The other thing that we're often ignoring is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.

For the most part only capital gets to roll the dice, but even before that it's a sign of the times that we take it seriously at all when people talk about "earning" a billion dollars. We could all do with a bit more humility.

George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.

It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?

> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.

What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.

That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.

The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.

in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?

> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.

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> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.

And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.

Can you quickly break down which players on the team are fairly compensated and which are oppressed by LeBron?

It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.

If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?

Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.

There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.

If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.

Once again, lopsided allocation - George benefited from and is directly responsible for keeping the cost of labor low: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100...

Would he have been a billionaire without that? Who knows? But it definitely helped him get there.

If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.

Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?

The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.

Jk Rowling and LeBron James are additional examples.

The reason is that the conflict here is between labor and capital. And those two, at least in their primary roles, are labor, as a writer and an athlete. One of them is even a union member operating under a collective bargaining agreement.

They're just the absolute pinnacle top of anything that could possibly be put in that category.

But if I'm arguing that this is really about the division of of the spoils between labor and capital, and you have to resort to picking members of the labor class to make your argument then you have essentially conceded my point, which is that returns to labor are different than returns to capital, and returns to capital are much harder to defend. You didn't pick Bill Ackman for a reason.

Well yes. That is in fact exactly what I mean.

Now I'm not saying that the employer is necessarily morally culpable here — I'm sure most employers would like nothing more than to not have to worry about their employees' healthcare, and certainly I doubt many people enjoy having the ability to take it away. But it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to have a real negotiation when inelastic demands are (potentially) unmet. Someone under threat of losing health insurance or housing is negotiating under duress, contrary to the comment I replied to.

It's especially insufficient to generalize the working of the entire system from an example of a market in which employees currently have enough power to not really have to worry about the prospect of physical harm because it would be disadvantageous to the employers to cause it. Even if we take the current state of the SaaS startup market as reliable (which it isn't) the original argument was not limited to SaaS startup employees, and in other industries (including ones that are a bit down the pyramid from the SaaS companies) things are a lot less rosy for employees.

This is a ‘no true Scotsman’ so I don't think I can really respond to it directly. But I'll point out that my claim is not that some contracts bargaining for safety of life and limb are a form of duress but that all inherently are (to some extent). Especially when the other party's BATNA is ‘no guarantee of safety’.

This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.

I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.

But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.

My argument is this: the core disagreement here is about the allocation of resources between labor and capital.

I’m right. It is.

That doesn’t mean I have settled the argument about what those allocations should be which nobody has, it’s a core organizational element of politics.

But I think his argument is bullshit. It’s a purposeful misdirection because it refuses to recognize the terms of the discussion at all.

> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.

In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.

For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.

This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.

They don't hold me down and force me to hand money to a landlord, mind, they just lock me in a cell if I don't, so maybe it doesn't meet your standard of proof.

No it's not, it's actually extremely easy to prove wrong: J.K. Rowling.

Which is, as I pointed out, inarguable. No one is spawned alone in the woods to start their adventure independently of the society they are in.

He takes that as a given but this is, in fact, the argument and you can't wave it away.

By doing so he's being disingenuous. The argument here is about who gets what. And the startup founder and its employees are not the only participants in the economy.

The revenue flowing in to his hypothetical startup is exogenous to the startup so you have to talk about where it's coming from, who's affected, and how that fits in with policy goals.

For an extreme but accurate thought experiment, imagine concluding your analysis of FTX by noting that their employees were "fairly and properly" paid and then moving on.