen that $100 / year, as a use-it-or-lose-it source
of funding for whatever political causes they wanted to support)... if we
lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark Zuckerberg had a lot
more money than you? Why?

~~~
tkiley
>... if we lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark
Zuckerberg had a lot more money than you? Why?

That's a really good question. Theoretically, I would be fine with that kind
of world, but I dont think that kind of world has ever existed or will ever
exist. It is more realistic to attack the problem on both fronts - maximize
social mobility and minimize the influence of wealth on politics, but also
recognize that you will never completely succeed. Wealth will always equal
opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad
thing to some extent.

For what it's worth, I'm not upset that Zuck has a lot more money than me. I
just think that entrepreneurially generated inequality should not be a sacred
cow, and I'm speaking as someone who has created a good deal of inequality
with entrepreneurship.

~~~
sail
> Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so
> inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.

Perhaps, but we may all be surprised to how little extent. Instead of giving
up, it's worth giving a better world a try.

------
msvan
It's interesting to note how the styles of Russell Okung's article and PG's
response are so different. Okung draws analogies to sports, men on hills, uses
rhetorical questions, and talks about dreams and compassion. It's impassioned.
PG's response is a cold deconstruction. A implies B implies C, but B is not
true hence the argument is false.

Personally I love this style of argument and wish more people would argue in
this way, but, anecdotally, people often think you're an asshole when you do.
Maybe it's because you miss out on nuances that you find irrelevant to the
central question, but that others feel are very important. Maybe it's just a
generally unappealing way to be convinced of something.

------
pfarnsworth
To be blunt, if people are misunderstanding pg's essay, what it means is that
his writing skills were not good enough to tackle a topic as complex as
economic inequality. I read his essay and came across with a bad taste in my
mouth as well. I think he has surrounded himself with too many yes-people that
told him this was a great article to post, without being honest to him about
the repercussions.

It's fine because everyone makes mistakes. This is a life lesson that he needs
to internalize.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" it means is that his writing skills were not good enough"_

or, possibly, their listening/comprehension skills were not good enough.
Communication requires solid effort and methodology by both the speaker and
the listener. Either or both sides can be responsible for a breakdown.

~~~
pfarnsworth
There were a lot of people that burned him online for his essay, not just a
football player. If a bunch of people accuse you of the same thing, at some
point you have to start blaming yourself instead of blaming others.

~~~
lotharbot
pick any controversial topic in which people are emotionally invested, and any
well-written argument made about that topic, and you'll find "a lot of people"
who "burned" whoever wrote the argument -- some of which might even be good
responses, but many of which are some variation of "heard what I wanted to
hear".

~~~
jusben1369
Yes what was most telling to me was how many of his usual supporters were
quiet or gently rebuffed him indirectly on Twitter.

------
barney54
There is so much truth in this: "Quote the specific passages you disagree
with. This forces you to calibrate your mental model of what someone said with
what they actually said."

~~~
gammarator
I disagree. Much of rhetoric is about framing--choosing what to present, and
how. An essay can be wrong because of what it omits or wrongly emphasizes.

Everyone is quoting pg's passage "So you could for example have no poverty and
perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." That's
true, in the abstract--but it's so far from the reality of US society today
that it makes the whole essay tone deaf: "let them eat cake." pg could have
written an essay saying "poverty and poor social mobility are the real
scourges, here's how we could fix them." Instead he wrote a defense of
inequality, and wonders why there's blowback.

pg has a bit of a blind spot about this "quote a specific passage" business.
idlewords wrote a brutal evisceration of "Hackers and Painters" called
"Dabblers and Blowhards":
[http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm](http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm)
And here is pg, 8 years ago, demanding someone point out which specific
passage was refuted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325)

------
darawk
I think the core of the issue isn't whether economic inequality is good or
bad. I think most reasonable people can agree that _some_ economic inequality
is good and healthy and incentivizes innovation and productivity. I think we
can also agree that absolute inequality (one person with everything, and
everyone else with nothing) is also a bad thing. This means that the right
answer is somewhere in between, and where we draw that line is where people
disagree. Holding up either side as saying "inequality is bad" or "inequality
is good" is, therefore, a straw-man. No reasonable person is saying either of
those things.

