Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.
> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home
This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making.
[0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.
Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
> One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
> Please, don’t spend your late teens or early twenties in front of your computer at a startup. If you’re a young person, I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work – however that looks for you. Get an instrument, learn three chords, and go on tour; find a derelict boat and cross an ocean; hitchhike to Alaska; build a fleet of dirigibles; construct a UAV that will engage with the emerging local police UAVs; whatever – but make it count.
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
Can someone help me understand the first footnote?
>[1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome.
Yes, clearly different passions lead to different industries which mean different economic outcomes.
But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
I have no idea of how to solve this or create the perfect utopia, btw. I'm just confused on the point of the footnote.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right?
Seems you're focusing on the Floor whereas pg refers to a Ceilings?
It's normal that enterprise sales lovers ends up as taller poppies than pottery lovers. You could take it a step further and say: it's normal than Tom Brady and Ronaldo ends up rich but mediocre football players make $0 from football, even though both have interest in football.
That's the typical Ikigai diagram stuff: if someone's "what you love" naturally aligns with "what you can be paid for", pg point is that this person will be richer. (On top of this, if someone's "what you're good at" also aligns naturally with "what you can be paid for", they'll also be richer).
But you're approaching a different question: do pottery lovers have a good enough quality of life? Do they deserve one if nobody needs any of their pottery stuff?
Does everyone's deserve a good quality of life regardless of what their passion is? What about people with antisocial passions (crime, exploiting others etc)?
I think you make a really good point at the end, that those with antisocial and pathological passions shouldn't be encouraged for the sake of societal health.
They can really make a huge profit if done in a certain way, right? Exploiting others like using dark patterns or scams definitely can reap huge rewards.
As a layman, I'm curious to know what you and others think about what standards should be held to meet the floor, what standards should be held to reach the ceiling.
I know you're being sarcastic, but there is truth to that. Without judgement, it is well-documented that those in poverty will spend, as a proportion of their income, 20 or 30 times as much on lottery tickets as someone who is rich. Now they have their reasons, I think a lottery ticket lets one dream what life could be like, at least until the draw happens, but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.
I hear a lot of focus on money and not just quality of life. One issue with quality of life is that as you improve it for the bottom, the expecations of what a minimal quality should be tend to go up. So you may never really "solve" it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continually trying to improve.
i think it's pretty clear what pg means. more useful products = more money = better outcomes in life. no one wants more pins and posters of some artist's OCs, they want software that helps the world and actually changes lives for the better. studio pottery won't do that.
To be clear, I like the idea of making something really useful and being rewarded from bettering other people's lives. I don't doubt that if you make something really useful for the world, you can gain a lot from it.
But when people talk about fairness, (I assume) they're usually thinking about the successful scammers, predatory practices, people not contributing to the world yet profiting a lot from it. They may also think about "essential workers" who, in contrast, may live paycheck to paycheck.
It becomes blurrier to me when I think about who "deserves" what.
I'm young and at a pivotal point in my life, where I need to decide whether to remain in my well-paying job in software engineering or pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. This article has deeply inspired me, hitting at just the right moment to encourage me to aim higher and take the leap.
Two things to check out: (1) find out the best university in your area, and see if they have a business incubator. Check out their events page - there's usually something interesting happening in the next couple of weeks - go to it with an open mind! Creators, investors, students, entrepreneurs all in one spot. Meet the organizer, and find out what kind of workshops would be valuable, and consider running one! They will help promote you! Usually, they'll have a busy group chat (WhatsApp) - get in there and see what services people need / offer...
(2) Find out if there is a community maker-space in your area, and take a tour. You'll meet some of the most creative, entrepreneurial people there, and you'll see up-close, what's possible with product prototyping these days - 3D printed ceramics, robotics, CNC wood carving bots, metal carving, etc - and computer/code labs!
I ran a "Get your product on Shopify" workshop in a maker-space. It was tons of fun and high value - got people booted up with a custom domain name, photo of their product online, Buy it Now button, make a business card with a QR code. For software experts this kind of thing is easy (a couple of hours etc), but for most people - it can feel like an extremely complicated mission (managing DNS records, or adjusting a theme's CSS - super tricky!). Not that you need to go be a Shopify installer! But the point is that you can help turn someones dream into reality, and its satisfying for all involved.
Work at a job that contributes highly to a retirement fund (401k o
If in the USA) and after you have maxed our your retirement savings for at least 5, if not 10 years, then go ahead and do something else.
If I had waited 3 more years before I tried to go the startup route I'd have another 200-300k in the bank right now and I would have the financial independence to do whatever I want for however long I want right now.
Compound growth is amazing, take advantage of it while you are as young as possible.
When you work for money, you'd rather do something else, and you aspire to save up enough so that you can stop and do something else.
When you love your work, it doesn't feel like work, and you don't want to stop.
(having said this, I know some people who started out wanting money in order to do something useful with it later, however now they are so hooked to optimize their income more and more -- money has become their main driver and primary motivation.)
Passion is too generic of a word and that gets confusing when it comes to advice like this. It could be someone is passionate about the activity itself, passionate about the idea of being successful, obsessed intellectually with a question, passionate about wanting to prove something…
Also worth thinking about whether you want to be in the bridge of a ship with lots of other people on board, prefer working in a different deck like Engineering, or flying your own light shuttle craft about!
From a commencement speech by a young person called Grant Sanderson:
> Influence is not distributed uniformly in the population and I for one would feel a lot more comfortable if it was you who were at the helm guiding this crazy ship that we're all riding.
> If you step into the next chapter of life with an implacable focus on adding values to others, you're more likely to be the ones at the helm.
