> I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?
What you're doing here is speculating about the motives of an unknown number of people who upvoted a comment. Can you really not think of any other reason they might have done so?
It tends to come out most fervently in strained justifications about such massive and obvious inequalities in compensation, such as this case.
I wish people did it less often.
The problem is with the fact "the world is just" is a position they reason from, and seek to defend, often in blatant contradiction to the facts of the situation.
It seems to me that you're accusing people of a pattern of "mistakenly seeing the world as just". But your only evidence for this is one case of them mistakenly seeing the world as just; and in that case, you haven't even put in the work to show that they're actually mistaken.
(edit - for that matter, how many people even think this state of the world is just? From skimming, I can't see anyone explicitly saying it is. The author of the comment that triggered this subthread explicitly disclaims it.)
Both views are flawed, of course.
That's not the flip side of that view, because the socialist view of an exploited proletariat in an advanced industrial democracy is not one of “helpless victims”, but of a powerful force that has the power to reverse the power structure once they realize it exists and act in solidarity against it.
A quick (and very) simplified summary of the traditional socialist perspective is that in capitalism, the vast majority of the population must work as wage-earners (proletariat) to provide the means to sustain their life.
A much smaller group of people (capitalists or bourgeoisie) own the means of production and do not need to work. The material interests of these two groups are in opposition (class struggle): value is created by work done (labour theory of value) and it is in the interest of capitalist owners to exploit workers as much as possible, i.e., maximise the amount of value they can extract as profit.
As economic value is created by the labour of workers, in an advanced industrial society, they are the class with the potential to consolidate this economic power: if they were to unite (in unions and socialist parties), they could use this economic power to take political power from the capital class. The goal of the socialist is to unite workers across boundaries so that they understand that their material interests coincide with other workers (class consciousness) – what they have in common is more important than what divides them. If workers don’t see that their material interests lie with the vast majority who have to work to live, the class will remain divided (as illustrated by the Ronald Wright quote).
As well as these two primary classes, there are other (smaller) classes in capitalist society, such as
- petit-bourgeoisie (small capitalists who own their means of production, e.g. shop-keeper) who can employ workers but don’t possess sufficient capital to not have to work themselves. Their class interests can lie with both capitalist and worker.
- lumpen proletariat – the underclass of the proletariat who don’t provide economic value, e.g., thieves, beggars, criminals; they lack class consciousness and act in their individual self-interest; they can be used by capitalists against the interests of the proletariat (e.g., strike-breaking, inciting racism to divide workers).
Not really smaller, the lumpenproletariat and petit bourgeoisie are each generally both numerically larger than the haut bourgeoisie. Less important in terms of the basic class conflict, but not smaller.
Appreciate your time. Peace
I used to be an anarchist (libertarian socialist) and was very much inspired by the accomplishments of the CNT and FAI in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 [1]. The book that I remember most from those days was “The ABC of Communist Anarchism” [1] by Alexander Berkman which explains in plain language the ideas and philosophy of libertarian communism. Being Irish and interested in history, I also read James Connolly’s “Labour in Irish History” [2] where he argued that class solidarity was more important to the cause of freedom than pure nationalism. I was also strongly influenced by the Orwell classics, “1984”, “Animal Farm” and “Homage to Catalonia”. Most of these books are free of the jargon and overly academic language that many leftist authors are wont to use.
Nowadays, I still consider myself to be a socialist, albeit a sceptical one. I’m always open to learning more about history, economics and human nature. I find myself seeing the conservative perspective on a number of issues and I despise the divisiveness of cancel culture and the modern incarnation of identity politics as being antithetical to the ideals of socialism. Anyhow, I’ve had “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists” on my to-read list for some time (now that I’ve publicly said it, I better stop procrastinating and actually do it).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_After
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr...
It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire. You don’t need thousands, let alone millions, of employees labouring for you.
Name a company with a billion dollars in revenue that is, or could be, operated solely by someone with a laptop and programming skills.
Indeed. There's a big difference between 1 person and a team of hundreds.
I definitely would not describe myself as a socialist (I have an academic background in economics) but it's pretty clear that the labor theory of value is not contradicted in the slightest by citing examples of lone rent-seekers.
And what of users? The value in social media companies, for example, comes from the number of users, who provide free labor in producing content.
Write code that makes those computers $0.01-$0.10 more valuable for human being, multiply by large number of humans paying yearly.
Billion dollars, easy
While central to Marx’s writing, the LTV isn't particularly essential to socialism (that labor is essential to the production of value is, the LTV itself is not).