What we do have to ask ourselves is how much inequality should we tolerate in
the name of progress? Would Larry and Sergei not have created Google had they
made only 1/10th of the fortunes they have today? What about 1/100th, or
1/5th?

My personal view on the subject is that that multiplier is set too high at the
moment, and that society would churn out innovators just fine if there were
extreme taxes at the ultra-high end of the income spectrum. I would be very
surprised indeed if Larry and Sergei would have chosen to abandon their little
search engine project if they only had the potential to make $100 million
each.

I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a
question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense, to be
perfectly frank. And this is my, and I think many people's issue with PG's
essay: he seems to be taking the position that some types of economic
inequality are good and some are bad. But it's not _how_ someone made the
money that's good or bad, it's whether or not it's really necessary that they
have _that_ much.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a
> question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense"_

Personally, I think "where to place this multiplier" is not anywhere close to
the most relevant question.

What matters isn't how big the multiplier is. What matters is what's causing
it, and what problems it causes. If a big multiplier is caused by an
atmosphere that promotes innovation, that's better than a small multiplier
caused by a stagnant environment, which is better than a big multiplier caused
by massive corruption and oppression. Norway, Sweden, and Finland have some of
the lowest Gini coefficients in the world, way "better" than the US or the UK
-- but so do Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Where to put the multiplier" is, at
best, a secondary question after fixing all of the primary problems, and
possibly a completely irrelevant question.

~~~
darawk
Where to place the multiplier only becomes irrelevant when the bottom is
acceptably high. If you think that the bottom is acceptably high, then you may
accept an unlimited multiplier.

I agree with you that a big multiplier caused by innovation is _better_ than
one caused by stagnation and rent seeking, but I don't think that we would be
willing to accept _any_ multiplier just because it promoted innovation. So the
question remains _: how much inequality is worth how much innovation?

_ Assuming you accept PG's premise that more inequality equals more innovation
_

~~~
lotharbot
> _" only becomes irrelevant when the bottom is acceptably high"_

or, put another way, only becomes _relevant_ when the bottom is unacceptably
low.

I'm much more interested in worrying about where the bottom is than worrying
about the multiplier. It's a proxy measure -- perhaps a good proxy measure,
but still a proxy measure. Instead of focusing efforts on the proxy measure as
a whole, focus on specific issues that matter at the low end. If it happens
that some specific issue is best resolved by closing tax loopholes or
steepening the tax progression curve, OK -- but don't do it just to "lower
inequality", do it to solve a specific problem.

~~~
darawk
I mostly agree. However, I think it's a little more than a proxy measure. I
think people often conflate the notion of capitalism the resource allocation
algorithm with capitalism the moral philosophy.

The former says that assigning people directly the fruits of their labors
leads to an efficient marketplace and ultimately greater welfare for all. The
latter says that the efficacy of the former grants those people a moral
_right_ to those fruits.

The former is almost certainly true - capitalism is much more effective at
accelerating efficiency and innovation than anything else we've tried. But the
moral corollary doesn't necessarily follow. And if you accept the former but
deny the latter, you're faced with a question: Do we really need extreme
outliers of wealth in order to achieve the benefits of capitalism? And if the
answer is no, then does it really make sense to let those outliers keep all
those resources?

------
my_first_acct
Quoting from PG's first essay on inequality: "The great concentrations of
wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying
democracy."

This is where I disagree. The risk of dynastic wealth is that the wealthy can
pay to change the system, in effect pulling up the ladder and shutting down
all future disruptive startups. So we not only need to fix the problems at the
bottom of the economic ladder (which is where I agree with PG); we need to
make sure that those at the top don't capture the government.

Cynical readers might suggest that this is already happening.

~~~
apsec112
Google, one of the richest, most powerful companies in the world, can't get
the city council of an 80,000-person town (where they own an eighth of the
real estate) to let them build a small bridge: [http://www.mv-
voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on...](http://www.mv-
voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on-google-bridge-idea)

------
flubert
>So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and
still have great economic inequality.

How much of our "discussion" on this issue is tangled up with the fact are
that some people are greatly concerned with relative poverty and other are
more concerned with absolute poverty?