> If you recognize that action precedes motivation, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you ask what's possible now that wasn't 10 years ago, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> If you appreciate just how much power you have to shape the lives of the generation that follows you, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you remain adaptable to a changing world, treating passion not as a destination but as a fuel, following not dreams but opportunities, you're more likely to be at the helm.
Please if you are young and still in full-time education and reading this, please please please take it with a pinch of salt.
What you are reading is essentially a sales-pitch trying to lure you in. This has the tell-tale signs of classic hard sales pitches - playing on the fear of losing out, offering big rewards, comparing to a negative stereotypes, appealing to your ego/self-worth about not being ignorant, flattery by dismissing it as not greed but an intellectual puzzle for smart people like you etc etc. Your internal alarm bells that stop you getting suckered into things should be going crazy about now!
He has a vested interest in getting as many people as possible to throw themselves and their lives 110% into doing a start-up so that he can invest in it and make money off of your work.
For every successful billionaire (or hell even millionaire) that comes out of his "sales funnel", there will be hundreds if not thousands of people whose full-potential/career-potential/earning-potential will be severely curtailed as a result. They'll waste many of their most productive years, potentially building up massive debts in the process, chasing some start-up dream before eventually capitulating and failing before trying to get a "steady job" when they find themselves burnt-out and debt-ridden with nothing to show for it after 5-10 years of slog.
Meanwhile 5-10 years at a FAANG you would have pocketed several million in total-comp (probably in the region of 5+mil USD in the bay area I guess), working in low-stress environments with some of the best engineers, researchers, PMs, and leaders in the world while still having time and energy to live your life too.
It is a numbers game for him. Think carefully about what you are getting into before throwing your future life away. Good luck.
He's targeting a particular audience in this essay. Doesn't mean he hates everyone else. In fact, in other essays he says that being an older founder can actually be an advantage in some ways.
Probably the culture of where I live is very different from the other side of the ocean, but... why is money such a big point in this article? I love my work and I'm decently paid and... I don't really want to be rich. With the given title, I would advocate for/stress on contentment rather than monetary richness.
In the culture where you live there are good chances you don't finish college with a couple hundred thousands dollars in debt, and getting a reasonable home near the place where you want to work doesn't cost a million dollars.
On top of that, bad luck in America can be very expensive. the wrong illness can make living a low stress life difficult
Therefore an American that sees a pile of debt in their future, the kind of career that can pay for that kind of debt, and therefore lead to just being reasonably content and independent, is not all that far from one where you end up in the neighborhood of being rich. It's definitely what happened to me: The difference between not having a lot of economic stress and 'oops, I could retire tomorrow' was about 5 years.
Same. I think PG and the bay area has been such a goldmine the last few decades most people in tech and VC driven by the rewards. Most people in American are somewhat more money driven than Europeans, but most are relatively content than the Bay Area population.
There’s no such thing as a reasonable quality of life on an average income anymore. People who don’t prioritize money will live like poor students for the rest of their lives renting with roommates. They will never have a family, healthcare, hobbies, or respect from their community.
Stop pretending that not prioritizing money is an option. It’s incredibly condescending. In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
Granted: If you live in America, depending on your situation, you may need wealth or a good job to have access to decent healthcare.
But, "They will never have a family... hobbies, or respect from their community." This is completely out of touch. Plenty of Americans in flyover country accomplish all of these on an average salary. Source: They're my neighbors.
I don’t want to lead with the mean retort that people who say they don’t care about money often don’t have any, so let me give you the kinder version - I think you come from a place of immense privilege. Either born in a first world country, or born to well off parents or in a rich society.
otoh, Where I come from , we have a proverb that’s hard to translate but describes our misery quite accurately - “we don’t even have enough water to wipe our anus after we poop”.
So that’s why I seek wealth. Not because I’m not content, or stressed out or whatever. Because the people I was born with, my cousins, brothers, relatives - they are still digging ditches. I am no smarter than them perhaps, but because I chose to pay a little extra attention at academics, atleast I have some money to buy some water so I can wash my butt after I poop.
Don’t hate on people who want money. The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
Because America has such a poor social safety net that it is very easy to go from well paid to homeless in just a few years.
Accordingly, everyone is fighting to make enough money to not get fucked over during each of our cyclical "economic recessions". During each recession more and more people permanently fall into poverty and everyone who is left fights even harder to not be a victim the next time the economy goes south.
Besides removing distractions, having more money raises the limits on what you can build before it needs to become self-sustaining. Retirement should be a consolation prize but not the entire goal.
honestly, I want to be rich. I do make a decent living, but not enough to quit my job. At this rate I'll have to work until I'm 50 or 60, which is same as everyone else, so cry me a river, but even so, it would be nice to dedicate more time to hobby which at this rate I can at most dedicate a weekend to, but in practice it's a bit less because I have to go out with the wife and I have visit my family, etc. Most weeks I have a full day at most to pursue anything.
From what i understand my life is very similar as yours. One out of 7 seems not too shabby though.
Maybe a cliché but... my advice would be to try to get most out of each simple experience. Today my spouse and kid went for a long walk together with me... while I could have been doing woodworking. I _tried_ to teach the kid the joy of walking without having too much on his mind. I also started conversations with strangers while waiting in the ice cream queue. There's always something to learn from that. I guess you by now understand my advocating for contentment.
this afternoon i couldn't have been doing woodworking because i don't have woodworking tools. that's not just because i can't afford them; my apartment is not really big enough for a woodworking shop, and i worry that the wiring might catch fire if i tried to plug in a high-powered saw. i'm having a hard time being content, despite going on a walk with my wife this morning and having lots of lovely conversations with strangers over the last three days, because the rent is due in two weeks and i'm nervous about whether i'll have enough. ever since i got covid for the third time in april, at which point i couldn't get paxlovid, i don't remember things like i used to. (i suspect that with enough money i could have gotten paxlovid.) also, my aunt is going to die soon, and i don't have the money to visit her before that
i really wish i'd spent more effort on making, and saving, money 20 years ago. i wouldn't want to spend my life on it, and no amount of money will keep me from dying, but right now i'm spending a lot of my life coping with the consequences of not having it
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself.
