Its a fallacy to call it a fallacy though. Sure, many forms of wealth is not zero sum, but some are. For example political influence correlate with wealth and is basically zero-sum. So larger economic inequality concentrate power among fewer people. This is pretty significant whether you consider it a good or a bad thing.
The things though here is that comes rather neutral. Neither bad nor a good, but false or positive symptoms. That could a better starting point to take actions to strengthen the positive ones and get rid of false.
There's no doubt it's in our DNA. Forming groups with likeminded people is what kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And it's only been in the past ~150 years that we as a civilization have started to seriously care about the wellbeing of others unlike themselves. We've undoubtedly come a far way, but that's not to say we don't have much further to go. Fighting with our innate tribalistic tendencies is hard.
Interesting to see PG worrying about coronavirus. Otherwise somewhat of a bizarre series of interview questions, including asking him to opine on seemingly random quotes. Perhaps there is some non-obvious context.
"The exit “tax” seems the most alarming to me. Though it’s called a tax, it’s really just confiscation. And if you look at the other countries in history that have confiscated the property of people who tried to leave, it’s not company you’d want to be in"
- Denmark currently has what is in effect an exit tax on rich people. It's a complicated tax and changed all the time in order to dodge EU requirements on the freedom of movement between EU countries.
PG probably wouldn't want to be in Denmark since after all he exchanged chilly and grey England with warm and sunny California, but Denmark is hardly among the worst places in the world in which to live or do business.
It is called “fraflytteraktieavanceskat”. It is a capital gains tax for equities that can be paid at once as if you had sold the shares, or you can delay it by filling out a form every year to the Danish tax authorities after moving abroad.
Well capital gains tax is pretty much normal, it exists in most places.
As for exit tax in the U.S., i really wonder how one could enforce it. So if you left the country and have another passport (otherwise you couldn't drop U.S. citizenship), what can they possibly do to you? I don't think this absurd leftist idea even deserves much attention or comments, someone just said bs without thinking of it much.
You are required to enter the US on your US passport if you have one.
If you wanted to go back (say to the funeral of a friend, or something equally important) then they could detain you until you paid what they thought was due.
>Though it’s called a tax, it’s really just confiscation.
After all, they earned their money through hard work alone, with no help from the infrastructure, education system and social policies of the country. And now that they have an ungodly pile of it, they should be able to take it to whichever new country will require them to give back the least, and stop contributing to the country that made them rich.
If IRS can't say when you paid enough tax, who can then?
Shall we ask all politicians just in case they gain power and implement their own vision of taxation someday? Or is it safer to just give all earned money to the state just so we can sleep at night?
> And yes, they already paid tax on said money in the country they earned them.
I think the point that exit-tax proponents are attempting to make is that the current social understanding of wealth is that wealth-holders tend to show that they are capable of efficiently allocating resources, so they should be able to continue to do so while they're still in the country, thus we tax them lower than we would if we could more efficiently use those resources. So think of it like a partial taxation or a conditional subsidy alongside a future promise of additional, likely greater, taxation from their future business dealings, job creations, &c.
Since they're leaving, the country is losing out any investment it assumed at an earlier date when deciding to tax less, so the country would effectively just be reclaiming a conditional subsidy.
Funny enough, people leaving a country do not necessarily want to cut out all investments in said country. Just reside (and pay income taxes) elsewhere. Original country could still reap benefits of the existing investments there.
This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world: it prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in the first place.
> Funny enough, people leaving a country do not necessarily want to cut out all investments in said country. Just reside (and pay income taxes) elsewhere.
> This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world: it prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in the first place.
You have to define the "good" in "good business people". If you are a global scale entrepreneur planning to start a business and looking for country with an educated workforce that has good infrastructure but you need to be able to take your gathered wealth when the business is mature (read you have an obscene amount of wealth) in order to find cheaper less educated workforce to keep up operations in order to generate more wealth for yourself. Then you are a "good" businessman only in the sense that you are good at maximizing your own pile of gold. Morally you are bankrupt. So what does a "punitive" country loose by not letting you reap the benefits of a "high taxes system" for your own personal gains?
