I'm not saying that what warehouse workers are being paid now is "fair" or "reasonable", but I do think that trying to establish some fixed ratio between what a warehouse worker makes and what Jeff Bezos makes is sort of a silly exercise. Additionally, if you think that comp shouldn't reflect value added to an organization, then I would be interested in hearing what you think it should be based on.
If we assume that it's illegitimate for someone to prosper that much behind growth and optimism that growth will continue (ie he didn't sell his stock), then the legitimacy of the net worth of every single direct or indirect (eg via ETFs) investor in Amazon, every single indirect beneficiary of investments in Amazon (eg recipients of pensions whose funds hold Amazon), and every single employee with an equity stake needs to also be questioned.
Sure there are some differences here such as stock options, but even if we divided Bezos's net worth by 2 or 3 to account for this I don't think it would make much of a difference.
My only point is when you're talking about his growth in wealth, you're always de facto talking about his stock holdings and their growth and the idea of objective compensation goes out the window. In fact, even if you're talking about straight compensation, it still is part of the discussion because clearly in this case, he is willing to take a paltry salary because he is benefiting from massive stock value growth.
As for this point:
>If we assume that Amazon is fairly valued and that Jeff Bezos's holdings of Amazon are in line with his contributions
He is not being 'compensated' via stock nor is the total amount of stock he holds fluctuating based some sort of objective analysis of his contribution. He could contribute nothing and retire and still hold the same amount. So I don't know how you can assume that.
its not a question of "fair" or "reasonable". such jobs shouldnt exist. i come from the side of ag jobs and there are a lot of repetitive manual jobs that should simply be automated.
in the place of low paying jobs, new higher wage jobs should be created. eventually, with more people being skilled and having good earning potential, the number of work hours will also come down leaving people to do other things than just work 40 hours/day and wasting 2 hours in commute.
this is how we should live. we should live our lives and work a little bit to support that life style. life shouldnt be drudgery where work is how we survive. creating high value items and high wages with robots and automation taking care of menial tasks will also bring out the creativity and potential of human beings. there will always be those who will fall through the cracks and thats when the social net should catch them.
current system is the expectation of the social net to catch everyone on a low wage. for example, you cant increase wages for ag. it would mean cost of food would go up. so we end up making cheap food, cutting corners, having a low wage worker class and then subsidising them through welfare paid through our taxes. its messy and complicated and inefficient.
my fav example is that of automobiles replacing horse carriages as the preferred urban transport system. it erased all the jobs like the guy who drove the carriage, the kid who picked up the horse poop on the streets, the stablemen, the horse groomers..the farriers...i mean..how many people want to take up equine hoof care as a profession these days. all those jobs. gone. in its place, came a new set of jobs..the factory worker, the mechanic, the gas station owner (and with it 711)...not to mention the sweet relief for the poor overworked horses. and our lives are better.
of course, the flip side is the pollution, dependence on fossil fuels, exponential population growth ..but we grow by leaps and bounds. and we fix our missteps as we move along. but some jobs..it is inevitable that they will disappear. they have to. or we will become stagnant.
Still, one way to go about this is to assume that workers and employers are rational economic agents and look at their incentives and bargaining power. Obviously, an employer will never employ anyone for more money than they believe that employee will contribute to the company (assuming no nepotism, fraud, corruption etc). However, an employee may well accept to work for less money than they are actually contributing, since they have ~0 visibility into this number, and much less bargaining power than the company, especially at the lower end.
So, in for a large company without powerful unions, we can virtually guarantee that employees are each receiving less money than they are actually contributing - with shareholders correspondingly receiving more money from the profits accrued. Additionally, shareholders also have more money based on how over-valued a company's stock is, which employees gain nothing from.