What silly advice. I didn’t even know my “what to work on” existed until I was near the end of my junior year of college. XD
I took that phrase to mean "don't be blocked by any institution, person, or societal expectation to pursue what's interesting to you". Could be casual research, a cursory glance, or a deep internal investigation of yourself.
Which is always good to start as soon as you're aware of it. It's fine if you figure it out near the end of your junior year, your first job, or a midlife crisis. "Best time to start was yesterday, 2nd best is now" type of thing.
When friends say they are "going to start a business", I ask them "Why? Do you know why, do you know what your goal is?".
In most cases people can't really explain exactly why, and that's fine and normal. Only after years of being in business did certain things come clear to me. Are you there to make money, to follow your passion, to succeed with something, anything, to own your own time and life? The naive might say "all of the above", but they are not compatible.
You may find that you care more about owning your own time than working on stuff you are passionate about.
I've seen quite a few people start a business to work on something they are passionate about and then go out of business, when they COULD have stayed in business if they had been prepared to make money doing stuff they didn't love. What is more important in this case, being in business or doing stuff you love?
new twist on capitalist pitch:
"There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them."
the older Paul gets, he sounds just like rest of his club mates!
I'm someone who is not rich but is interested in capital markets. My net worth is less than USD 100,000 and I spend hours each week downloading market data, looking for trade ideas, writing scripts, running statistical tests, implementing trading strategies, and analyzing the results.
I expect to be quite well off someday as a result of this hobby, but for now it's just an interest.
From an investors perspective looking at a group of people with randomly distributed interests, it seems like great advice to motivate each and every one of them to pursue their interest with all their energy and waste their lives on it. Some might get lucky and make the world a better place.
From the perspective of an individual who only gets assigned one or a few subjects to be interested in, not knowing whether these will bring fortune or not, not so useful advice. Chances are that you will fail, lose money and friends, and forget to spend time with your loved ones.
The way to make billions, or even millions, is OWNERSHIP.
Own the profits or some of the profits of other people's hard work and creativity in some way, either directly or indirectly (eg property), or the promise of such profits (stocks), and trade that.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard or create, yourself. Just that hard work, creativity, etc, in and of itself, doesn't pay. It pays off when you work harder (or smarter, or just luckier) than other people, in order to win or create ownership, that other people will then contribute to. Just like pg did.
If you make studio pottery you likely own everything, and still dont make money.
Many FAANG employees are clearly in it for the money or status and have no real ownership. (Inb4 RSUs. They are treated as cash.)
The Marxist analysis makes most sense in the context it came from - the Industrial Revolution where most economic value was concentrated in expensive machinery.
Their comment said to own other people's profit. And that is true: the only way to get really rich is to own results of work of millions other people. Like Musk, Zuckerberg or Mohammed bin Salman.
I gladens me to see that the sentiment here on HN is getting increasingly critical of PG and other VCs and Silicon Valley figures. Let's just hope that PG doesn't decide to pull the plug on HN some day.
Aren't we the court jesters who entertain them with our wit, or the court scientists who provide them with early insights into which technologies will be worth investing in?
Work is what you do to keep society and your place in it going.
Hence it's an intersection of what society needs and what you are capable of.
The issue with modern degenerate society is that nobody'll tell you what society needs - you're supposed to figure it out through gossip.
This is extremely stupid.
People who write articles attempting to solve collective problems at an individual level are blaming the victim and giving terrible advice without realizing it. So it goes.
Well the reason is that nobody knows what society needs… or stated differently, what ends up being useful is non-obvious. So you can’t plan it outside of some general parameters.
> ... but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
It's sad to me that the wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism, that people like Graham full throatily endorse, creates this mentality.
"If you're young" is a euphemism for "if you are free from the necessities of responsibility, and so are able to forego the lack of consistent income (and if you're in the states, a lack of employer provided health care".
pg, encourage the companies you give money to pay an equal portion of profits to their employees, and maybe even the "olds" can be free do what they love; rather than the fear induced indentured servitude currently so predominant.
May even give us better products and solutions, or as you say, allow people to do actual "great work".
> wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism
I've been having this conversation over dinner with my wife for the last few years. What else is there? Here are the broadly categorized economic systems that I'm aware of (I sincerely request correction if I'm incomplete or mistaken):
- Despotism, feudalism, and other ruler-based economies that mix governance with economy by fiat
- Marxism (and it's entanglements into governance: socialism and communism)
- Capitalism, though it eventually captures governance as a failure mode
Of these systems, with the possible exception of subsistence, only capitalism really works. All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing. Even with a benevolent dictator for life, that life ends and the system degenerates at most in two generations of hereditary leadership.
How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)? How do you turn back the clock on regulatory capture, and monopolized consolidation where firms move to become parasitic instead of exchanging value?
Is there something else?
And no, Marxism and collectivism is not it. Drowning the individual is not it. Marxism hasn't lost its appeal precisely because it's one of the few models that addresses dramatic pay disparity. But it was created in Britain thinking about the factory workers of the time. We know now that it includes errors and misunderstandings of fundamental human behavior that make it turn into tyranny every time. We also know that it necessarily leads to central planning which is fragile and collapses. So that's not it.