"punitively taxed" is your words not mine. And yes a employee who reap benefits from taxes but acts in a way to evade taxes is acting in a morally bad way. However, an employee has very limited ways of evading taxes and pressuring countries to change their taxation system to fit his/her idea of what is "good" whereas people at the top of the pyramid are very "good" at doing this.
They may have paid a smaller total amount of tax on the presumption that the money would be used in the country to stimulate economic activity. If the money leaves then that presumption is gone and there is a shortfall.
Every tax dodger, every tax evader claims they have paid tax. Every single one. Is that what this is?
I don't pay income tax with my offshore family trust structure but it's legal and I pay sales tax when I spend - those are the only facts that matter the rest is unseemly.
My company doesn't pay tax but it's legal and I pay my employees and /they/ pay income tax - those are the only facts that matter and the rest is just snark.
Leave it out. Leave it right out. All the way out. Then and only then can it be discussed what constitutes good tax policy and what is trying to be achieved with that policy.
Billionaires whining about paying a legal tax that once paid leaves them with more money than they can possibly spend in their lifetimes and those of their children makes me want to spit on my hands, hoist the black flag and begin... - and /I/ tend toward libertarian.
I didn't think of that. So if it's so difficult to prove and we'll all be paying the tax anyway, then logically we should all practice tax evasion, right?!
Tax dodging is entirely legal. Eg spend on business consumable this year as a tax expense to lower taxable income and avoid some tax this year. Tax evasion is the same sort of thing, but not legal which is why I mentioned both. Which are legal and which are not is entirely unclear, the wealthy and large co.s employ lawyers and accountants to run cases tying up the legal system at vast expense when caught. Sometimes they're not guilty (at least of the charges brought) too. If you bring a lawyer they'll bring 50. Then hire yours. You've seen this, it's uncontraversial that it happens and it's entirely legal. Moral? Desirable? That's up to you.
It's difficult to fight tax evasion but rather important unless you want to give up on a system of taxation altogether, which has issues.
When you look at an entity with a large income and very little tax paid you know it's one or both of tax evasion and tax avoidance. Apple. Evasion or avoidance? Which is a fancy way of asking "Is what they're doing actually legal? I can't do that, why can they?" Trump doesn't pay tax because he inherited a billion dollars and thinks he's smart. I know a lot of people who really are /very/ smart, who didn't inherit a billion dollars who pay their tax. They can't decide not to like Trump did.
Rule of law. Equality before the law. Sure. Precisely. So what should the law be? What should the tax system be designed to achieve? What are the consequences of each particular trade-off you consider? Is there some new and better way worth considering or is it just hype to disaster?
And now we're at the starting point of a sensible discussion about tax policy.
Sure. You can only do that once, though. Others have tried that throughout history, with the same previsible result: see Venezuela and other socialist "utopias".
Staying in a place because you'd be punished if you try to leave is the very definition of a prison.
> And why is "the country" in scare quotes.
Because it's not a "country" asking for this. It's politicians. Who make these kind of proposals for their own, selfish goals. Lately populists have managed to gain more and more support pretending what they propose is for the good of "the country" but in the end it's them who profit the most.
> Because it's not a "country" asking for this. It's politicians.
Politicians are, more or less, democratically elected in the US. A country is just a huge net of social relations, and those social relations express power in electing a representative. A country isn't going to express any preference because it's collectively imagined, and the closest we're currently capable of expressing the preferences of those who are apart of this imagination is through democracy. These politicians don't just pop out of thin air.
"Legally" is a vague term. What's legal today can become illegal tomorrow and vice versa. What is legal depends entirely on who gets to define and enforce the meaning of the term.
That enforcement can happen in two ways. Either because individuals acknowledge that the state holds a monopoly on violence in return for lawful order through a social contract, or individuals get effectively subjected to violence coming from a stronger individual or group of individuals.
> And yes, they already paid tax on said money in the country they earned them.
You're appealing to a principle of fairness. However, such principle only applies if those who get to define the rules are willing to accept and enforce that principle. Either because there's a large social consensus, or because enlightened despots are in power.
A universal principle of fairness does not exist.