------
ChuckMcM
Too many people have tied "economic inequality" to "poverty and lack of social
mobility", it is like there is some sort of constant preamble on the
definition. And in my experience (and I've only tried this twice so take it
for what its worth :-) talking about opportunity inequality gets you the
social justice discussion, talking about financial inequality gets you the
unicorn/startup discussion. But is economics simply finance + opportunity? Or
is it the first derivative of that expected value over time ?

Then the whole conversation is sidetracked by aspirations of the whole
population versus aspirations of the few.

------
tmsh
I think the confusion is around whether "like Larry Page and Sergey Brin
starting the company you use to find things online" is a good thing. It's easy
to read this as not just "[starting this company]", but "[starting this
company] [and growing it into a huge success with mixed benefits for
everyone]." I.e., Russell Okung or others might read that in terms of what it
implies; but Google by itself neither furthers nor reduces global income
inequality to my knowledge. That's not one of its priorities or missions.

But starting it! Starting it was key. And "income equality" was key to
starting it as it is to starting most companies. Is the original wording wrong
in PG's essay wrong? No, but it's easy to misread unless it's emphasized.
E.g., the desire for "economic inequality" as a catalyst for starting
companies is great. It can be hugely successful and useful in many ways.

But as soon as a large company has shareholders etc. one of its primary goals
is to maintain capital for itself, which is generally speaking in favor of
income inequality in more negative ways for the general public, one could
argue.

Russell Okung's point at the end is I think actually built on teasing apart
this conflation: "I urge you, Graham, along with the rest of the community, to
return to your first love. Build people up."

------
sail
I can't think of a bigger complement to a writer than to explain something
clearly and yet that somehow turn into a controversy.

Because if the writing is clear, which in this case it is, it means the
problem is the audience. It means the writer found a genuinely confusing and
probably undervalued topic.

Good job, pg.

------
OopsCriticality
I think it's time for pg to review the idea that there should be only one SV.

Having only one startup center in the country contributes to limiting social
mobility (how many can afford to move to and live in SV; amazingly, some don't
want to live in SV; what about people with an "n-body problem"?) and deprives
other areas of the country of the tax base in SV. It could be transformative
for, say Detroit, to get even a fraction of the attention of SV. "Spreading
the love" is also beneficial with respect to diversity, finding problems to
solve, and to robustness (e.g., natural disasters).

------
staunch
> _In fact I suspect much if not most of the angry reaction to it was a result
> of people not understanding what the term "economic inequality" means._

Like "global warming", the term "economic inequality" has become something
people use to refer to all of the related issues. PG's essay was controversial
because he used a narrow definition. He says other people are confused, but in
this case, I think he is. The fact that his essay necessarily strayed outside
of his own definition proves the point.

> _... and talked about how I had personally seen the effects of it in the
> relative scarcity of successful startup founders who grew up poor._

And yet PG has never made any effort to help founders from poor backgrounds.
In fact, YC has chosen to provide the majority of their help to people from
the same elite backgrounds as themselves. Literally turning away thousands of
people from poor backgrounds. It truly is "the Harvard of startup
accelerators".

It sure would be amazing if the most powerful person in Silicon Valley decided
to help more poor people do startups. Nothing has the same potential to
increase social mobility in the U.S. like thousands of new startups run by
poor people solving problems _they_ care about, like maybe helping more poor
people do startups.

------
tahssa
The problem, as I see it, is that when wealth becomes too concentrated it in
fact destroys opportunities and therefore social mobility.

Some people want to believe that you can create a solution that fixes the
opportunity/social-mobility problem without eroding the concentrations of
wealth. Others believe that you have to attack those concentrations of wealth
in order to bring back opportunity/social-mobility. I sit in the latter camp.

To give an example. When house prices expand out of reach for the much of the
local population many will object to any additional taxation that targets
excessive ownership (landlords) or even foreign ownership. They all have the
same argument, that it will cause house prices to go down and harm the
economy. Instead they promote low income housing programs which are just
handouts that only slightly offsets this gigantic problem. These people really
don't seem to understand that house prices are abnormal and need to go down to
sane levels that will on average align with normal incomes in order for the
gentrification process to reverse course.