> It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck. But, though there are reasons to question the LTV, I'm not sure how the high value of of some particular labor that requires only minor capital to realize in any way figures I to such criticism.
But that's silly. We see celebrities generating tremendous amounts of economic value by the "labour" of taking a selfie. To emphasize the labour is like focusing on the discarded cigarette butt instead of the thousands of acres of dry tinder it landed in.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck
People who own factories needed a lot of luck to get there as well. What real difference does it make whether I earn a billion dollars with a factory or a laptop? Or are they roughly equivalent in power and my laptop ought to be collectivized? That doesn't seem right.
Well, and their and various publicists and promoters labor that went into creating the environment for the reception of that selfie, and lots of other people's labor on the things that made the celebrity a celebrity, whether it's the labor that went into building a business that made the family name for someone like Paris Hilton, or the labor that went into making movies or TV shows for celebrities manufactured in Hollywood, or the labor that went into political campaigns for celebrities of political origin.
Heck, even celebrities who have “made it” like Kevin Costner can still produce something like “Waterworld” while complete nobodies like JK Rowling can launch themselves to mega stardom by writing a novel while commuting on the train.
May be mistaken, but historically didn't socialist view proles as a 'lumpen mass', with no real power?
No, the lumpenproletariat, in Marxist theory is an underclass beneath and contrasted with the proletariat consisting largely of the unemployable (not due to economic system or structure, or physical capacity, but personal character and inclination), career criminals (of more than mala in se than malum prohibiting sense), and the others who neither make nor are inclined to make a positive contribution to society, and which unlike the proletariat is not viewed as a fertile ground for developing class consciousness and is viewed as a dangerous class at best useless to revolutionary organization of the proletariat, and also having a great potential, largely for pay, to individually be recruited as agents by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
If there are no real barriers in upward social mobility, it will quickly be apperant that earning a little capital and putting it to work is the best way to spend your life. Over time it will compound and produce even more.
Of course, often the best capital to accumulate is skills and education.
If the is no real upward social mobility, people will feel indifferent to the idea of producing more value, right now.
The truth is that any system has winners calling the shots and losers at their mercy. What matters is figuring out which system (or blend of systems) produces the best outcomes for its worst off constituents.
Basically, he was one of the key founders of the project that made Google Maps what it is today (a crown jewel of Google with one of the best cartography datasets), vs what it was originally (better UI to third-party, licensed cartography data).
I remember about 12 years ago somebody from the GIS industry, scoffing at the notion that Google might even try to go do some mapping of their own. For him, maps was something Navteq and TeleAtlas knew how to do, and a search engine was deeply misguided if it thought it could venture into that space. That was honestly the prevailing wisdom at the time — it was going to be hard for web-based Google to even deal with the ugly real-world-ness of mapping.
Fast forward to today. Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. They invented street cars, street view, and actually made it work; and they used the data to produce accurate maps of the world.
So to your question, what led this guy to an astounding level of monetary reward was that he was part of a team that made a big, calculated bet with Maps and executed very, very well on it. That gave Page ample reason to compensate them well, and it gave him trust that they could handle more projects where they would show up incumbents (such as the traditional car manufacturers, whose inroads into self-driving tech had been very timid for decades).
And it's not clear that they are close to self driving cars, but they certainly contributed to upping the game of that whole industry.
So there's your recipe :) I'd bet that folks who came up with the key tech behind the iPhone are in similar positions at Apple, given how they turned the whole mobile phone business on its head (remember Nokia?).
EDIT: I don't mean the above to indicate that the reward was deserved in any way. Likely, a lot of what happened here is luck plus outstanding team work rather than individual lead performance. But to the question being asked, this is the kind of circumstance and outcome that seems to have supported, in one man's view at least (Page), that level of compensation. If you look at folks at Google who made/make big $, the story is often similar - they led products that were fledgling challengers into industry leaders within a few years (Chrome, Android...).
They also had, maybe, 10 users outside of our own network a year. Everyone else we’re using the traditional pre-google-maps map websites, in my country krak.dk.
I think what google did better was marketing. Then they mapped every WiFi network on the planet to make real life location tracking faster than using GPS.
What google did was make it into a mass product and they had the resources to apply it to a planet level. That is more than marketing. There are a whole lot of steps between tech demo/proof of concept to product. The most important of which is to actually have the foresight of what the product can be and a plan to get there.
But it wasn't useful to anyone who wasn't in the GIS/remote sensingspace. Firstly, the ArcGIS product was primarily client/server and secondly you had to understand what you wanted to see before you used it - it was (and is) literally as easy to get infra red satellite imagery as actual photos.