Society at large isn't rational. It's a collective that spawns irrational, often conflicting views and beliefs. And the net result is, in the best of worlds, an uneasy compromise. If the large majority of a community feels that an exit tax is a fair principle, then that's something you will have to accept unless you find a way to convince people of the opposite view.
"Legal" is not a vague term. What is legal at the time the money was made is pretty clearly established (in the court of law, if necessary).
> That enforcement can happen in two ways.
The enforcement, under the Rule of Law, happens in only one way: through the state. If you don't believe in the Rule of Law, then all this discussion is pointless.
> You're appealing to a principle of fairness.
No, I am appealing to the principle of The Contract. Going back and changing the terms of a contract is illegal. Under the rule of law, of course.
So... Do you feel that the establishment of the Roman Empire was "illegal" as it imposed taxes and Roman rule on previously independent territories? As far as the Romans were concerned, their actions were entirely lawful.
Or how about the American Revolution which was literally a conflict about taxes? As far as the British Crown was concerned, sending an expeditionary force was all about enforcing the rule of law among rebellious subjects. And if the British had won, we would now consider a short-lived Congress just a bunch of irresponsible rebels.
How about the Civil War? Slave owners have balked for a long time over Abolition violating their rights; yet, today nobody in their right mind would consider slavery as something that should to be legalized once again.
What's "legal" or "illegal" has little to do with "The Contract" and everything with who gets to define the rules.
At what point does this logic stop? I see it all the time to justify taxes, but I'm sorry I think there is an upper bound of justifiable tax and a 40% exit tax certainly seems egregious.
> After all, they earned their money through hard work alone, with no help from the infrastructure, education system and social policies of the country.
> Soon I’m going to have to say enough is enough, and push the coronavirus into a corner of my mind so I can have room to think about other things again.
I'm in the same boat. I'm not particularly worried about the coronavirus, but I spent too many hours discussing and looking for information.
I think the point here is as soon as any “guru” is brought out of his / her superior and acknowledged niche expertise, the universal, human frailty prevails and coronavirus is the plague of today. Keep well, folks (and every man for himself).
Quite a diverse range of topics for pg from politics to epidemiology. Interesting to see that juxtaposition between his ultra-capitalist viewpoints with his isolationist stance on coronavirus. The latter comes across to me as a little out of touch with both the disease and his risk factors compared to the general population. To me the wealthy retired have a responsibility to be educated yet critical on current events such as coronavirus.
To some extent, the pie fallacy exists. But if your major
life work is Viaweb (which was really worthless and sold
during the bubble to Yahoo contacts), perhaps you should
not talk about pies.
There are a huge number of Open Source contributors here
who have produced way more wealth than Graham.
The pivotal work (with rtm and trevorj!) was Viaweb. Without that he would not have been able to start YC.
Also I presume he had substantial help in starting YC.
Many successful people like Bechtolsheim and Khosla go into the VC business. Still these two would probably list Sun as their major work.
The OSS contributor comment still applies: In the technology business one would need to go into the league of companies like Intel to even start comparing the wealth generated by companies vs. the wealth generated by OSS.
I mean, he had to learn to read too. If not for that, he'd never have founded viaweb!
True, but not very interesting.
I happen to think both were fairly innovative. Both viaweb and YC were at the forefront of a newish idea that seems pretty obvious in retrospect: Server based applications, and startup incubators. Both existed before to some extent, but pg recognized their value pretty quickly, and did them both well enough to make an impact. (I'd learn toward more credit incubators and less for server-based apps, but whatever.)
I think you are rewriting history. Viaweb was selling shovels (enable small businesses to generate websites) Ycombinator is selling shovels (enable people to launch startups, initially for an outrageously low investment).
Selling shovels was one of the fundamental concepts during the first bubble, nothing new.
Webshops were nothing new either.
His innovation was turning startups into movement, largely using this website and blog about it so tirelessly (always using the term "startup") that he is credited with the concept.
YC (and other VC) doesn’t seem like selling shovels to me.
If you’re selling shovels, you can succeed without any of your customers ever finding gold again. You happily sell shovels even if you knew the customers could never find gold.
When you’re buying percentages of multiple companies, you need somebody to succeed for you to succeed.