In other words you can't _really_ fix the problems that both Paul and Russell
agree on without directly attacking the concentration of wealth problem.
Everything else is just bullshit.

~~~
T2_t2
Explain China? Or Japan? Or Vietnam?

The world is not the USA. The world is 7 billion people, in countries and
cities of varying economic outcomes. While income inequality is rising between
inhabitants of the first world, global income inequality is shrinking.
Specifically, the gap between Brooklyn, Beijing and Botswana is shrinking,
even as the gap between individual citizens is rising.

And the biggest gap of all - the gap between 21 meals a week and < 21, is
shrinking rapidly. As much as we bemoan great wealth compared to middle-
classness, this gap - the gap between the never-hungry and the sometimes
hungry - is IMHO the single biggest gap of all.

~~~
tahssa
It was an example. An example that was on topic towards economic inequality.

Just because you can find some examples where economic normalization is
occurring doesn't mean that excessive wealth concentration isn't killing more
opportunities than it creates.

------
alexashka
Looking at it - I can't help but feel like he simply said everything he said
in the original essay, except with quotes from that other guy sprinkled in.

That is to say, the position hasn't changed at all.

This is simply a reiteration, a response to the number of people filling HN
with emotional comments on the topic.

The potential problem that hasn't garnered much attention is that the issue of
having a lifestyle you are not satisfied with goes far beyond the distribution
of dollars.

If we agree on that, then there can be room to discuss what's really bothering
people.

From an individualistic point of view, it is easy to say 'he has more than he
knows what to do with, I'm struggling, I want some of that, just give it to
me!' and anyone who says otherwise, is clearly not cool.

It makes sense too. That point of view makes total sense - if someone has a
billion, giving me personally a million would be real good right?

Too bad there are just not enough billionaire people to make that work, not
even close. So then what are we talking arguing about? The solution is
elsewhere.

That is to say, we have to pick our battles, we only have so much time and
energy in a lifetime. Arguing about 'if we distribute it differently, I think
it'd be better' back and forth if you are an economist, philosopher, or
someone in a place where you can actually affect these things is totally fine.
That's not the people here, so then maybe all that's happening is people
venting their frustrations out on PG and if that's the case, no amount of
responses is going to fix that. It's like arguing with a dude who believes the
root of his problems is witchcraft.

That's something each person has to fix for him/herself.

------
nhaehnle
_1\. He says I say economic inequality is "a good thing." I didn't say that.
What I said is that it has multiple causes, some bad (lack of social mobility)
and some good (Larry and Sergey starting Google)._

It's interesting and probably important that he doesn't actually come out and
say whether or not he believes economic inequality to be a bad thing, either.

There is significant evidence that a high level or economic inequality has bad
consequences for people - it can literally be bad for your health, via
psychological mechanisms. This is important since if inequality is bad in
itself, then you might want to eliminate some of the ostensibly good reasons
as well, after having eliminated the bad reasons.

So instead of taking a stance on the badness of economic inequality (yay or
nay), he bangs on the drum that one should first go after the _bad_ causes of
economic inequality. I doubt anybody else in the discussion would disagree
with that, which makes the whole first point rather pointless.

On point 2, " _So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social
mobility, and still have great economic inequality._ "

Does pg realize that perhaps somebody might not agree with that? This seeming
lack of understanding makes the second point rather pointless as well.

On point 3, " _I called out lack of social mobility as one of the worst
problems contributing to economic inequality_ "

Is he aware of the argument that economic inequality can reduce social
mobility?

Since I doubt that pg is wilfully ignorant of the potential subtext that goes
on in the heads of the people he responds to, I can't help but have the
impression that people are talking past each other. I guess part of the
problem is that the people he responds to aren't making their arguments very
well (at least from the perspective of a highly technical mind), and another
part of the problem is that pg seems to be insufficiently aware of the large
body of work on the topic in disciplines outside his "home turf".

------
lackbeard
> you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still
> have great economic inequality.

I get the impression, reading a lot of the responses to pg's essays on this
topic that this is like dividing by zero according to most people's model of
the world.

------
newmana
"So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and
still have great economic inequality."

I think this is where the evidence is to the contrary - economic inequality
predicts poverty and poor social mobility.

"These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in
part for the decline in mobility."

[http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mi...](http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mitnik-
cumberworth-grusky_social-mobility-high-inequality.pdf)

------
yarou
pg never had to struggle too hard in his life. That's why he has skewed views
on income inequality. He also has probably never read Piketty's book on income
equality.