Now, the real question is of course "how much more wealth are they getting from the company"? I don't have an exact answer to this question. However, one way to look at it is that Amazon has ~800k employees who at MOST could collectively own the ~20% of amazon stock on the open market, while Jeff Bezos owns ~10% of the company directly. This would mean that Jeff Bezos personally would have to contribute as much as ~400k people to the company for his contributions to be in line with the value he extracts. I just don't believe that Amazon could be where it is if it replaced ~400,000 employees with a second Jeff Bezos. Honestly, I don't believe that Amazon could be where it is if it replaced 1,000 employees with a second Jeff Bezos.
Also very important would be to ask how many of those 800k people would have similar or better payed jobs if Amazon didn't exist at all. Would there be an Amazon-shaped hole in the market, or would there actually be more economic activity if instead of one giant corporation there would be thousands of smaller ones? I believe the second is more likely to be true.
In any case, high comp for executives would not be such an issue if money didn't translate so fluidly to political power. If wild success just meant cushy living, you might not see so much blowback, but when profits translate to power which translates to using that power to shield your profits, then claims about a rigged game are not so crazy.
From the original comment:
> taxing the top ~1% is to simply bring their wealth more in line with their contributions
The comment above yours is just pointing out that Bezos may contribute more, which would be an explanation for Bezos' outsize wealth. Whether it's true or not that Bezos contributes more is subjective, of course.
> It’s not healthy for society to have Bezos level wealth in one person.
That's an entirely different point unrelated to the "contribution" question/attribute.
Why do you want to take away decision-making power from people who know how to make [a lot of] money?
that amazon doesnt give out as much dividends and ploughs back all the profits to create new companies and new jobs shows that jeff bezos is more socialist than any self declared socialist. its going to back as wages! and benefits of society are for everyone. if this isnt more than fair, i dont know what is...if the wealth redistribution people ever lived in any other country other than california(i wouldnt include the rest of the usa), they would realise how socially responsible and beneficial ca's billionaires have been to california by contributing to not just california but to the rest of the world. if anyone is 45 or above, they'd know how it was in the 80s and early 90s. if anyone has lived anywhere else and shelled out double digit VAT, they'd know that the europeon mixed economies and social welfare states place a higher tax burden on the middle class for far lesser quality of life materially than in california.
i wish i can air drop the proponents of 'eat the rich' into any one of the dozen countries..not even third world countries..for about 3 months. they'd realise how good we have it here in CA. or rather..how good we have had it...all that is going to go.
it's ironic that the same people crying for blood and redistribution are the ones fleeing to tax free or low tax states. thanks for nothing.
Not to mention, at the rate people's productivity has gone up, we should probably be working 3 or 4 day weeks at most, or earning almost double our wages. Instead, all of this extra productivity has been pocketed by Jeff Bezos and his ilk.
> Jeff Bezos is worth more than his warehouse workers because he creates jobs for the workers to survive. if the warehouse workers were worth the same, they would have come up with AMZN.
First of all, I didn't say he wasn't worth more to the company than 1 warehouse worker - of course he is. Is he worth more than all the warehouse and IT and sales workers combined? No. And please don't attribute to personal worth what is mostly a product of good luck - the fact that Jeff Bezos's move from books to everything else happened to be wildly successful doesn't mean it was a guaranteed success or that no one else could have done it. And after it started snowballing, pretty much anyone could have run Amazon and it would have still become a big success - especially anyone who doesn't care about the welfare of their workers, willing to cut corners, willing to extract massive subsidies from the state more or less directly (food stamps, the Amazon HQ bidding), willing to use their position and information to destroy their competitors, and so on.
If Amazon didn't exist, it would have been replaced by a thousand other smaller enterprises that would have hired more people. Centralization and concentration of wealth and power are always a net negative for everyone who isn't very near the top of that concentration.
If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.
According to wikipedia:
> He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.
I know literally zero people whose parents could afforded to have given this type of loan, let alone willing to.
If you don't see the choice factor, I think two things happen: 1) you stay where you are because you think, nobody is in fact successful, they only had it given to them, and 2) and you think it doesn't matter what you do, so you will not navigate your path with choices, and see yourself as an agent, but instead see yourself as basically a helpless leaf in the current, tossed this way and that by fortune and fate.
