Realizing that it's luck all the way down only reinforces my opinion that the wealthy pay a pittance in taxes relative to the value they get from our society. Those talented, hard-working people who will never see success deserve affordable healthcare, a functioning safety net that allows them to overcome difficulty and take chances, equal education opportunities for their kids, and a hope for a retirement that doesn't require giving up everything or overburdening their families.
Unhappiness that we (in the US at least) are not on that path is more than envy.
No matter what system we have, SOME people are going to be advantaged by it. We can't always know with certainty beforehand who are the people who are going to be advantaged, but we have a pretty good idea that the people who make a shit ton of money were advantaged in some way. So lets have them pay more than what would seem to be their share, since things were clearly set up with advantages for them.
I can assure you that most people in the world have neither of those attributes.
The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth and therefore so far from the everyday or philosophical notions of value that it hardly deserves the term. Example: finding a reason to deny someone's health insurance claim is "valuable", feeding a starving poor person is not.
Monsanto has made plenty of money feeding the world, including poor people. The key is to do it at scale. Even though some of their tactics and products are controversial, they have probably made the most headway in eliminating hunger as any other organization in history.
Also, I'm not at all sure the value proposition they see in being charitable in the tail of their price grading (i.e. no terminator genes) is market-driven. It could quite plausibly be driven by fear of government intervention -- or even, possibly, compassion.
the everyday or philosophical notions of value that it hardly deserves the term
> instead value is determined by the importance an acting individual places on a good for the achievement of his desired ends
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/value
> The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something
Seems to fit
How could this possibly be true when the majority of wealth is held by a minority of individuals?
It’s contradictory. A majority of people are incapable of expressing their values through wealth dispersion. If you assume that wealth dispersion is an expression of value, then by definition wealthy individuals are disproportionately able to express value.
How could this possibly be true when the majority of wealth is held by a minority of individuals?
> The developed world has devised a formal property system of titles, title registries, and inclusive property law that includes real estate used for homes or businesses. We in the West take that system for granted, probably because it is invisible to us. De Soto shows that this is in a large part why some nations are rich while others remain in poverty.
then by definition wealthy individuals are disproportionately able to express value
I don't believe this is possible; it seemed like that might be what you were suggesting. I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make with your links and "seems to fit" comment in response to the "markets notion of value" correlating to wealth, but I also wasn't sure that I was correctly interpreting your comment.
Not really. It’s mostly family connections.
So clearly family connections help. But that doesn't appear to be most of the picture.
> So clearly family connections help. But that doesn't appear to be most of the picture.
That's a very simple view of the OP's statement - notice that OP did not say inherited wealth, but instead 'family connections'.
For example, if you received personalized advice to invest a lot of money in a business that later became wildly successful, are you a self-made individual? There are even more subtle examples of how relationships can lead to wealth.
Anyway, perhaps a better analysis is asking what happens to children who grow up either in poverty or in wealth: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
Yes. You took the risk. The rewards are yours - and if you fail, nobody's going to bail you out.
Having lots of ready liquid cash gets you the ability to make deals that normal people do not have access to.
You don't even have to be that rich. Take a look at Craigslist at the end of the month before rent is due.
And his mother had good connections with the IBM board, leading IBM to give the operating system business to Bill .
The public & press love rags to riches stories, so even someone without any of the traditional 'advantages' can leverage that for publicity, fundraising, etc. And many independently wealthy business-people have.
Millions of people started a business with at least 25,000 and there are only a few billionares, most lost it all but some made a living and some got richs.
Yes.
> Or was it the fact that his father could cut a $25,000 check on a whim?
There are millions of Americans like that, and only one Bill Gates.
There's no evidence, either, that his father bought the success of Microsoft. The early success of Microsoft did not require anything more than rather trivial amounts of cash.
His mother is credited in her obituary with pulling strings to get him the IBM contract: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
"Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft.
Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."
However, that $25K check is the difference between Microsoft being a solidly growing company up against someone else that IBM anointed vs Microsoft is the anointed one.
$25K was about 5x the price of a car at the time. That makes it about $150K in modern dollars.
How many people can cut a $150K cash check because their kid says it's a good idea? Even most "millionaires" can't cut a check for cash at that level.
Don't overlook that Microsoft was IBM's second choice. Their first was Digital Research.
And lastly, I haven't been able to find any evidence that Gates Sr. funded Microsoft with at $25,000 check. Citation needed! Certainly there's no mention in the book "Hard Drive", and my recollection is that he started MS with $5,000.
There's nothing Bill Gates did at the time that a very, very large number of people could have done, if they'd only thought of it and had been willing to risk it. I knew many computer people at the time, and they dismissed PCs as toys and saw no future in them. Including many who had money to invest in such a startup.
And then there are all those millions buying houses for over $500,000, and $30,000+ cars, who could invest $25,000 in a business instead. But that's why they aren't Bill Gates - they made different choices.
Unless all the scholarly work on “how is value determined” attempting to define this is wrong. Did we just solve it on a web forum by accident?
Short answer is there isn’t an answer that’s reliable except “networking and feelings” making it seem arbitrary
Economics and Wall Street are not free markets for ideas. They’re on rails financial walled gardens. One must recite the theories and have the right keys (money) to gain entry
Nothing about the system is objective
Second, when you say "sit around watching TV," I presume you're saying that hard work leads to success, and implying that hard work is not luck. I agree with the first part and disagree with the second. What makes someone a hard worker? What makes someone intelligent? Attractive? Likable? Talented? If you keep asking why, and you keep retracing a person's history back to the beginning, then the answer invariable boils down to some lucky combination of genes and environment/experience. Even your ability to improve upon the hand you were dealt in life depends entirely on… the hand you were dealt in life.
oh no, now I'm just jealous they were able to convince people of the value of their vapid bullshit.
There are only so many hours in the week, only so many years in a career, and thus there's a limit to how much more one person can work than another. And yet there are people making 2x, 10x, 100x, 1000x, …, 1 billion times what others are. Compensation is largely unrelated to the amount of sweat, time, and effort we put in. Rather, it's a result of the depth of the value we provide and the number of people we provide that value to. Outcome > input.
I believe that understanding this makes us less jealous of people who seem "undeserving," and also helps us make better decisions in our own careers.
Another way to reduce envy is to realize that, ultimately, it's luck all the way down. There are plenty of talented, hard-working people who will never see even moderate success, simply because they were born in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, to the wrong parents, etc. It seems that cursing the people above us is a natural tendency for humans, but we'd do well to spend more energy thinking of those behind us, as well as appreciating our own circumstances.