In my opinion, a good first step is to stop looking at socialism and capitalism in absolute terms. I think its a mistake to idealistically cling to one archetype as the best of all possible archetypes. When you go the idealistic route, you are doomed to repeat the failings of the past.
I would argue that the most successful economies are blended economies that have achieved success by blending elements of both systems and perhaps other systems as well.
For example, the USA once had working conditions as described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle .” Those working conditions are no longer legal thanks to regulations. But regulations are an element of command-economy, not of free markets.
An example from the other side is the rise of China’s economy. I don’t believe China could have become “the world’s factory” without introducing elements of free market capitalism.
During the cold war, propaganda made socialism the bogeyman to the west, and capitalism the bogeyman to the east. I don’t think this fear is rational. To me they are just two economic archetypes of many. Each has its own merits and faults. The key is to apply them where they make sense.
To me the real enemies are: authoritarianism and corruption.
I see regulatory capture as a form of corruption. The regulators are corrupted by those who would like to externalize their costs onto society. How do we fight corruption? It’s a tough battle, but remember it has been done before. Tammany hall, etc.
It's far too late in the history of discourse to try and change this perception, but 'Marxism' is not really so much of a system in-of-itself more than it is a grouping of influential ideas that were propagated by Marx and disseminated throughout history. Marx at no point ever attempts to describe an ideal economic system - Communism as an idea is far more intagible to him, and many 'modern Marxists' have long since re-oriented their ideological critique away from 'the establishment of Communism' and towards 'survival under Capitalism' as modern society is inexorably more alien than Marx could have ever known.
> The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.9 percent average rate, nearly eight times higher than the 3.3 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers
> The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.
The post I was replying to suggested that everyone pay the same tax rate. I'm opposed to this. Progressive taxes are more fair, due to the marginal value of money.
Capital gains tax is lower to offset the risk of taking a capital risk, which labor does not do in receiving a wage.
Much of “labor” participates in capital risk through retirement accounts and homes, blurring this 19th century distinction.
The “capitalists” are likely to sidestep taxation through politicians, lawyers and accountants (See the often quoted 1960s era “tax rate”) which is a phenomenon of power, that exists pre-capitalism.
The one that jumps out at me is implying “socialism is a form of Marxism” when it’s the opposite that is true.
There are thriving socialist governments right now. What benefit does your argument get from ignoring those?
Why do you have “capitalism” and “despotism, feudalism, and other ruler based economies” separate? Are you unable to see the oligarchy of the US?
> Drowning the individual is not it.
Spreading ownership across those necessary for a thing to exist is drowning them? Or is it drowning the Csuites?
If your online bookstore turned imitation product megastore requires the people boxing the goods and driving the trucks then they should own a piece of what their work creates; that means ownership in the company and a share in the wealth it creates.
Is it because a CEO is golfing with war criminals that they deserve to capture the economic production from the labor of so many?
The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
> The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
I agree here. Even during the feudal era, if you happened to be employed in the envoy of one of the world's richest trading fleets, you would be treated with far greater respect than an Amazon worker.
> All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing.
What you call a Marxist system is something that Marx said could only work in the most advanced country if it was ready for it, which in that time was Germany. He said such a system would not work elsewhere.
So what form of Marxism failed? Even Lenin, who many Marxists did not consider Marxist, was a Marxist enough to say that Russia would not establish communism. That the Russian self-described Marxists had the chance to take power in Russia and they took it. That Lenin wanted to take power in early 1917 came as a surprise to Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev etc., in fact Trotsky was not even with Lenin then. It surprised them because it was not a Marxist idea. Then Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, i.e. capitalism. Then he died.
Marx clearly spelled out what not to do, and some did what he said not to do, then people attribute the failures of those who did what Marx said not to do, to Marx.
This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.
There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.
No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.
Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.
Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.
> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.
Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.
Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.
> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home
This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making.
[0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.
> If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible
Do you really believe this?
Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
This is because you chose to live an expensive life. Most of the world gets by on less.
I spend around 25% of my income
> One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
Reminded me of this gem: https://moxie.org/2013/01/07/career-advice.html
And this interview at Slashdot:
> Please, don’t spend your late teens or early twenties in front of your computer at a startup. If you’re a young person, I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work – however that looks for you. Get an instrument, learn three chords, and go on tour; find a derelict boat and cross an ocean; hitchhike to Alaska; build a fleet of dirigibles; construct a UAV that will engage with the emerging local police UAVs; whatever – but make it count.
— Moxie Marlinspike https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/12/19/179256/moxie-...
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
They can’t.
Need to have the day job and try to do something in the night, or vice versa.
We need a basic income.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=basic+income
We don't deserve Moxie. What an inspiration
Can someone help me understand the first footnote?
>[1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome.
Yes, clearly different passions lead to different industries which mean different economic outcomes.
But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
I have no idea of how to solve this or create the perfect utopia, btw. I'm just confused on the point of the footnote.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right?
Seems you're focusing on the Floor whereas pg refers to a Ceilings?
It's normal that enterprise sales lovers ends up as taller poppies than pottery lovers. You could take it a step further and say: it's normal than Tom Brady and Ronaldo ends up rich but mediocre football players make $0 from football, even though both have interest in football.
That's the typical Ikigai diagram stuff: if someone's "what you love" naturally aligns with "what you can be paid for", pg point is that this person will be richer. (On top of this, if someone's "what you're good at" also aligns naturally with "what you can be paid for", they'll also be richer).