That's not just marketing - it made it usable for whole new markets.
With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside?
I wouldn’t frame it as having potentially no upside. In public talks after Google found success as a public company, Larry Page has never hidden his desire to leverage Google’s strengths to improve the transportation industry, so the desire to invest in a venture that has nothing to do with Google’s vision of “organizing the world’s information” was always there. It turns out that transportation and search have a lot in common but it wasn’t immediately obvious back in 2009 how transportation could benefit from investments by an Internet search engine.
I remember attending a Google sponsored event where Google Street View—along with crowd-sourced data added by human users—was marketed as data that would lay the foundation for a self-driving car project. They would later screen a video of the panda-like prototype from the Google Self-Driving Car project, and how the SDC could use Street View data to safely drive people around town, to which there was a lot of applause by the audience.
google/apple were taking it to the next level (phone locaiton telemetry for traffic conditions)
and then tesla with not only location telemetry from their cars, but uploading images from customer cars.
He just got too brazen with those trade secrets. Which is exactly how people get high rewards, until it breaks.
You could post factually justify their place, but that’s easy in hindsight.
If you think your statement is true - could you please provide a research into which skills would be needed to exploit the right place at the right time that actually proves that’s not some mystical abberation of self-help books?
Nobody is doubting Levandowki is an extremely talented engineer, but literally every person that achieves that level of success also took a considerable amount of luck to get there. Right place, right time, right skills is everything.
There is no "right time, right place" factor for Lebron, unless we're simply considering the fact that he lucky enough to be born at a time on Earth when professional basketball is a thing that exists.
Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted
to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about
if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would
that have impacted his trajectory?
Generally though, I do agree with you.
Lebron's championships, as opposed to his individual performance, are definitely somewhat the products of circumstance. He heroically dragged some mediocre supporting casts to the Finals and fell short a few times, which simultaneously proved both his own brilliance and the inability of even the arguably-greatest player of all time to do it all on his own.
A lot of supremely talented athletes have failed to find success in professional sports due to simply never finding a good fit for themselves where they were able to shine.
Similarly, there have been some oddballs who have found great success thanks to being in circumstances in which they were able niche for themselves. James Harden is a modern NBA player who comes to mind. The Rockets play a somewhat bizzarro style that caters to Harden's bizzarro skirting-the-rules game.
The underappreciated part of luck (by the lucky) is not the good luck people have the benefit of, it's the bad luck they avoid.
I really think you are underestimating how special LeBron is, how obvious it has been since he was in middle school, and how much it says about his physical gifts that he has played such heavy minutes for so long. We still talk about high school prospects being the next LeBron James because he was obviously a once in a generation talent (Zion being the only prospect since LeBron that has equalled his hype). Also LeBron has not really had good luck in his life. He had talent that transcended his terrible situation.
On a human level, it is worth appreciating such things. Finding new ways to express and experience gratitude is one of the most profoundly powerful things a person can do. A true key to happiness. (I hope this doesn't sound sarcastic: I really believe this)
I think we just generally leave that sort of thing out of "what makes Lebron, Lebron?" type discussions because it's a constant for all athletes. A catastrophic injury would disrupt any player's trajectory. That's not interesting or useful to discuss from an analytic standpoint.
What we're really looking for is, "why is Lebron different from others who've avoided catastrophic events?" or to be more on-topic, "why was Levandowski able to rise to superstardom when other engineers weren't?"
Certainly, yes, some of this can be chalked up to Levandowski's avoidance of catastrophic events. He wasn't eaten by bears! His parents didn't blind him with acid! He wasn't struck by meteors! But, this is also true for a lot of other engineers, so this doesn't tell us anything useful. Everybody already knows that being killed by a bear is detrimental to one's career prospects.
To return to (and hyper-focus on) Lebron for a second...
there are a number of equal/better players (physically and mentally)
who get bumped, land wrong, tear an ACL, and their trajectory changes forever
1. Every year, millions of people play basketball and do not suffer catastrophic incidents and yet also do not display the sort of generational talents displayed by Lebron.
2. Given the extremely large sums of fame and money involved in collegiate/professional basketball, anybody manifesting his level of talent is unlikely to go undiscovered. There is a lot of incentive for everybody involved to identify and develop such talent. This would be less true for many other pursuits. I suspect there are many "undiscovered Bobby Fischers and Gary Kasparovs" out there in the chess world and many "undiscovered Lewis Hamiltons" in the racing world; I suspect this is not the case for "undiscovered Lebrons."