Viaweb was founded in 1995 and sold in 1998. It WAS part of the first bubble. And no, people were not routinely writing web server based "applications" in 1995. They were, at best, making some early websites. Also nobody was thinking of pages as screens in an app powered by server based software. OpenMarket, I suppose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Market
Paul is seen as God here and that's overreacting, but his major life work is the company on who's website you're on. He has mentored a lot of startups. https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/
“Mentoring” is a code word for “not working very hard.”
I don’t have any particular admiration for someone so wealthy that “mentoring” is in their job description.
Arguably the tech industry is (or was up until recently) so disruptive that any idiot with money could invest in it and come out ahead (the SoftBank strategy).
I agree that this article is a fluff piece but, unless you worked with him at YC or seen how he worked there, the idea that he wasn’t doing a lot to make YC successful is wrong. It’s not an exaggeration to say that PG’s work and insights changed venture funding and startups significantly. For better or worse!
Generally agree that a lot of tech luminaries are overrated and often not qualified to speak on topics out of their field though.
I guess my argument is that you could replace him with any number of the numerous reasonably above average performers at your company and the results would be the same.
The difference is that none of your coworkers got to sell a company to Yahoo! at an inflated dot com era price to fund a venture capital firm.
Sure, YC is a famous seed accelerator, but it’s also not unlike a number of other early stage investment firms that also provide mentoring and guidance to early stage founders. The success of these venture firms boils down to a math equation and a selection process, not any sort of unique secret sauce.
It is a venture of owning capital and growing it, not of any sort of unique skill set.
Whilst it is now true that the YC model is now widespread, YC were the first.
They invented this model!
They were the first to realise that web-based startups didn't need a whole lot of capital and that the mentoring and guidance part was where the USP was for the investor in this sector.
This is a pretty unfair assessment. He didn't have to use his acquisition money to start YC or create the community site you are using right now.
You are also completely dismissing that Y Combinator grew from nothing into the top seed stage firm in the world. Look up typical returns on accelerators and incubators. Look up the number of unicorn companies that have come from Y Combinator as well.
I agree that the vast majority of VC is just a shitty index fund and crapshoot.
I do think that YC, from a Performance perspective is light years ahead of all the others that launched just after it did.
For me, the skill of PG was being relentlessly focused on the core of what made startups in that era super leveraged. That insight is obvious now but it wasn’t at the time. The essays did synthesize explicitly how and why startups work. No one else was taking such an extreme position: that you just needed to make
Stuff people wanted and the rest would be viable.
Lots of VCs to this day still think there’s all this other shit you need. And if I’m being honest, some YC leaders have bought into that too.
I agree, like all white male founders and rich before and after PG, that 90% of it is extreme privilege and chance but that’s literally all of tech Wealth at the moment
It's not really that he just sold a web app and then put the money in an accelerator. They wrote pretty much the first web app and then founded pretty much the first seed accelerator which is still several times their competitors size in terms of startup valuations. Average performers tend not to do that kind of stuff.
Oh, capitalism turned to authoritarianism often enough. And confiscates enougj as well, e.g. land for air raft production of coal mining in Germany. Not sure why the US is so scared about social agendas.
It seems like Paul Graham is being asked a bunch of questions not at all related to his field of expertise.
I point out once again that the only reason he’s on the front page here is his association with YC. He often has nothing revelatory to say and yet he’s on here due to the cult of personality.
Every time I mention this it stirs up controversy which in itself kind of proves my point. People want to hear what this dude says because they fantasize about the pure-luck impossibility selling a company to Yahoo! years ago and getting to spend the rest of your life as a semi-retired wealthy man with ample time to write essays.
Except tech folks are supposed to be more evidence-driven, and not prone to praising pointless fluff as wisdom. Worth mentioning at least, to warn the careless to not get sucked in?
The fact that PG was a founder, then went on to build a company/investment vehicle that is relevant to founders is "evidence" of relevant celebrity in this space.
Do you think this is the sort of forum that should turn to posting celebrity biopics?
If you like, I could post some stories about the kind of clothes Mark Zuckerberg is wearing today.
Personally, I’d prefer to see interesting technical or related content and I’m disappointed that other people interested in technology upvoted an article about what a wealthy person thinks of Elizabeth Warren.
