Re:California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 da...
by acover on Saturday December 19, 2020 @12:48PM
(#25479342)
I don't think marginal benefit of Jeff Bezos is what you are trying to measure. Consider, if a light bulb is broken having one Jeff Bezos replace it is hugely valuable. Adding a second Jeff Bezos to the situation doesn't help.
Re:California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 da...
by ericd on Sunday December 20, 2020 @01:58AM
(#25484491)
With 0 Jeff Bezos’, ~none of those 800k people would be working at a company called Amazon. Not sure who else at Amazon you can say that about.
Re:California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 da...
by tsimionescu on Sunday December 20, 2020 @06:22AM
(#25485505)
With 0 warehouse workers, the same is true. The bigger question is if Jeff Bezos were replaced with someone else, how much different would Amazon be? Unfortunately, we don't really have any tools to scientifically answer this type of question. My belief is that Amazon wouldn't be a thousand times smaller if Jeff Bezos were replace with another reasonably competent manager.
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.
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.