But you're approaching a different question: do pottery lovers have a good enough quality of life? Do they deserve one if nobody needs any of their pottery stuff?
Does everyone's deserve a good quality of life regardless of what their passion is? What about people with antisocial passions (crime, exploiting others etc)?
I think you make a really good point at the end, that those with antisocial and pathological passions shouldn't be encouraged for the sake of societal health. They can really make a huge profit if done in a certain way, right? Exploiting others like using dark patterns or scams definitely can reap huge rewards.
As a layman, I'm curious to know what you and others think about what standards should be held to meet the floor, what standards should be held to reach the ceiling.
It's good to know people crawling themselves out of poverty just lack the right hobbies
I know you're being sarcastic, but there is truth to that. Without judgement, it is well-documented that those in poverty will spend, as a proportion of their income, 20 or 30 times as much on lottery tickets as someone who is rich. Now they have their reasons, I think a lottery ticket lets one dream what life could be like, at least until the draw happens, but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.
I hear a lot of focus on money and not just quality of life. One issue with quality of life is that as you improve it for the bottom, the expecations of what a minimal quality should be tend to go up. So you may never really "solve" it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continually trying to improve.
Also I bet there is extreme income inequality among studio potters. Could even be more unequal than the overall population.
i think it's pretty clear what pg means. more useful products = more money = better outcomes in life. no one wants more pins and posters of some artist's OCs, they want software that helps the world and actually changes lives for the better. studio pottery won't do that.
I've written software that has had a big impact, on a lot of lives. I'm still doing it.
I haven't been paid a dime for it, and I'm quite happy with that.
I don't think PG, or any VCs would be at all interested in my work. They might like the work, itself, but it's not gonna make anyone rich.
Can you please share some more about what you’ve done.
Not in the public forum. The very last thing our service needs, is thousands of curious geeks, signing up throwaways.
If you really want, you can figure it out, from my GH page, or send me a message.
To be clear, I like the idea of making something really useful and being rewarded from bettering other people's lives. I don't doubt that if you make something really useful for the world, you can gain a lot from it.
But when people talk about fairness, (I assume) they're usually thinking about the successful scammers, predatory practices, people not contributing to the world yet profiting a lot from it. They may also think about "essential workers" who, in contrast, may live paycheck to paycheck.
It becomes blurrier to me when I think about who "deserves" what.
>and that some interests yield far more money than others
Okay. Why?
This is presented as an axiom, but it isn't.
I'm young and at a pivotal point in my life, where I need to decide whether to remain in my well-paying job in software engineering or pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. This article has deeply inspired me, hitting at just the right moment to encourage me to aim higher and take the leap.
Two things to check out: (1) find out the best university in your area, and see if they have a business incubator. Check out their events page - there's usually something interesting happening in the next couple of weeks - go to it with an open mind! Creators, investors, students, entrepreneurs all in one spot. Meet the organizer, and find out what kind of workshops would be valuable, and consider running one! They will help promote you! Usually, they'll have a busy group chat (WhatsApp) - get in there and see what services people need / offer...
(2) Find out if there is a community maker-space in your area, and take a tour. You'll meet some of the most creative, entrepreneurial people there, and you'll see up-close, what's possible with product prototyping these days - 3D printed ceramics, robotics, CNC wood carving bots, metal carving, etc - and computer/code labs!
I ran a "Get your product on Shopify" workshop in a maker-space. It was tons of fun and high value - got people booted up with a custom domain name, photo of their product online, Buy it Now button, make a business card with a QR code. For software experts this kind of thing is easy (a couple of hours etc), but for most people - it can feel like an extremely complicated mission (managing DNS records, or adjusting a theme's CSS - super tricky!). Not that you need to go be a Shopify installer! But the point is that you can help turn someones dream into reality, and its satisfying for all involved.
Best of luck in the next chapter of your journey!
Work at a job that contributes highly to a retirement fund (401k o If in the USA) and after you have maxed our your retirement savings for at least 5, if not 10 years, then go ahead and do something else.
If I had waited 3 more years before I tried to go the startup route I'd have another 200-300k in the bank right now and I would have the financial independence to do whatever I want for however long I want right now.
Compound growth is amazing, take advantage of it while you are as young as possible.
Note that Paul Graham has a vested interest in you doing that and he writes with that in mind.
Don't do it. Wait until you have enough money to comfortably retire and paid off the mortgage etc, then do it.
Don't go all in. Try starting your business on the side and see how it goes for a while.
Be an entrepreneur. If it's not for you, you'll know within a few years.
When you work for money, you'd rather do something else, and you aspire to save up enough so that you can stop and do something else.
When you love your work, it doesn't feel like work, and you don't want to stop.
(having said this, I know some people who started out wanting money in order to do something useful with it later, however now they are so hooked to optimize their income more and more -- money has become their main driver and primary motivation.)
Passion is too generic of a word and that gets confusing when it comes to advice like this. It could be someone is passionate about the activity itself, passionate about the idea of being successful, obsessed intellectually with a question, passionate about wanting to prove something…
Also worth thinking about whether you want to be in the bridge of a ship with lots of other people on board, prefer working in a different deck like Engineering, or flying your own light shuttle craft about!
From a commencement speech by a young person called Grant Sanderson:
> Influence is not distributed uniformly in the population and I for one would feel a lot more comfortable if it was you who were at the helm guiding this crazy ship that we're all riding.
> If you step into the next chapter of life with an implacable focus on adding values to others, you're more likely to be the ones at the helm.
> If you recognize that action precedes motivation, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you ask what's possible now that wasn't 10 years ago, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> If you appreciate just how much power you have to shape the lives of the generation that follows you, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you remain adaptable to a changing world, treating passion not as a destination but as a fuel, following not dreams but opportunities, you're more likely to be at the helm.