Harsh words, but there is truth ingrained in them. I appreciate your willingness to address what otherwise might be seen as too abrasive or thorny to approach normally.
Eric Weinstein calls this phenomenon "earns as an X, spends as a Y". Someone earns credibility in one domain and is suddenly qualified to spend it in any other domain.
There are many rich people in the world and I don't read their essays or blog posts or whatever. I came to know PG from his essays and think they're pretty interesting.
I also like the fantasy of selling a company and retiring early to write essays and work on my software projects.
Why do you focus about who is interviewed rather than what the questions and the answers are? If the answers are still interesting, it doesn't matter what the person has done before or is doing now.
Instead of bragging about the person who is interviewed, point out answers you don't like or agree with and post your point of view.
Repost the exact same interview, but substitute your name and experience for his. Give the same opinions and life advice.
If it makes it to the front page of HN, then we have some evidence that this community cares more about what is said than with who says it.
On the other hand, if this community ignores it, than we have some evidence that this community values who gives the advice as much as the advice itself.
Now, if the latter is the case, if ”who gives the advice” matters for some reason, then it seems relevant to discuss who gives the advice, and whether their life experience lends weight to their advice.
Oddly enough this is part of what made 4chan enticing in the earlier years I went on it. Everyone is forced into anonymity to strip them of this sort of bias. Since nobody knows anybody's identity for certain, whatever you post must speak for itself to hold any merit.
Also, 4chan is more than just their 'random' board.
The next question is, how did pg become pg? His essays are how I learned of both HN and YC and from founders I've spoken with the very same essays played a critical role in getting YC off the ground in the early days.
Of course he was already a (relatively minor) entrepreneurial success through Viaweb, which gave the essays a boost. But when starting Viaweb, he was just a smart 30-ish guy who had published a couple of books on a niche programming language.
It's easy to see how this would feel like a lucky chain of events and that a random person could have jumped in at any given point and done as well, but I'm very skeptical of that hypothesis.
I’m not saying that he got lucky, or that he is one of those rare polymaths who has tremendous insights into nearly everything.
I was just trying to suggest that it's quite clear that HN takes his identity and experience into account when choosing to upvote his work, and therefore it seems reasonable to discuss his identity and experience when evaluating his work.
Without taking a side, when we admire someone and give their words extra credence, it seems very reasonable to be on our guard against “false positives,” situations where someone we otherwise admire releases a clunker.
I find Paul Graham to stand out even among the smartest people whose work I follow. He's prone to regular and incredible insights. Like a great stand up comedian, he frequently notices things most of us manage to miss. He has his blind spots and faults, of course, like every human ever.
And there is truth to the charge that his current popularity is inflated due to him being an investor. Many investors receive an undeserved amount of attention and adulation. After all, their entire job is to hand out millions of dollars. That tends to incline people towards paying attention.
But I, along with many thousands of others, have been reading Paul Graham's essays since long before YC. That's how he launched YC (and Reddit, and Hacker News). This is proof that he was genuinely compelling long before he was an investor.
His Lisp books were also great. So he was a successful book author, successful founder, successful essayist, then a successful investor. Not an example of someone failing upwards, as is disappointingly-common in The Valley.
I’ve read most of his stuff and find him to be no more compelling than just about anyone. He just packages it all up and puts it out there. But his foot-in-mouth ratio is also really high and he often tweets or writes about the most banal things as though he were discovering new physics.
I actually don't fault him (despite my other comments) for writing about 'the most banal things' I put that on the person who is reading that thinks it's more than it is. And seem to celebrate it.
Likewise I remember when someone wrote (don't remember who) how they thought it was great that the janitor put a supply of plastic trash can liners at the bottom of the trash can so they'd be there in supply when needed (and when the trash was emptied by taking the existing filled bag). This is something I had done myself forever. Just seemed obvious. So it's more "what's the big deal why are you making like the janitor has figured out some really ingenious trick'"?
Also the other thing that I would guess bothers people is when they say the same things it would get no notice at all (from friends or in an online comment). So it's more like 'why is this guy getting attention and I am not for these simple thoughts'? (This might have been parodied on SNL as 'deep thoughts by Jack Handy' iirc.