3. Basketball is also different from other pursuits in that freakish physical height is a great advantage. If you are tall, in most of the world, people will tell you to play basketball. A height of 6'8.5" (Lebron's height) is something like 99.99th percentile and playing basketball is one of the few lucrative things one can do with that height, unlike a 99.99th percentile intelligence or even 99.99th percentile strength.
There are plenty of "Most insane athletes we've ever seen" coming up from High School that never turn into anything, or don't turn into the greatest players of all time. You can't just say "Lebron was more talented and worked harder" when things like car accidents, illness and coaching can all ruin a player's career.
Thanks?
> but you aren't really respecting how much LeBron was an outlier as a prospect
This is rewriting history. The thing about signing someone straight from high school is it's tough to know how good they are, given they've mostly spent their whole career stomping normal people. Also I'm not implying Lebron was bad, or even anything less than a top pick. I'm just pointing out that there are quite regularly draft candidates that are touted the same way, that do not end up as a Lebron James.
> There simply are not plenty of prospects with his size, control, explosiveness, durability and fine motor control
Most of which he developed in the league? Which is as much a testament to him as it is his coaching, no? Which is a variable that could've prevented him from ascending as high as he did?
> 16 years after LeBron was drafted, we finally saw someone who is as much of an outlier as LeBron in Zion.
This is flatout not true (and frankly pretty offensive to Lebron). Zion is overweight and duck-footed, the combination of which has already shown issues even in his first season. His team knows it, which is why they're keeping him at 20 minutes a game.
If you can't play a player because of their fragility, you can't really call them great.
I'm just pointing out that there are quite
regularly draft candidates that are touted
the same way, that do not end up as a Lebron
James.
Lebron had thousands of people and scouts at his games as a high school freshman and sophomore, and was was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before his junior year of high school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeBron_James#High_school_caree...
He is such a freakish outlier.
"Simply one of the best high school players in the last decade. Whatever you have heard about him is true. He’s so gifted it’s scary. As a scorer, his range extends to 3-point land. He’s a terrific passer and is quite unselfish. Simply put: his talents are on another level. We can list schools with him until we are blue in the face, but in the end this is the best high school-to-NBA prospect since it became chic to make the jump. LeBron James is a special basketball player, good enough to don the cover of Sports Illustrated as a junior in high school."
Fron nbadraft.net
" He has met and surpassed the hype every step of the way. The game just comes so easily to him, he’s the epitome of a hoops prodigy. He has changed the face of highschool athletics with Nationally televised games being carried by ESPN. He has lived up to the hype and then some every step of the way. Carmelo Anthony has a better jumpshot than LeBron, and a NCAA title under his belt. But LeBron has far superior upside.[...] No one has ever had to overcome this kind of hype as a highschool player."
Here's an article from SI in his junior year - https://vault.si.com/vault/2002/02/18/ahead-of-his-class-ohi...
Quotes:
"OHIO HIGH SCHOOL JUNIOR LEBRON JAMES IS SO GOOD THAT HE'S ALREADY BEING MENTIONED AS THE HEIR TO AIR JORDAN"
"There are only four or five players in the NBA that I wouldn't trade to get LeBron right now," says former Phoenix Suns coach Danny Ainge."
(Also, I think that article illustrates that LeBron didn't have much luck in his life other than his talent)
Most people have to cope with mediocre physical gifts that no amount of training will fix.
Or maybe I have a hand-eye coordination that means I'd be a gold medalist at Shooting, or some other sport I've never had the inclination or opportunity to train in
If a battery or metals (or self-driving) engineer comes up with a material break through and starts a company they could easily eclipse Levandowski's earnings.
Citation needed. I don't see many self-driving cars around, did you mean "world's most self-promoting engineer in self-driving cars"?
It doesn't mean that he's not the best, does it?
As far as I've heard Waymo was considered to be #1[0] when it comes to self-driving cars, thus it's probably someone of Waymoers
So if he was actually doing a lot of work there (basing on experience and how important for Google he was) then I think it's fair to consider him as a pretendent to be industry leader
[0] - Basing on Googling "most advanced autonomous cars"
Of course, commitment can increase your odds grealy, but it doesn't magically make them 100%.
1. Bill Gates had computer access 2. Steve Jobs met Woz
My career took off when I had a particularly bad metal break where I exhibited both to a frightening degree. When I got over those I just retired with all the money I'd made.
Make no mistake, success is a mental illness.