Personally, I feel it's really important to take personal responsibility for my own path, and see where I am as a result of choices. Not just for things like business, but for all of life. I think that's perspective puts me in a position of power, and taking that perspective is something I can control. Even in the context of things like harassment, or accidents, or childhood abuse and trauma, I don't think about it as, "I chose for this to be done to me," but rather as, "I choose what I make this mean, and I choose how I respond." I feel if I give that up that perspective, I willingly take on a disempowered perspective, so I see giving that up as giving myself a disadvantage.
I understand if you and other people want to see things that way, and I myself have the reflex where if I see someone successful I immediately ask myself, "Yeah, but who did they know? Who gave that to them?" and I try to let go of that because I see that as a trap that will make me feel better (by comparatively telling myself, it wasn't my fault, I just didn't get so much given to me, and also by letting me bring down in my own estimation the significance of their success, and thereby their capability, by eroding its legitimacy, since it wasn't them, it was just what they got given) -- and I try to remember that such notions won't help me get anywhere. So I try to emphasize to myself how inspired I feel about this, as in, "I like this. How can I get some of that for myself?"
One way I try to remember this to myself is, "If I can't get from where I am to where they started, how would I ever get from they started to where they go to?" And "win from any position". All the same, I'm not suggesting these are appropriate attitudes for you or others, since everyone has a different path and purpose, and we need a diversity of people who believe different things...but I just hope that sharing this, can give you some insight into the other perspectives that are out there about this. I know how hard it can be to hear even a simple set of ideas like this, because these ideas, if you entertain them run the risk of removing the comfortable distance you put between your own path, and those of others, by being able to explain it away as not having any responsibility yourself. It's a lot easier to psychologically deal with knowing about "people more 'successful' than me" if I can tell myself "it's not my fault" and even "they are not responsible for their success". Taking that responsibility, even just in a perspective sense, prompts you to look at where you are at, which can be very painful. It's not my intention to initiate this sort of response in you by sharing this, and it's not an attack on your position, just sharing my relationship to that kind of thinking, and how I understand it can be a very difficult type of thinking to try. I hope it was insightful and worth your time reading, but if not, at least you have the perspective you already know and like.
However, when taking political and social decisions and analyzing the world around us, we must also look at how people are influenced and how their chance of success or failure is affected by conditions outside of their personal agency. The fact that we are each responsible for our own happiness should not preclude us from observing that there is no downwards mobility and increasingly little upwards mobility in European and US society. It should not preculde us from observing that while productivity is increasing at all levels, wealth for middle and low income families has been stagnant for decades, while the top earners have exploded in their wealth.
Basically, each of us in our own lives should seek to be the best we can be. But we should also realize the limits of our individual powers and seek to collaborate and organize to achieve more than we can alone. And we shouldn't care just about our own personal well being, about climbing up to be the next Jeff Bezos, but about the well being and success of everyone around us. You can't build a cathedral alone, but you can inspire many people to build one with you.
I think we both agree there are bonds of slavery on society, and we both agree that there are both mental bonds, and institutional bonds, and that these different types of chains require different methods of attack to free oneself (or one's group) from such. For the mental bonds, I believe an adjustment of perspective is all that's needed to free myself, and for the systemic bonds, I think you believe that collective action and organizing is how groups free themselves. I think we simply differ in thinking the degree of importance and effect of each of these. I think the mental bonds are more prevalent, and I believe you feel the systemic bonds are.
Not that it's really important that we agree, or not, but it's nice to draw the outlines clearly I think. And we can both be right, I believe, as there are different situations where mental or systemic bonds are more prevalent, not that "both right" is the most important thing either. I think it's just important that each of us enjoys the beliefs we choose to have.
I also feel that collective action and "asking the system" to change is a position of powerlessnes, and futility. Perhaps you feel the same way about trying to adjust your perspective, in order to free yourself.