Just to briefly note, the trashcan liner storage thing is actually a bad idea if done like that. The reason why? Sometimes because of defects or rips caused by sharper pieces of trash, followed by kitchen/bathroom liquids accumulating in the same bag as its used, said bag leaks. Having stored the reserve bags inside the same can beneath it, you're now left with a leaky, full garbage bag that soaked not only the easy to clean can but also all the other folded bags, which is a more tedious sort of mess. Better to keep them nearby in a guaranteed dry place.
To me his essays are far more important than his role in YC. When I meet a new startup, get talking to the founder and find out he's never heard of PG the first thing I do is send them a link to his essays. I've made life long friends that way, most people are effusive in their praise.
Having started several companies I can truthfully say PG has figured out a lot of stuff every founder faces and it's removes a layer of complexity for everyone.
Can you think of a startup thought leader that is more important? To me it's a very short list. In addition to PG mine would include Mark Andreesen, Steve Blank, Brad Feld and Naval Ravikant.
> Like a great stand up comedian, he frequently notices things most of us manage to miss.
How in the world can you make that kind of statement? 'Most of us???'. You say that as if it's an easter egg hunt with 100 participants and PG came up with the most eggs that 'the others clearly could not find'.
I guess 'most of us' is a bit vague as to which particular subset of the human population you are referring to but he's more perceptive than most of the stuff I see online.
If as you say 'he has often nothing to say ...' etc., why would you bother to read the interview. It's not obligatory nor to keep mentioning your view.
The luck part is the timing. As a product there’s nothing about Viaweb that was particularly exotic even for the time.
For comparison, Amazon was founded the year before. eBay was also founded in 1995.
Enabling businesses to sell stuff online as an alternative to phone or fax orders was probably the most obvious commercial application of the World Wide Web.
AFAIK it was the first web application, which by definition makes it unique (since there can only be one "first"). The innovation was that they were selling a store-builder that didn't require the business to have their own servers, not ecommerce.
Not quite pure luck he was in the right place at the right time with the right skills. I would say this is nearly impossible to reproduce today compared to the 90s its not exactly a wide open field, niches are filled rapidly and there is arguably a massive glut of smart people trying to escape desperate poverty. This is why I see Bernie signs on every corner.
The point is fair, except that PG is not your average dummy. Revelation is usually (tbh) in hindsight anyway, and PG has seen a lot.
That said, I don't enjoy his essays one bit. They are not thought provoking, they don't offer any real lessons, they are his thought of the moment. Like how he had kids now he likes to talk about having kids. We don't need more blogging (esp. not in tech blog) about the things you can only know if you actually have kids anyway. Reading it is a waste of time. Writing about it is actually fantastic for the author, so I don't fault him. Writing is great. But the cult of personality that actually draws readers rubs me the wrong way. His are poor writings, for audiences I mean.
I think growing up 'back in the day' some of us may have known people that we viewed as smart and having just good answers about things in general (if not a topic they had specific expertise in). Someone in the neighborhood older or a friend.
But the thing is that was more or less earned. They'd say something and then over time you'd find they were right or not and so you tended to listen to what they said more and consider them 'smart'.
Sometimes you'd consider them smart just because they had answers to things that you didn't [1] and often even because you didn't (pre-internet) have a way to see if they were even right at all. So it was easier for sure to run circles around people when knowledge wasn't so accessible.
But very generally wasn't something (that I recall from my experience) bestowed on people based on things that vaulted them to prominence which could be attributed to luck.
[1] A good example of this on HN for me is tptacek who amazes me with his writing and what he knows (that I don't) but honestly I don't know enough to know how correct he is and I suspect others may not as well. Noting that on a topic (that I will not mention) that I am an expert on a HN discussion is typically totally wrong many times.
There's a difference between a 'cult of personality' which dictionary.com has as "promoting adulation of a living national leader or public figure, as one encouraged by Stalin" and following someone because you find them interesting.
Since I follow paulg on twitter I don't have to read the article to know where this is going. On twitter paulg is a "capitalist idealogue" (a term someone else used to describe him which I thought fit very well). and that comes with all sorts of controversial points of view.