There are empirical results that justify the narrative, people.

------
shadowsun7
pg's central argument is that economic inequality in itself is not bad, but it
has good causes and bad causes and those should be attacked instead of
economic inequality.

I think he's right: it's probably more productive in the near term to attack
bad causes of economic inequality. [1]

But his first assertion (that inequality is not bad) could still be wrong.

I think his essay is built on the assumption that people care more about
absolute values of wealth and not relative ones. Psychology indicates that
relative measures of wealth more directly map to levels of happiness and
unhappiness. People _do_ care about relative levels of income as opposed to
absolute levels of income, and social cohesion is affected directly by such
resentment, _even if there isn 't extreme poverty and incomes are rising
across the board!_

In Singapore, where I live, there is relatively strong meritocracy and little
extreme poverty. GDP per capita is high, and rising; the government is
directly incentivised to create economic growth (their bonuses are pegged to
national GDP increases). But ostentatious displays of wealth - made easier,
IMO, by social media - have led to rising resentment of the government's
policies, as well as resentment against the globalised rich who chose to make
Singapore their home.

I also think economic literature and history is rich with the negative social
effects of economic inequality (even if some of it is conflated with bad
causes, as pg describes). Elsewhere in this thread tkiley talks about how
economic inequality can be seen as a negative externality, which is a good way
of describing it, and is, I think, the attitude economists seem to take.

While pg's essay contains a fascinating call: to imagine a world where we have
to chose to live with increasing economic inequality, I do not believe such a
world would be easy to live in.

[1] To paraphrase his argument, progressive taxation might bring down the Gini
coefficient but not necessarily do anything to alleviate poverty if the
systemic causes of poverty aren't attacked. Better to 'attack poverty and
destroy wealth in the process, as opposed to attacking wealth and hoping it
destroys poverty as a side effect'.

------
sushirain
Larry and Sergey started Google because they wanted to be rich? Even if they
had known for sure that it wasn't the way to the 1%, but say to the 10%, would
they not have started Google?

------
interesting_att
PG's point is so obvious it is almost tautological. Of course we should get
rid of negative causes + negative effects, while keeping the positive. That
applies to literally anything (gambling, friendship, work, etc). Maybe people
are interpreting this w/ the most controversy because PG has a history of
controversial statements (remember his article on immigration which caused an
uproar on HN?).

A more interesting argument that PG could have made is that it is
theoretically possible to have inherent wealth inequality in the system
without negative results. At this point, I see very few believe that it is
even possible.

------
jgord
yes PG, but .. Inequality is a pretty good proxy for all the 'evils' we really
want to address -

If we could turn one knob to fix things, we would turn down the big one marked
"Inequality".

I think the high emotion around the issue, that most of us feel, arises from a
kind of pre-cognition that something is totally broken in our system of
commerce and democracy...

There are titanic demographic shifts even in the last few years [ for example,
look at the graph on this page, showing a 10% shift in wealth from the 99% to
the 1% in the last 5 years, if I read it correctly :
[http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-
peopl...](http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-people-have-
the-same-amount-of-wealth-as-half-the-world-says-oxfam-20160116-gm7h6y.html) ]

This is a bit like a 3 degree change in global climate - we feel it viscerally
without understanding whats going on, we get the sense old rules/intuitions
don't apply anymore. Weather is more extreme, something is different in the
economy.

This may be a natural result of technology plus the magnifying effect of the
internet to spread value out and gather X% of that Y value inwards to
creators... which is fine and good, we all benefit from technology. Inequality
may be even more extreme in future, and yet all boats may be lifted as that
happens - so we all enjoy a better standard of living. But we are not seeing
that now, there is a torrent up, but no trickle down. Right now, our rules for
democracy have not caught up to this new norm, nor has our tax regime - and
the current system is being gamed.

I think there is justified rational anger, because most people feel somehow
they have been stolen from and lied to, particularly post GFC/2008.

While we are violently agreeing/disagreeing on whether != is intrinsically
evil, lets drill down and discuss the real issues lying under the banner of
inequality - poverty, tax, education/student debt, superPACs / campaign
funding, influence of lobbyists, police abusing power when black lives matter,
incarceration rates for petty crimes, carbon pricing / green energy
incentives, minimum wage/basic income ... its a long damn list, and most
politicians don't seem to be too serious about talking about this stuff - now
is the time to demand that discussion of them.