The final things I'll say about all this is: 1) I want no part in the social-political "battles" of this age. The ideas in these battles are not my ideas, and I don't really understand them (not the ones that I speak of here, but the majority of the ideas in currency in the "culture wars") even as I watch myself partaking in that discourse and using the language of it, and I don't want to become an instrument of the will of whoever's ideas these are. And 2) I think privilege, in its common contemporary usage, is a made-up, woolly concept that muddies the waters and is not a useful lens to address either mental nor institutional bonds.
The reasons are, first because privilege lumps together unrelated things: advantages, and special rights and immunities, granted or available to only some. If I have special rights and immunities over others, that's the definition of unfair. It's a real thing, like diplomatic privilege, but it's rare on the whole. Advantage is much more common, like money, genetics, country, family. I am advantaged, but I'm not privileged. But such a distinction and nuance has become verboten in the current fascist doublethink speech controlled discourse. The term privilege as used lumps together these distinct things. Second, "privilege" is a way to pretend someone is your enemy and justify attacking them, by conflating whatever advantages they may have been given or have earned, with the made up concept of them having special rights and immunities over others. And if one is so independent to "resist" this "group judgement" you, the "tolerant and inclusive" group decries you are "privilege blind", and therefor doubly guilty. So in its common usage, it's a made up concept, that has no basis in reality, and is simply abused, in the vein of terrorism, to create enemies and spread fear and shame. Third, privilege elides over the importance of personal responsibility, and captivates people with the compelling, but false, fantasy that "it's never your fault", which traps people in a powerless cycle of fake victimhood, learned helplessness and hostility towards others acted out via blame displacement. It teaches people that the way to deal with their frustrations is to blame someone else, instead of reflecting and creating improvements. This is such an addictive thing to do, it is misused. Of course, "privilege" is not the only tool in the arsenal of social control that contributes to these maladies, but it is one of them. In short, I denounce "the contemporary concept of privilege" as part of the mental enslavement of people that traps them, under the guise of freeing them.
I want to share more of my story. I'm advantaged, but not privileged. Some of those advantages I earned (most, these days), for example the experiences I've given myself that were broader than my upbringing, and my skills and critical thinking abilities, and some were given to me, for example, I came from a rich background, which is an advantage, because even tho I earned scholarships to school and college, my parents could pay, and I never had a lack of money or shelter, until my early 20s, when, deciding that my advantaged background was also a disadvantage (rich family was also abusive, comfortable life was also narrow: completely heterosexual all boys school, life in the suburbs in a Western country, and so on), I gave myself all types of new experiences over many years that were broader that where I came from, because I knew there was more to the world, and I knew I wanted to be more, than where I came from. And I wanted to make sure that what I was choosing, or wasn't, was not due to the conditioning of my narrow upbringing, but was authentically me. So for me, it wasn't only about what I was given, it was what I chose to do with it, with which I created the life I wanted. I followed the mantra, "follow my heart", and "use what I have to get what I want," and figured out ways to travel and live overseas, even tho my parents didn't support that. After years of trying to get them to "understand" me, at some point in my mid-20s I simply realized that my parents were not "in my way", that the only thing stopping me from doing the life I wanted was myself, and that (if I cared, or conceptually if one were to honor the idea of the best wishes of "good parents") then the best way to honor my parents was to do what would make myself happy, and be truly fulfilling, because no matter what they might say, why would they really want anything else for me? And if they did want me to simply only suffer as they felt they had themselves, then why should I care what they think? So, either way, I could free myself of this one, small, but for a time, very significant bond, by adjusting my perspective.
My parents, my school, even my peers were always focused on money, getting a job, a career, getting married, all of the normal things (even, bizarrely, as they tried to get me to stop computer programming because they saw it as a "waste of time"). I just thought, I don't want to be stuck in one path, and it scared me I think to see everyone of my peers enthusiastically (leap off that cliff) go down that road. And the more "alternative" people I came across in my journey I could never felt really aligned (as interesting and valuable as there company was to me) because they seemed too crazy, or too far gone, and I knew I wasn't like that, either.