The most entertaining/snarky way I can describe it is he is a try hard auditioning for the role of Peter Thiel's best friend.
It's a little disappointing considering the regard I held for him for so long. I try to separate the essays from the twitter account.
Does PG earnestly believe that the critique of income inequality and capitalistic exploitation in general is really "everyone should get a fair piece of pie!"?
I have a hard time believing a Harvard PhD and rapid support of capitalism has never encountered a critique of the topic outside of a third grader's worldview.
The one poit I dont quite get is the connection between economic inequality and "noone should support founders". The one has nothing to do with the other, you can support founders and support initiatives to decrease economic inequality at the same time.
Generally, i don't like the view that there is nothing between radical capitalism on the one side and stalinist communism on the other. And that everything that is not 100% "true capitalism" is automatically socialism hich is, by the above logic, stalinism style communism. Every European country prooves otherwise.
The article draws heavily from his essays and both the questions and answers assume a good familiarity with them.
In at least one of his essays he argues that founding a company creates wealth and wealth creation does two things.
1) Makes society as a whole better off. i.e. "A rising tide lifts all boats", so the poorest in society benefit as well as the richest. The mean value of all individual's wealth increases.
2) Increases inequality because the distance between richest and poorest increases. The variance in individual's wealth across the population increases.
Of course, these are just arguments he puts forth. Others may disagree with them. ...but I think it's worth trying to understand the distinction he makes between "inequality", "wealth creation" and "improving society as a whole".
Actually I came accross PG's essays before I discovered YC. Historically I think he's right. Even the poorest ones in today's western world are still better of in most aspects than most of the richest ones back in, say, the 16th and 17th and even 18th century. Easily.
He even once wrote, no idea in which essays, that he would prefer to be poor in an advanced society to be rich in an non-advanced one (something along these lines). Now, as we know that automation and software are enabling companies, and their investors / founders (with VCs investors more than founders IMHO), to create a lot of whealth that is not very well distributed across society. Which we see every day. So, working from his earlier statement on which society he would rather life in had he the choice, I assume PG has some level of understanding about the social realities. He is now also in a position to actually do something about it, him being arguably very rich and influential in his own way.
And what is he doing? Arguing against taxes for the rich to make life easier for the poor, against reducing the economic and social distribution and faisness in society. Because, according to him as far as I understood his later essays, as long as everybody can be enabled to found a company that problem will go away. Which it will not, not everyone can start one, regardless of access to capital. And even then most of the return will end up in the hands of the rich investor class with founders being more often than not cogs in the system.
Call the opposite approch socialism if you want, but if we as a socuiety don't think about these issues, hard, we will end up in deep trouble. Not just in the US where these problems are way more extreme than in Europe. I'm just way beyond believing that rich people will voluntarily do something about the poor if it would cost them a single dime.
> But on the other hand, I’m one of the few people who can say heterodox things without worrying about getting fired. So if I don’t say these things, who will?
He has been talking bs for more than a decade, but I don't know if that's just him being in his bubble taking himself too seriously or saying heterodox things because it's all relative.
I haven't read every essay he's written, but to me it seems like his "heterodoxy" is relatively weak. He won't be fired for his opinions but he's not going to risk his reputation by doing something actually controversial, like denouncing capitalism or calling out the racism and misogyny in his own industry.
This is was my impression as well, hence asking. I dimly recall him getting zinged by some fringe enforcer group once or twice, but not because what he was saying was genuinely heterodox, simply to tighten the overtone window a bit on that side.
I agree with him that financial independence and a bully pulpit give one freedom and, as a public spirited person at least, responsibility to make use of that freedom to voice otherwise supressed opinions that merit some airing (whether correct or not). If he's actually doing it, it would certainly enhance my opinion of him.
He wrote an implementation too, but he hasn't released it yet because he says it's too alpha for now.
BTW, I'm like the world's biggest fan of PG's Lisp work, but given that the bel spec doesn't have an efficient association data type in 2020, I find it completely impossible to take it seriously. (This is speaking as someone who wrote a production app in arc that is still in use)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.bmaho.com/articles/post-yc-depression
- Denmark currently has what is in effect an exit tax on rich people. It's a complicated tax and changed all the time in order to dodge EU requirements on the freedom of movement between EU countries.