We need to drill down, explore the engineering of our capitalist democracy,
then fix it.

------
kevinwang
This style of response is ideal and we should all emulate it.

------
hackaflocka
These are great debates.

It's difficult to keep emotion out of it.

Thank you, PG, for your responses. They help remind me that "enlightened
capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than every other system that's been
tried."

------
serge2k
Another "you just don't understand!" Response.

------
LukaAl
I don't really get what all this rebuttal targets. The original essay is
poorly thought and full fallacies. Despite that none points them out. So, let
see some of them.

Ok, we shouldn't look at indicators of inequalities (the Gini Index for
example), but we should look at inequality effects. Well, there's a lot of
literature looking at it and finding that the Gini index is an acceptable
proxy for the other measures (acceptable is kind of fuzzy here, bear with me).
We also know that a Gini index of 1 doesn't mean perfect equality. This
because it depends on the definition of equality and on what you measure.
Also, we know that a little bit of inequality is not only acceptable but
required to foster social mobility (and it is probably part of PG's argument).
How much is the problem! But saying we shouldn't look at inequality index but
at the underlying issues and the individual cases is as much a misguided
suggestion as suggesting a startup to stop looking at DAU/MAU.

But even if we discount this critique as futile. Do we really think that
reducing a little bit the inequality will stop startups? If we setup the
system in a way that Page make just 10 billion dollars instead of 15 billion
out of Google (I'm making numbers up) he would have decided for a clerk work
instead? Is he seriously saying that? And then, wasn't him (to be honest,
could have been Sam Altman) that said that you shouldn't start a company to
become reach but because you think you are the only one able to solve this
issue? I know it sounds like a straw man argument. It is a sort of. But I
believe in the law of diminishing return. I believe that I started a startup
because I was determined to solve a hard problem, not for the upside (although
it was important, but I was smart enough to know that the probability of
making big money were really small and other investment had better returns).

Then there's the point of variation in productivity that is so fuzzy my head
exploded. What does he mean by that? Which his the definition of productivity
he is using? Seriously, that's a problem. Because if he defines productivity
by the ratio value individually produced/hours, I wonder how he estimates the
value produced in the last week by Larry Page. By Google's value? And how he
approportionate the value produced between Page and the thousands of people
working for Google. Even for a simple example, how do you compare a
productivity of a woodworker making chairs and a steelworker making swords?
You could count the unit produced per day, but they are different products.
You could assess the market values of their output, but I'm pretty sure the
value of their output changes between peace time and war time without their
productivity actually changing.

Finally, it comes the last issue. He acknowledges that there's a small number
of startup founders coming from poor backgrounds. I don't have data about
that, so I believe him. Yet, I don't think determination is something lacking
from poor people; it is the opposite! So, which is the problem here? Well, my
little anecdotal experience tells me that when your parents could help you,
you could go for the long shot, but if you need to eat, it is better to find
something that give you the food quickly. It doesn't go against his argument,
actually, kind of make it. But I wonder why it didn't make it explicit.

------
jwildeboer
So Paul Graham complains that Russell Okung seems to use a different
definition of economic inequality. And leaves it at that instead of giving his
definition. Nice try.

~~~
geomark
I think he did give his definition. He said "It means the variation between
different quantiles' wealth or income." Last line of the first paragraph of
point 2.

~~~
tiles
I feel like the grandparent post demonstrates a flaw in the method of quoting
passages you disagree with: you can just as easily claim the absence of
information in the initial post and set it up as a strawman.

~~~
toolz
Of course, my grandparent comment demonstrates how much easier it is to
correct someone claiming a lack of addressing the point, rather than the
tedious nature of getting into trying to match someones rebuttal to a claim
that may have only been partially made.

Also, I don't think the claim that quoting the points your addressing solves
all the problems in organizing a debate, just some of them.

------
ronilan
Russell Okung suffered a dislocated shoulder today and the whole team seemed
distracted. They lost. So, PG for next year, just to be on the safe side, can
you please choose another player to debate with. Maybe Brady? Thanks. A
Seahawks fan.

