The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language.

The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party.

Please, just don't.

No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere.

Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"

I don't say the folks with guns can't do constructive things to improve trade. They can. But they don't create that understanding you're talking about.

Again, the understanding you're talking about doesn't come from the sovereign.

As for Bitcoin networks being hacked that is a red herring as we often hear of non-black market sites being hacked--even with the all mighty government protection.

Can you cite me one example of this happening?

For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion?

I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.

If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others.

If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.

It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them.

The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?

It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?

The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin.

It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes.

How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there?

This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.

The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system.

Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities.

Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them.

All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.

If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?

But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?

If I were to bet on it, I'd bet very heavily on him creating wealth under those circumstances. As measured by creating a system for survival. Obviously not as well as someone trained in such things (as implied by your dodge), but better than someone who lacked his intelligence, and more importantly, his drive.

Ordinary people are compensated ordinarily because their contributions to the economy are ordinary. That actually does seem quite fair to me. I appreciate the work cleaners do, but their jobs simply don't contribute to the economy as much as building a large company like Facebook does.

That's not to say everyone who is highly compensated contributes highly to society, we all know that isn't true. But that's also not really what we're discussing.

And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? That's pretty circular reasoning. I'd argue that the esoteric jobs of building web gadgets are the fluff and foam of our economy, unimportant to real health and welfare, and way, way overcompensated.

I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it.

I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside.

However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.

If the pay of 'ordinary' jobs is to be set to some low minimum level, then the 'job making' or 'economy building' of the non-ordinary people will have no benefit for most folks. Its fine to brag about building wealth; but if its the highly-educated building wealth for themselves then who cares? But them of course.

The economy is not the plaything of those that have figured out the system. Its not there to make them wealthy, though I have no problem when that happens. As long as we remember the whole system is supposed to be for everybody.

There is a long chain of responsibility in an organization to allow anyone to function effectively at their job. Repeating what I wrote above, take away 'ordinary' tasks and the company grinds to a halt exactly as dead as if the CEO were removed. Maybe not; a company can go on for a year or so without a CEO on momentum; it stops dead if payroll stops processing, or heck if the lock on the front door breaks and nobody can get into the building.

When I debate the social good aspect of entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurs priorities, I try to appeal to the rationality of the self-interested agents. We, as a humanity, have two unambigous pathes in future. Either everything is really good or everything is equally bad. We are heading to near-utopia or to full-blown dystopia.

Tech entrepreneurs and investors hold the power to change the world faster than anyone else. More wealth inequality --> closer to the dystopia. It rational for anyone with power to influence the world and possible future to contribute to the decrease of wealth inequality.

I guess such approach to discussion would be more beneficial to your cause.

Unless they think that their lives will be better by increasing inequality, particularly in their individual case (cf. Tragedy of the Commons). And that may well be true, as they would disproportionately hold power and capital. Is it better to be a rich man in a society slowly going to hell or a poor one in a society slowly on the rise?

It's a non-empathic viewpoint, but I can understand why some would consider it rational and self-interested.

Also helping other is a significant factor in emotional wellbeing.

I mostly blame the current snapshot of evolving social system, not the actors, even psychopathic ones.

All trolling and snark aside your comment is the antithesis of the point that many factors outside of the individual contribute to their success. If you believe that then the number of those individuals capable of similar success rises dramatically. Also those who clean and do "ordinary" jobs are people who are similarly shaped by many factors they don't control.

Also I am very certain that people would get by better without Facebook then they would with the lowly legions of those toiling away to keep the world merely "clean".

I totally agree with that. That's why I weight it with the scarcity. Of course you disagree with the scarcity of Zuckerberg, but in my comment I assume that what defines a "Zuckerberg" includes the outside factors that the individual doesnt control.

I doubt that ability grow the company and be the CEO correlates much with the ability to hunt and kill an animal. Especially if we are talking about hunting in isolation, CEO skill is mainly in dealing with people and making strategy. If you drop someone alone in the middle of woods, he needs to be strong, fast and know a lot about nature. Otherwise said, Zuckenberg would do as good as any other random man.

The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness, and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.

Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness.

Of course it's possible to imagine a scenario of puny or fat nerds vs gorgeous athletes, but that's adding in things that don't necessarily relate and it's pretty clearly avoiding the intent of the scenario.

Sure, and if you have free reign to choose on any traits you want, you'd probably not consider attractiveness directly, but instead consider a balance of general health, physical fitness, survival experience (and specific context if the expected survival situation was known in more detail), and general intelligence (though the latter wouldn't necessarily be very high on the list of priorities.)

If all you have is intelligence and attractiveness, though, given that attractiveness has a correlation with (even though it isn't identical to) important things other than general intelligence that the hypothetical has prevented you from considering directly, you'd be ill advised to neglect it in favor of intelligence alone.

In fact, the whole reason attractiveness evolved is is exactly about choosing who to be stuck in a long-term survival situation with (which is why it is linked to both general health and physical fitness.)

It is one of this science "just-so-stories", but the idea being that other attributes being equal more intelligence would allow you to more successfully mate with attractive people.