
Richest 1% now owns more of US wealth than at any time in past 50 years - eevilspock
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/
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vfulco
Trickle down capitalism at its finest.

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danschumann
If you took all their wealth and gave it to the poorest 1%, by the end of the
decade, they'd probably have it all back.

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ajroas
So, what?...

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eevilspock
Yeah, I know that we've seen reports like this before. But if the SV sphere
wants to stop being part of the problem and start working on a solution, it is
critically important it first stops perpetuating the meritocracy myth and
looks at reality.

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goldensnit
Can you expand on what you mean? SV seems to represent more of a meritocracy
than most industries or areas?

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eevilspock
I don't have time to write the treatise this deserves, but here are some
things to consider:

1\. More does not mean sufficent.

2\. Does Zuckerberg have more merit than all the people who invented the
Internet in the first place? I'm pretty sure the net worth of _all_ those
people don't add up to 0.1% of Zuck's ($74 billion today).

3\. Google was better than Infoseek. It won on the merits. But Google wins and
owns markets now not on the merits, but on its accumulate power, and the moats
it has built. Including political moats and advantages (It puts a lot of money
into lobbying). The Matthew Effect (the rich get richer) is the antithesis of
meritocracy.

4\. Do VCs merit the cut they take? Smacks more of rentier capitalism than
meritocracy to me.

5\. Bill Gates supposedly won the OS wars on the merits (many in SV will
strongly disagree with that, myself included). But now he uses his wealth
(i.e. power) to push his ideas and preferences on education and healthcare.
Did Common Core get selected on the merits?

6\. In the spirit of going back to first principles, what exactly it
meritorious? Look at all the things that SV is rewarded for versus the things
that this fucked up world really needs. Why is Instagram worth so much? Does
coding work on any of YCombinator projects, for example, have more merit than
teaching children in our totally neglected schools? Why do teachers get paid
so little? Is our society valuing things properly _on the merits_? "The best
minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That
sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of
Cloudera. If we define "merit" as able to figure out how to capture eyeballs
and data about those eyeballs in order to sell them to advertisers, that's a
pretty meritless definition of merit.

7\. Advertising itself is antithetical to meritocracy. Products should win on
the merits, not on which one has the best marketing (much less which one has
the most money for marketing), not on who is the best used car saleman.
Silicon Valley not only uses advertising, a lot of what it does is _funded_ by
advertising (undermining things like privacy while they're at it).

8\. Likewise, producing and making money off of products that taps into our
psychological weaknesses, our propensity for addiction, our desperate need for
social validation, is not meritorious, it's despicable. See Farmville,
Facebook, and many of SV's greatest "successes".

9\. Here's another first principles question: What does it actually mean to be
a meritocracy? Is it "the best idea, solution or person for the
issue/problem/job get chosen" or does it also mean "get the most money".
Because we have a economic system that is built on the idea that self-interest
and greed are so inevitable, so fundamental that we should build an economic
system around these givens, "gets the most money" is our answer. I don't agree
that someone born with a higher IQ merits a greater share of the world's
wealth or resources, just as I don't agree that if 10 people get shipwrecked
on a desert island with no edible food on land, the best fisher of the 10 gets
to eat the most much less be king. They each get the greater share by
leveraging power. That's not merit. Note also the situational arbitrariness:
in SV the higher IQ gets more money and power, and in the shipwreck the better
fisher does.

Okay, maybe I should go write that treatise.

~~~
wahern

      Does Zuckerberg have more merit than all the people who
      invented the Internet in the first place? I'm pretty sure
      the net worth of all those people don't add up to 0.1% of
      Zuck's ($74 billion today).
    

How to judge merit is a separate issue. Whatever the value of all the other
contributions, it's Facebook that attracted the most money in the marketplace
--one of the most common ways to judge merit in our society. When people
discuss the [lack of] meritocracy, usually the issue is whether, how, and to
what extent people are rewarded for their individual actions as opposed to
being rewarded for their status or associations.

Zuckerberg may have profited by standing on the shoulders of giants, but to
the extent that the environment was meritocratic those were shoulders anybody
else could have stood upon had they chosen, not shoulders that preferred
Zuckerberg over someone else equally situated. Of course, not everybody is
equally situated, but that has nothing to do with the merit of Facebook over
TCP/IP.

