If I have nothing, I have a couple of days to live - I need water, food, shelter. I cannot afford to be picky in the means of getting these. I find a manual labor task. It's hard, exhausting work, but I get paid and can buy water, food, and shelter. Through work and cleverness, I can improve my situation. And "improve" almost always means LESS work, LESS exhaustion, MORE security.
If I have $10,000, I can have at least a few months of water, food, and shelter. I can be picky in how I obtain employment. I can afford to travel distances to find better opportunities (better = LESS work, LESS exhaustion, MORE security). Should something happen (illness, transportation troubles, etc) I can arrange to work around it.
Just having that initial wealth creates an imbalance that is unrelated to my level of effort.
If I have $5 million, I can live modestly off the interest. My "effort" is finding an investment that outstrips inflation enough to let me live off the remainder. This is effort, sure, but it is not 40+ hour work weeks. It is not holding down multiple jobs. It is not skipping paying for car insurance or car inspections or oil treatments because you need one more month to make the payments.
Sure, there are millionaires spending 60+ hours/week trading and dealing. And they are successful. That's fine, but that's not the whole of existence. (it is also very selective - how many people work hard - that hard or harder - and aren't millionaires? That's not the model I want everyone striving towards. That's not success, that's just obsessive wealth.
Zero effort, compound growth, risk bordering on zero.
*Edit : a typo
The more insidious version of this is arguing over whose labours have more "market value". And there's something to that, but I can't get away from the feeling that it's deeply unfair how a software professional can coast for weeks on the occasional flash of insight or burst of productivity, while a housecleaner works two full time jobs and still is one unexpected car repair from insolvency.
Hunter gatherers - by being the son of the chief and getting chosen for the most instruction and preferable kills? By not having raids of people stealing everything you gather? By hoarding a secret fund of very desirable plants which they guard jealously to retain status? By being more attractive?
It starts with "effort leads to results", and then mixes that with "effort is virtue" and concludes "people who have results, must be virtuous". Then turns it around and says "people who don't have results must not be virtuous, and therefore deserve their lack of results".
"Effort leads to results" is based on the Just World idea that if you do what the winners do, you must get the results the winners got. It's only fair! If you invest "properly" then you must get good results. If you don't get what the winners got, you must not have been doing what they did well enough, and you only have yourself to blame. Nevermind the post-hoc definition of "properly" where, if it worked it was proper, and if it didn't work, it must have been improper.
Reinforced by Survivor Bias - you can't see how many people invested like Warren Buffet, but didn't get results, so somehow their effort doesn't count. Same reasoning as "proper" earlier - if it worked, it counts, if it didn't work, it doesn't count. Just World where successful people deserve it, and unsuccessful people deserve it too.
It falls apart again when you look at lottery winners - their results were disconnected from their initial effort. That single counterexample is enough, the problem is not that they got money unfairly, the problem is that you or I cannot do what they did - choose a winnint ticket - and get the same results they got. For the mindset to work, there must be a path going from effort to success, but here there is not one. You can't defend the way they got success as any kind of virtue, so it has to be put down to luck, and luck has to be outside the system, so the Just World can be upheld.
It must be true that rich people were hard working, people who got smarter and created value for others, because if it was luck, we can no longer sell people the pipe dream "you can do what they did, and achieve what they achieved", and use it to manipulate and guilt and shame them.
It must have been hard work that made Amazon successful (survivor bias: don't look at any other internet company, any other shop, any other investor choices, they clearly didn't deserve success because they didn't get success, by definition). It can't have been luck that Jeff Bezos was born who he was, where he was, had the ideas he had, got the investors he got, in the dotcom boom he was in... all that was effort.
But in a fatalist, determinist view, there's no place for luck or effort. He got what he got, because he was who he was, in the place he was in, in that part of universe configuration space. You can't have what he had, because you can't do what he did, because you aren't him, in his environment, in his area of spacetime, anymore than you picked the right lottery ticket.
I don't know what room there is for free will in this view, whether people can still choose to add effort to things, but:
"investing it properly" - there is no properly. Some investments work, some don't. Whether they work after the fact can't be the determining factor in whether they were proper.
"How do people build wealth from the ground up?" // "They work hard each and every day and that effort COMPOUNDS." - those two can both happen, but correlation is not causation.
"They get smarter" - disconnected virtuous thinking. People generally don't consider there is any way to "get smarter". Because they got wealthy post-hoc, doesn't mean they must have become smarter (read: better) people.
"they get better creating value for others" - logically inaccurate; they might get better at extracting value not creating it, they might get better at manipulating people to see value where there is none, they might get wealth through large groups of people speculating others will see value where none ends up existing.
"When you make strangers happy, they reward you with their money" - sometimes yes, sometimes no, correlation isn't causation, sometimes the two aren't even correlated. I have made strangers happy and received no monetary benefit on many occasions.
"a fair exchange" - in the sense that you want wealth and wealth creation to be seen as virtue, maybe.
"This is how wealth is made - compound effort" - wealth is made by magicking money into existence through debt, and giving it to someone. Almost all "wealth" in the global economy is fictional credit, not backed by material anything, not directly correlated with creating human happiness. Holding wealth isn't virtue and is disconnected from compound effort and largeyl disconnected from doing useful things for others. With so many trillions of dollars in the global economy, you'd think everyone would be ecstatic 24/7 now!
"One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level OF EFFORT.*" - How much EFFORT did Warren Buffet put into Berkshire Hathaway compared to a coal miner or a partner in a law firm working 16 hour days, or a startup founder working 16 hour days but being squashed by a bad faith third party? How much EFFORT did Elon Musk put into Tesla and SpaceX compared to the other smart, hardworking, long-hours-pulling engineers designing Tesla cars and SpaceX rocket engines? Did Betsy DeVos put into marrying rich?
Then, accept this, and one "must wnat to reward the poor and lazy", which is bad because they're clearly digusting inferior humans who must be lazy because they are poor, and therefore deserve what they have. But that isn't the only conclusion of accepting this reasoning is awful, another is that if wealth doesn't reliably, repeatably, come from effort, people without wealth can't be labelled untouchables and exploited by their betters, and need to be seen as equally deserving humans in disadvantaged situations - including familially, educationally, genetically, nutritionally, and other ways - as well as geographically.
It does make me feel a bit of despair at the prospect of humanity ever reaching an agreement that would make everyone satisfied. I guess having most satisfied will have to do, but regardless, it's rough.
Getting people to agree on anything is a massive effort. Getting the entirety of humanity to agree on something that will satisfy everyone will take until everyone is dead and there are few enough people it can be done.
This sounds like a delightful utopia. Let's have more of this.
your feelings don't matter- Get to work.
This sounds like an appalling dystopia. Let's have less of this.
If you drive a truck for ten years to save up enough to buy your own truck, and then drive it eight hours a day while you pay two other people to drive it the other sixteen hours a day, you're making more money than them for the same work. But it's only because you saved instead of spent for ten years, and the only reason they have a job driving a truck is that you have a truck. They have neither a truck nor the money to buy one, so without you they're standing on a street corner with no job.
Even a wealthy person can lose their money if they don't make an effort investing it properly. How do people build wealth from the ground up? They work hard each and every day and that effort COMPOUNDS. They get smarter, more opportunities present themselves, they get better creating value for others. When you make strangers happy, they reward you with their money- a fair exchange! This is how wealth is made - compound effort.