> The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their ...

lapcat · 2024-01-17T16:15:10 1705508110

> within the limits of their abilities

That's the crucial distinction. Specifically, the ability to buy politicians and elections.

> This is the Internet and saying this is free.

Once again implying that I'm a liar...

You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.

> There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.

It's true that there are a lot of unethical poor and middle class people. (Also a lot of ethical poor and middle class people.) My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".

> I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.

You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work", so how would it even be possible for me to make any argument or defense at all? It ought to be clear from how I earlier characterized hard work (e.g., manual labor) that there's no correlation. You claimed that my characterization was silly, but it's become ridiculous how you won't say anything more about it.

Perhaps what you want to say, or at least ought to say, is that some people have more natural abilities than other people, which is absolutely true, and thus some people are capable of accomplishing things that are impossible for other people, which is also true. But I wouldn't characterize that as "hard" work, at least not for the person with special abilities. To the contrary, things come easier to them. It's only hard for the people who don't have those natural abilities. I could work as "hard" as I possibly could, to the very edge of my abilities, and never become a professional guitar player or a professional tennis player (much to my dismay), because I simply don't have enough talent.

> I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.

It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.

> You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term).

Pathological. But I didn't say "simply".

> would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth?

Why would it need to be "obvious"? There's no obvious way to become ultra-wealthy, otherwise everyone would do the obvious.

rocgf · 2024-01-18T19:42:09 1705606929

> You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.

And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.

> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".

Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.

> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"

Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.

Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.

Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".

In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.

> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.

Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.

lapcat · 2024-01-18T22:21:51 1705616511

> We are talking about averages, not particular examples.

On the contrary, the submitted article is not about averages but rather about particular examples, namely, the five richest men in the world. I would say that happens on average is largely irrelevant here, because the average person will never become a billionarie or come anywhere remotely near the vicinity of affluence.

> Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.

> Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".

> In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.

Now we're making progress, if we've defined "hard work" to mean "long work", i.e., hours of work. However, there's an ambiguity in your discussion above. First you talk about "on average", but then you switch over to "all things being equal". Those are two very different concepts. I actually agree that all other things being equal, people who work more hours will make more money. This is practically an axiom, if their hourly wage is among the things that are equal. On the other hand, I think the "on average" claim is dubious at best.

One major problem is that there are strict physical, temporal limitations on how many hours a human can work. There are only 24 hours per day, which you must spend not only on working but also on sleeping, eating, and other necessities not related to work. God forbid you have any free time! There's not a huge variation in the number of hours that different people can possibly work in a day, though certainly family responsibilities can take up a large chunk of hours. (Wikipedia says that Elon Musk has 11 children, but I couldn't say how much time he spends with them.) There's a somewhat broader variation in how many days per year that different people can work. It's worth noting, however, that on average (your favorite notion), poorly paid workers have the least generous vacation packages.

Another factor is the availability of work. Those who make hourly wages can't just automatically work as many hours per day and as many days per year as they desire: the money has to be in the company's budget, the hours approved by the company's management. And if the business itself runs on strict hours, opening its doors at a certain time in the morning and closing its doors at a certain time in the evening, then it may not even be possible for the employee to work more hours! Moreover, there's typically "overtime" pay, which is more costly to the employer than "regular" pay, so there's a natural reluctance to grant too much overtime. Of course it's possible to work more than one job; indeed, some people have to work more than one job, because one job doesn't pay them enough to cover their expenses. But this phenomenon calls into question the idea that hours of work are strongly correlated with higher wealth.

What I'm suggesting is that you may be reversing cause and effect. It's largely the job itself that determines how many hours per day/week/year that a person can or does work, and it's largely the job itself that determines the compensation. The "hard work", so to speak, can only vary within the confines of the job. Of course you can try to change jobs to get one that pays more — and finding a new job is itself "hard work", albeit unpaid work — but that's not quite the same thing as "working harder"; it's merely working for higher compensation. Those with a yearly salary (on average higher total compensation than hourly workers) may have more opportunities to work more hours, but it's also axiomatic that if you're working for a yearly salary, your salary for that year doesn't change no matter how many or how few hours you work. You have to hope that your bosses recognize your "hard work" (or whatever traits they happen to recognize) and reward you with bonuses and/or promotions. (I would say, by the way, that it's more important to be regarded as a hard worker than to actually be a hard worker. It doesn't hurt to brown-nose either...)

Let's go back to the wealthiest person in the world. Mr. Musk is subject to the same physical, temporal constraints as the rest of us: 24 hours per day, 365/6 days per year. Presumably, as a human, he must sleep and eat. We know that he seems to have quite a bit of time to tweet, and also quite a bit of time to read political conspiracy theories. And we've seen him photographed or recorded at parties, sporting events, interviews, podcasts, and other activities during which he's clearly not working on cars or rockets and such. So the available working hours per day are significantly less than 24. The biggest problem for Musk, though, is actually what you seem to admire most about him: his many companies. Given the strictly limited number of hours he has per day, and given that he owns so many companies, it's just numerically impossible for him to work a ton of hours per day at every company. I think it's safe to say that Musk actually works fewer hours per day at any given company than many of his much lower compensated employees at the company. Tesla engineers are working "harder" (longer) than Musk at Tesla, Twitter engineers are working "harder" than Musk at Twitter, SpaceX engineers are working "harder" than Musk at SpaceX, etc. The math just doesn't work out otherwise.

Thus, I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that "hard work", i.e., hours of work, are rewarded as much as you think they are. And they certainly don't explain the inhuman variation of wealth in the world, how one person can be worth $200 billion, while another person can be worth $0, or be in debt. The range of wealth is way out of proportion to the humanly limited range of working hours.

Incidentally, I'm in the top quartile of earners in the United States, yet I appear to have a lot of time to spend arguing with strangers on the web. ;-)

We could talk about entrepreneurs (of which am I one). But most new businesses fail, so the number of hours worked was for naught. And it's not clear that working more hours is the magical solution to making a business succeed.