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3I3kAg2J7w
— https://www.3blue1brown.com/about
Please if you are young and still in full-time education and reading this, please please please take it with a pinch of salt.
What you are reading is essentially a sales-pitch trying to lure you in. This has the tell-tale signs of classic hard sales pitches - playing on the fear of losing out, offering big rewards, comparing to a negative stereotypes, appealing to your ego/self-worth about not being ignorant, flattery by dismissing it as not greed but an intellectual puzzle for smart people like you etc etc. Your internal alarm bells that stop you getting suckered into things should be going crazy about now!
He has a vested interest in getting as many people as possible to throw themselves and their lives 110% into doing a start-up so that he can invest in it and make money off of your work.
For every successful billionaire (or hell even millionaire) that comes out of his "sales funnel", there will be hundreds if not thousands of people whose full-potential/career-potential/earning-potential will be severely curtailed as a result. They'll waste many of their most productive years, potentially building up massive debts in the process, chasing some start-up dream before eventually capitulating and failing before trying to get a "steady job" when they find themselves burnt-out and debt-ridden with nothing to show for it after 5-10 years of slog.
Meanwhile 5-10 years at a FAANG you would have pocketed several million in total-comp (probably in the region of 5+mil USD in the bay area I guess), working in low-stress environments with some of the best engineers, researchers, PMs, and leaders in the world while still having time and energy to live your life too.
It is a numbers game for him. Think carefully about what you are getting into before throwing your future life away. Good luck.
If you aren’t young, you aren’t worth Paul taking a moment to write a sentence about you, though, so go to hell.
Apparently.
He's targeting a particular audience in this essay. Doesn't mean he hates everyone else. In fact, in other essays he says that being an older founder can actually be an advantage in some ways.
Probably the culture of where I live is very different from the other side of the ocean, but... why is money such a big point in this article? I love my work and I'm decently paid and... I don't really want to be rich. With the given title, I would advocate for/stress on contentment rather than monetary richness.
In the culture where you live there are good chances you don't finish college with a couple hundred thousands dollars in debt, and getting a reasonable home near the place where you want to work doesn't cost a million dollars.
On top of that, bad luck in America can be very expensive. the wrong illness can make living a low stress life difficult
Therefore an American that sees a pile of debt in their future, the kind of career that can pay for that kind of debt, and therefore lead to just being reasonably content and independent, is not all that far from one where you end up in the neighborhood of being rich. It's definitely what happened to me: The difference between not having a lot of economic stress and 'oops, I could retire tomorrow' was about 5 years.
Same. I think PG and the bay area has been such a goldmine the last few decades most people in tech and VC driven by the rewards. Most people in American are somewhat more money driven than Europeans, but most are relatively content than the Bay Area population.
Consider who the author is: a wealthy investor for whom money is obviously very important.
> why is money such a big point in this article?
There’s no such thing as a reasonable quality of life on an average income anymore. People who don’t prioritize money will live like poor students for the rest of their lives renting with roommates. They will never have a family, healthcare, hobbies, or respect from their community.
Stop pretending that not prioritizing money is an option. It’s incredibly condescending. In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
Granted: If you live in America, depending on your situation, you may need wealth or a good job to have access to decent healthcare.
But, "They will never have a family... hobbies, or respect from their community." This is completely out of touch. Plenty of Americans in flyover country accomplish all of these on an average salary. Source: They're my neighbors.
I don’t want to lead with the mean retort that people who say they don’t care about money often don’t have any, so let me give you the kinder version - I think you come from a place of immense privilege. Either born in a first world country, or born to well off parents or in a rich society.
otoh, Where I come from , we have a proverb that’s hard to translate but describes our misery quite accurately - “we don’t even have enough water to wipe our anus after we poop”.
So that’s why I seek wealth. Not because I’m not content, or stressed out or whatever. Because the people I was born with, my cousins, brothers, relatives - they are still digging ditches. I am no smarter than them perhaps, but because I chose to pay a little extra attention at academics, atleast I have some money to buy some water so I can wash my butt after I poop.
Don’t hate on people who want money. The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
Because America has such a poor social safety net that it is very easy to go from well paid to homeless in just a few years.
Accordingly, everyone is fighting to make enough money to not get fucked over during each of our cyclical "economic recessions". During each recession more and more people permanently fall into poverty and everyone who is left fights even harder to not be a victim the next time the economy goes south.
Besides removing distractions, having more money raises the limits on what you can build before it needs to become self-sustaining. Retirement should be a consolation prize but not the entire goal.
In place of money, you can equally substitute status, prestige, or power.
When it comes to young people choosing careers in the US the money choice is more prominent.
honestly, I want to be rich. I do make a decent living, but not enough to quit my job. At this rate I'll have to work until I'm 50 or 60, which is same as everyone else, so cry me a river, but even so, it would be nice to dedicate more time to hobby which at this rate I can at most dedicate a weekend to, but in practice it's a bit less because I have to go out with the wife and I have visit my family, etc. Most weeks I have a full day at most to pursue anything.
From what i understand my life is very similar as yours. One out of 7 seems not too shabby though.