I wanted to know how could I ever decide what I was going to do with my life, my one valuable life, if I didn't understand myself and didn't understand the world? So I set out to understand my own limits, and the limits of the world, and I did that, and then figured out what I wanted to do (at least to a first approximation, or for this stage in my life). And even through the long years since my mid-20s I've held true to my vision of following the life I want to do, and the biggest lesson I've had is, "always back yourself and trust your instincts and stand up for that." Even tho I learned that lesson early on, it's been the times where I have not done so, that have been most painful to me. Sure, there's been many others things I've had to learn, very important, but that has been one, central theme. Follow the path I want for myself. No matter what. And tell my own story, don't let anyone tell it for me.
I'm already pretty successful relative to my peers.
He might be a billionaire instead of a millionaire because he "made personal choices" but his first million is much better explained by his handouts than by personal choices. "Personal choices" is such vague shallow and useless advice, it only tells me that he was smart enough not to blow it all on cocain.
They only water I can glean from this rock of a comment is that I should have chosen to be born in his family instead of mine.
About personal responsibility and choices, if you don't believe that then that's not something you can benefit from.
I'm not giving you advice, it's your path not mine, and I don't want the karma nor responsibility for affecting yours, I'm simply sharing my feelings about these things. If it inspires you or if helpful, that's good. If not, still good for me, and you still have the way you like anyway. So there's good their for you, either way, i think.
One last comment i thought of it i think sometimes if you have a very specific idea of what you need to get, you don't see the value in other gifts that show up along your way.
It would be completely idiotic if someone beat me in a marathon by starting on the last mile and then I look at that then say to myself "hmmm, I guess that guy just runs really fast."
I see that's your perspective, and i also feel glad for you that you hold it confidently, because that must make things easier for you.
I'm not telling you how you should think or feel about this. Just trying to offer and share my own perspective.
I don't want to challenge your ease. I just thought this different perspective could make things easier for you, and now i see you don't want that. That's okay. At least you have the way you like.
For other people reading here i will give a reply to what this person said to share how i feel about it.
I can't glean any meaning or value from your paragraphs of rambling about feelings.
What you find there is what you bring to it. What you make it mean, and any value you get from your interpretation is your responsibility. I see now that this person cannot benefit from this because to them these comments are ramblings, without meaning, nor value.
I think they just don't want to believe it, because they already have the way they like, they don't want to hear something different, so they choose to see it as without meaning and value them, and maybe pretend it's without meaning, or value for others.
For me these ideas are very meaningful and valuable. For this person, zero meaning and value. That's okay. Everyone likes and chooses different things.
"Jeff Bezos received massive handouts" is not a feeling or a personal choice. It's a fact.
It's both. The fact is he received help. The magnitude ( the meaning and significance of ) of that help is a subjective feeling and interpretation that this person chooses to make about it.
you can observe the extent to which the subjective feeling and chosen interpretation distorts the fact by the subsequent example this person gives
It would be completely idiotic if someone beat me in a marathon by starting on the last mile and then I look at that then say to myself "hmmm, I guess that guy just runs really fast."
Here we have a loose analogy being made between 300,000 loan from parents and 100 billion dollar fortune and 25.2 miles out of 26.2 miles.
So one measure of the objective significance of the fact is 300,000 / 1 billion which is three parts in a million. but a analogous measure of the significance of the subjective interpretation and chosen feeling is 25.2 / 26.2, which is 96 parts out of 100. Comparing these two ratios you can find the subjective feeling and chosen interpretation is around 320,000 times more important than the objective fact to this person. I think this is interesting, a little sad, and a little funny that, while someone pretends to exist only in a fact-based reality, they allocate 320,000 times more importance to interpretations and feelings than to the facts. but I think this is a natural part of being human because our emotions and chosen interpretations are extremely important to us and not just in a distortion sense but they are what help guide us I think it's useful and important to acknowledge that. And I do believe it can be harmful to deny that but I think in this case the person genuinely seems happy and safe in his belief and that's its own kind of utility.