Maybe a cliché but... my advice would be to try to get most out of each simple experience. Today my spouse and kid went for a long walk together with me... while I could have been doing woodworking. I _tried_ to teach the kid the joy of walking without having too much on his mind. I also started conversations with strangers while waiting in the ice cream queue. There's always something to learn from that. I guess you by now understand my advocating for contentment.
this afternoon i couldn't have been doing woodworking because i don't have woodworking tools. that's not just because i can't afford them; my apartment is not really big enough for a woodworking shop, and i worry that the wiring might catch fire if i tried to plug in a high-powered saw. i'm having a hard time being content, despite going on a walk with my wife this morning and having lots of lovely conversations with strangers over the last three days, because the rent is due in two weeks and i'm nervous about whether i'll have enough. ever since i got covid for the third time in april, at which point i couldn't get paxlovid, i don't remember things like i used to. (i suspect that with enough money i could have gotten paxlovid.) also, my aunt is going to die soon, and i don't have the money to visit her before that
i really wish i'd spent more effort on making, and saving, money 20 years ago. i wouldn't want to spend my life on it, and no amount of money will keep me from dying, but right now i'm spending a lot of my life coping with the consequences of not having it
> you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them
A very succinct explanation of complex emotional challenge.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself.
What silly advice. I didn’t even know my “what to work on” existed until I was near the end of my junior year of college. XD
I took that phrase to mean "don't be blocked by any institution, person, or societal expectation to pursue what's interesting to you". Could be casual research, a cursory glance, or a deep internal investigation of yourself.
Which is always good to start as soon as you're aware of it. It's fine if you figure it out near the end of your junior year, your first job, or a midlife crisis. "Best time to start was yesterday, 2nd best is now" type of thing.
it’s dangerous to take advice from those with superlative ability if you are only slightly above average
often times it’s not for you
be honest of your place in this world
enjoy the luck you have it’s better than most
When friends say they are "going to start a business", I ask them "Why? Do you know why, do you know what your goal is?".
In most cases people can't really explain exactly why, and that's fine and normal. Only after years of being in business did certain things come clear to me. Are you there to make money, to follow your passion, to succeed with something, anything, to own your own time and life? The naive might say "all of the above", but they are not compatible.
You may find that you care more about owning your own time than working on stuff you are passionate about.
I've seen quite a few people start a business to work on something they are passionate about and then go out of business, when they COULD have stayed in business if they had been prepared to make money doing stuff they didn't love. What is more important in this case, being in business or doing stuff you love?
new twist on capitalist pitch: "There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them."
the older Paul gets, he sounds just like rest of his club mates!
I'm someone who is not rich but is interested in capital markets. My net worth is less than USD 100,000 and I spend hours each week downloading market data, looking for trade ideas, writing scripts, running statistical tests, implementing trading strategies, and analyzing the results.
I expect to be quite well off someday as a result of this hobby, but for now it's just an interest.
Better that way than usual startup bullshit about changing the world to a better place.
The mask is coming off
From an investors perspective looking at a group of people with randomly distributed interests, it seems like great advice to motivate each and every one of them to pursue their interest with all their energy and waste their lives on it. Some might get lucky and make the world a better place.
From the perspective of an individual who only gets assigned one or a few subjects to be interested in, not knowing whether these will bring fortune or not, not so useful advice. Chances are that you will fail, lose money and friends, and forget to spend time with your loved ones.
More self-serving feel-good from pg
The way to make billions, or even millions, is OWNERSHIP.
Own the profits or some of the profits of other people's hard work and creativity in some way, either directly or indirectly (eg property), or the promise of such profits (stocks), and trade that.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard or create, yourself. Just that hard work, creativity, etc, in and of itself, doesn't pay. It pays off when you work harder (or smarter, or just luckier) than other people, in order to win or create ownership, that other people will then contribute to. Just like pg did.
If you make studio pottery you likely own everything, and still dont make money.
Many FAANG employees are clearly in it for the money or status and have no real ownership. (Inb4 RSUs. They are treated as cash.)
The Marxist analysis makes most sense in the context it came from - the Industrial Revolution where most economic value was concentrated in expensive machinery.
Their comment said to own other people's profit. And that is true: the only way to get really rich is to own results of work of millions other people. Like Musk, Zuckerberg or Mohammed bin Salman.
And my comment argues why that’s not true:
- many people prioritizing money are workers
- many (most?) owners are not making money
So in the context of this essay “choosing ownership” is not the key career choice facing young people.
I gladens me to see that the sentiment here on HN is getting increasingly critical of PG and other VCs and Silicon Valley figures. Let's just hope that PG doesn't decide to pull the plug on HN some day.
Aren't we the court jesters who entertain them with our wit, or the court scientists who provide them with early insights into which technologies will be worth investing in?
Work is what you do to keep society and your place in it going.
Hence it's an intersection of what society needs and what you are capable of.
The issue with modern degenerate society is that nobody'll tell you what society needs - you're supposed to figure it out through gossip.
This is extremely stupid.
People who write articles attempting to solve collective problems at an individual level are blaming the victim and giving terrible advice without realizing it. So it goes.
Well the reason is that nobody knows what society needs… or stated differently, what ends up being useful is non-obvious. So you can’t plan it outside of some general parameters.
I didn't find any new terms here, but it was a great synthesis of a lot of his work. I also really enjoy the shorter length of the recent essays.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.loom.com/embed/9ac3f3b85fd...
> if you're young and good at technology...
> ... but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
It's sad to me that the wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism, that people like Graham full throatily endorse, creates this mentality.
"If you're young" is a euphemism for "if you are free from the necessities of responsibility, and so are able to forego the lack of consistent income (and if you're in the states, a lack of employer provided health care".
pg, encourage the companies you give money to pay an equal portion of profits to their employees, and maybe even the "olds" can be free do what they love; rather than the fear induced indentured servitude currently so predominant.
May even give us better products and solutions, or as you say, allow people to do actual "great work".
> wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism
I've been having this conversation over dinner with my wife for the last few years. What else is there? Here are the broadly categorized economic systems that I'm aware of (I sincerely request correction if I'm incomplete or mistaken):
- Subsistence (hunter/gatherer, limited farming... etc.)
- Despotism, feudalism, and other ruler-based economies that mix governance with economy by fiat
- Marxism (and it's entanglements into governance: socialism and communism)
- Capitalism, though it eventually captures governance as a failure mode
Of these systems, with the possible exception of subsistence, only capitalism really works. All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing. Even with a benevolent dictator for life, that life ends and the system degenerates at most in two generations of hereditary leadership.
How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)? How do you turn back the clock on regulatory capture, and monopolized consolidation where firms move to become parasitic instead of exchanging value?
Is there something else?
And no, Marxism and collectivism is not it. Drowning the individual is not it. Marxism hasn't lost its appeal precisely because it's one of the few models that addresses dramatic pay disparity. But it was created in Britain thinking about the factory workers of the time. We know now that it includes errors and misunderstandings of fundamental human behavior that make it turn into tyranny every time. We also know that it necessarily leads to central planning which is fragile and collapses. So that's not it.
If not Marxism, and not capitalism, then what?
In my opinion, a good first step is to stop looking at socialism and capitalism in absolute terms. I think its a mistake to idealistically cling to one archetype as the best of all possible archetypes. When you go the idealistic route, you are doomed to repeat the failings of the past.
I would argue that the most successful economies are blended economies that have achieved success by blending elements of both systems and perhaps other systems as well.
For example, the USA once had working conditions as described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle .” Those working conditions are no longer legal thanks to regulations. But regulations are an element of command-economy, not of free markets.
An example from the other side is the rise of China’s economy. I don’t believe China could have become “the world’s factory” without introducing elements of free market capitalism.
During the cold war, propaganda made socialism the bogeyman to the west, and capitalism the bogeyman to the east. I don’t think this fear is rational. To me they are just two economic archetypes of many. Each has its own merits and faults. The key is to apply them where they make sense.
To me the real enemies are: authoritarianism and corruption.
I see regulatory capture as a form of corruption. The regulators are corrupted by those who would like to externalize their costs onto society. How do we fight corruption? It’s a tough battle, but remember it has been done before. Tammany hall, etc.
It's far too late in the history of discourse to try and change this perception, but 'Marxism' is not really so much of a system in-of-itself more than it is a grouping of influential ideas that were propagated by Marx and disseminated throughout history. Marx at no point ever attempts to describe an ideal economic system - Communism as an idea is far more intagible to him, and many 'modern Marxists' have long since re-oriented their ideological critique away from 'the establishment of Communism' and towards 'survival under Capitalism' as modern society is inexorably more alien than Marx could have ever known.
> How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)?
Do you know about Sisyphus?
I just want capitalism where the capitalists pay the same tax rate as labor.
That sounds fairly awful. The top 1% of earners pay 45% of income tax (US figure). Why would you want laborers to pay so much more tax?
In what country is that?
Average tax rate paid by billionaires in the US is close to 8%
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2021/09/23/new-...
The US of course, I specifically said that.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
> The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.9 percent average rate, nearly eight times higher than the 3.3 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers
> The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.
The post I was replying to suggested that everyone pay the same tax rate. I'm opposed to this. Progressive taxes are more fair, due to the marginal value of money.
I clearly wrote tax rate, not total taxes.
And the top 1% gets a lot of wealth that isn't classified as income.
Capital gains tax is lower to offset the risk of taking a capital risk, which labor does not do in receiving a wage.
Much of “labor” participates in capital risk through retirement accounts and homes, blurring this 19th century distinction.
The “capitalists” are likely to sidestep taxation through politicians, lawyers and accountants (See the often quoted 1960s era “tax rate”) which is a phenomenon of power, that exists pre-capitalism.
I think your bulleted list is a bit wonky.
The one that jumps out at me is implying “socialism is a form of Marxism” when it’s the opposite that is true.
There are thriving socialist governments right now. What benefit does your argument get from ignoring those?
Why do you have “capitalism” and “despotism, feudalism, and other ruler based economies” separate? Are you unable to see the oligarchy of the US?
> Drowning the individual is not it.
Spreading ownership across those necessary for a thing to exist is drowning them? Or is it drowning the Csuites?
If your online bookstore turned imitation product megastore requires the people boxing the goods and driving the trucks then they should own a piece of what their work creates; that means ownership in the company and a share in the wealth it creates.
Is it because a CEO is golfing with war criminals that they deserve to capture the economic production from the labor of so many?
The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
> What else is there?
What indeed.
> The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
I agree here. Even during the feudal era, if you happened to be employed in the envoy of one of the world's richest trading fleets, you would be treated with far greater respect than an Amazon worker.
> All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing.
What you call a Marxist system is something that Marx said could only work in the most advanced country if it was ready for it, which in that time was Germany. He said such a system would not work elsewhere.
So what form of Marxism failed? Even Lenin, who many Marxists did not consider Marxist, was a Marxist enough to say that Russia would not establish communism. That the Russian self-described Marxists had the chance to take power in Russia and they took it. That Lenin wanted to take power in early 1917 came as a surprise to Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev etc., in fact Trotsky was not even with Lenin then. It surprised them because it was not a Marxist idea. Then Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, i.e. capitalism. Then he died.
Marx clearly spelled out what not to do, and some did what he said not to do, then people attribute the failures of those who did what Marx said not to do, to Marx.
This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.
There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.
No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.
Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.
Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.
There are far more than 17 capitalist countries which meet every criteria you've listed as an evil of Communism.
> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.
Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.