The value that a machine imparts to its end product is equal to the portion of its total value which is used up in the process of production. Same with other forms of constant capital like tools and raw materials. So if a shirt machine costs $500 and can produce 1000 shirts before it wears out, then it imparts $0.50 of value to each shirt produced. When the end products are sold on the market, their price always covers the cost of replenishing the constant capital.
Constant capital is merely "congealed labor" meaning that labor had to be performed to produce it in the first place. When workers utilize the constant capital they unlock that value and also impart the additional value of their labor to the final product. The sum of the value of this labor plus the value of the constant capital expended equals the total value of the end product. When this end product is sold on the market as a commodity, its exact price fluctuates based on supply and demand and other factors, but its center of gravity is always the amount of labor required to produce it and all its components at a given level of technology.
Capitalists are the people who own the machines, tools, and raw materials. They pay workers a wage to utilize that constant capital and produce commodities for sale. This wage is determined by the conditions of competition in the labor market, but fundamentally it is anchored to how much it costs a worker to provide for his subsistence (e.g., food, clothing, shelter) and not the amount of value that his labor imparts to the commodities he helps produce. The difference between the value a worker's labor imparts and his wage is what the capitalist appropriates as private profit.
The development of automation like the robots you mention is incentivized by market competition. Automation enables capitalists to produce more commodities with less labor. Any competitor who can't match the level of production is driven out of the market. But because automation reduces the amount of labor required, it also necessarily reduces the rate of profit on each commodity. Thus to maintain the previous level of profit, production must be increased and/or wages and labor conditions must be suppressed. Over time, at the scale of the whole economy, this leads to crisis as neither the capitalists nor the workers can consume all the commodities produced (the capitalists are too few and the workers' wages are insufficient by definition).
But if the investor diversified well his investments, he's likely to have lower risk than an average worker.
Ownership requires management and the steps which were required to achieve that ownership. Somebody maybe had to work hard to own, while others inherited.
My own business began this year with $0 and I'm way past $100k. I had to live in my car for two months, absolutely worth it though, it helped me focus like never before. I created excellent product and then spent a lot of time both online and offline finding customers.
And now imagine you do this, and after all the shit you went through people start saying you don't deserve your money, completely ignoring the huge risk you made and the opportunity cost behind you, and that YOU MADE THE THING. What would you think?
And if you are making $100k, you aren't the target of anyone's tax plans.
While yes, at 100K you can probably afford to pay some taxes, it's not where we should be looking to solve any real meaty problems.
a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.
A car? Access to the internet? Their mental and physical health? No dependents? It's unclear how emteycz fed, cleaned, and clothed themselves while they had debt and no home, but plausibly there's some assistance there.
And the parent poster was talking about their privilege today in any case.
$200 one
> access to the internet
McDonalds and KFC
> Their mental and physical health
Both nope
> how emteycz fed, cleaned, and clothed themselves
Black market jobs, and sometimes not much to eat. I had clothes from before. Zero assistance, that's how it is in our little social democratic republic.
I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him.
Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others.
Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit.
> If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.
Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.
It's all in the realm of "numbers to big for our primate brains to comprehend" anyway, but Amazon as a whole only pulls in as much _revenue_ as 13 million warehouse workers, 14 thousand times less than you're implying.
Beyond that, Amazon has over a million employees. Using a simplistic model of their contributions that Bezos is irreplaceable and each worker is fungible, you'd get Shapley values for the whole organization along the lines of Bezos getting half and the workers splitting the rest. In terms of profits before wages the workers are getting far more than half, and even in terms of revenue before expenses they're only getting a few times less than half. As a crude ballpark, compensation doesn't seem to be disproportionate.
Valid counter-arguments include Shapley values not being an appropriate way to allocate payment (which necessitates choosing which one (or more) of their payout properties you'd like violated, e.g. symmetry among equivalent workers or that payment should depend on value added), my model being so simplistic that it can't possibly be right even to an order of magnitude, declaring that even a factor of 2 is actually important in examining Bezos's income, etc. Appealing to a gut reaction based on numbers that are "obviously" too big is misleading at best.
One is that I don't think it's anywhere close to true that Bezos is completely irreplaceable while all of his workers are not. I have little experience on the differences between a good warehouse worker or manager and a bad one, but I know that at least for software, the difference between a good software engineer and a bad one; or between a good software manager and a bad one; can make or break a business. I'm sure the same is true in many others domains of Amazon's activity (B2B sales is another obvious ones, as are marketing and market research; but I'm sure there are many less obvious ones).
The other point where I think your analysis is flawed is basing the "fair" compensation only on replace-ability. Even if 2 warehouse workers are perfectly replaceable, as long as they are doing the job and their work is absolutely required for the business to function, they should also be getting a large proportion of that business's success. This is where Unions can really improve things - by allowing collective bargaining, they help people who are interchangeable but whose jobs are crucial to get their fair share of the pie they are contributing massively to.
To your first point about Bezos' irreplaceability, that's definitely a potential sticking point, and one we don't have much data on. You'll find one side pointing to how there's only one Amazon (or one Tesla, etc) and to how all other attempts before and after have failed, but that confounds enough variables to not really be useful on its own. I would _love_ to see some good data on how much the choice of founder/ceo matters.
To your second point about how fair compensation is treated, replaceability mattering at all is an artifact of simpler premises. Shapley values are fun in their own right, and if you have time you should definitely read up on them. In any case though, here's a brief overview of the most pertinent characteristics to your replaceability point:
The Shapley values are the unique distribution of funds satisfying all of the following:
(1) All the gains are distributed.
(2) If two people have identical contributions they get an identical pay.
(3) If you mix and match activities you get the same answer (e.g. if you just analyzed contributions to Prime Video or just to AWS and combined the payouts relating to those two divisions you'd get the same value as if you treated them both together).
(4) The payout to people not in the group being analyzed is 0.
(5) For a specific mathematical formalism of the idea, if the whole venture profits then each contributor profits, and if the whole venture takes a loss then each contributor takes a loss.
(6) There is no dependence on the names of workers (similar to 2, but just different enough to need to be explicitly stated in the underlying mathematical formalism).
(7) The result can be expressed in terms of marginal contributions.
They aren't perfect for describing salaries (see #5 for example in the event that a business is losing money), but they're not a bad starting point, especially when we're talking about fairness of large salaries, because other frameworks like examining employee needs or market rates will determine that everything is sufficiently fair if some kind of minimum threshold is being hit (an open question in itself, but seemingly not the point of criticizing Bezos' large income) and because in a profitable business #5 isn't out-of-line with how salaries work -- everyone gets paid something.
Anywho, onto how all of that pertains to replaceability: Shapley values for large organizations are horrendously painful to calculate even with perfect data. They're much easier when you can invoke the symmetry properties, and in the context of a HN comment it seemed prudent to use as few distinct classes of people as possible to consider the problem at hand (Bezos vs workers).
Assuming Bezos is _irreplaceable_ is an easy way to estimate his marginal value -- without him the business makes 0 and with him it makes what it does. If his role is important then that's not actually such a bad estimate because if an alternative founder only created, e.g., a fifth of Amazon then the rest of the calculation works out that the other workers would split a twidge more than half the profits rather than half exactly. I.e., rounding most alternatives down to 0 is a good enough ballpark estimate.
Anyway, _replaceability_ doesn't play into the workers' values at all. The word I used was _fungibility_, and all that means is that I can treat them as having the same value with respect to each other (not with respect to an outside world ready to replace them). It's really not that important in the calculations though and just served as a concrete example. If you assume the rest of the workers have literally any other distribution of value contributions then Bezos' payout remains the same, and the only thing that changes is how the other half is allocated amongst the workers.
The fact that the state can also use some of this money to help with the funding of social programs is a secondary benefit.