PG probably wouldn't want to be in Denmark since after all he exchanged chilly and grey England with warm and sunny California, but Denmark is hardly among the worst places in the world in which to live or do business.
As for exit tax in the U.S., i really wonder how one could enforce it. So if you left the country and have another passport (otherwise you couldn't drop U.S. citizenship), what can they possibly do to you? I don't think this absurd leftist idea even deserves much attention or comments, someone just said bs without thinking of it much.
You are required to enter the US on your US passport if you have one.
If you wanted to go back (say to the funeral of a friend, or something equally important) then they could detain you until you paid what they thought was due.
https://skat.dk/skat.aspx?oid=2176214
After all, they earned their money through hard work alone, with no help from the infrastructure, education system and social policies of the country. And now that they have an ungodly pile of it, they should be able to take it to whichever new country will require them to give back the least, and stop contributing to the country that made them rich.
Those are the only two facts that should matter. The rest is just snark.
When do you consider someone paid enough tax?
Shall we ask all politicians just in case they gain power and implement their own vision of taxation someday? Or is it safer to just give all earned money to the state just so we can sleep at night?
I think the point that exit-tax proponents are attempting to make is that the current social understanding of wealth is that wealth-holders tend to show that they are capable of efficiently allocating resources, so they should be able to continue to do so while they're still in the country, thus we tax them lower than we would if we could more efficiently use those resources. So think of it like a partial taxation or a conditional subsidy alongside a future promise of additional, likely greater, taxation from their future business dealings, job creations, &c.
Since they're leaving, the country is losing out any investment it assumed at an earlier date when deciding to tax less, so the country would effectively just be reclaiming a conditional subsidy.
This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world: it prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in the first place.
That's not what the article is talking about.
You have to define the "good" in "good business people". If you are a global scale entrepreneur planning to start a business and looking for country with an educated workforce that has good infrastructure but you need to be able to take your gathered wealth when the business is mature (read you have an obscene amount of wealth) in order to find cheaper less educated workforce to keep up operations in order to generate more wealth for yourself. Then you are a "good" businessman only in the sense that you are good at maximizing your own pile of gold. Morally you are bankrupt. So what does a "punitive" country loose by not letting you reap the benefits of a "high taxes system" for your own personal gains?
What should he do, not sleep at night thinking about "the good of the company" to be a "good employee"?!
The truth here is that none of us are tax specialists in high government, we're all just speculating from a place of ignorance.
I don't pay income tax with my offshore family trust structure but it's legal and I pay sales tax when I spend - those are the only facts that matter the rest is unseemly.
My company doesn't pay tax but it's legal and I pay my employees and /they/ pay income tax - those are the only facts that matter and the rest is just snark.
Leave it out. Leave it right out. All the way out. Then and only then can it be discussed what constitutes good tax policy and what is trying to be achieved with that policy.
Billionaires whining about paying a legal tax that once paid leaves them with more money than they can possibly spend in their lifetimes and those of their children makes me want to spit on my hands, hoist the black flag and begin... - and /I/ tend toward libertarian.
It's difficult to fight tax evasion but rather important unless you want to give up on a system of taxation altogether, which has issues.
When you look at an entity with a large income and very little tax paid you know it's one or both of tax evasion and tax avoidance. Apple. Evasion or avoidance? Which is a fancy way of asking "Is what they're doing actually legal? I can't do that, why can they?" Trump doesn't pay tax because he inherited a billion dollars and thinks he's smart. I know a lot of people who really are /very/ smart, who didn't inherit a billion dollars who pay their tax. They can't decide not to like Trump did.
Rule of law. Equality before the law. Sure. Precisely. So what should the law be? What should the tax system be designed to achieve? What are the consequences of each particular trade-off you consider? Is there some new and better way worth considering or is it just hype to disaster?
And now we're at the starting point of a sensible discussion about tax policy.
And if Warren or Sanders are elected, they are going to take some of that money...legally.
>they already paid tax on said money in the country they earned them.
From what I gather, "the country" doesn't believe it's enough.
And why is "the country" in scare quotes.
> And why is "the country" in scare quotes.
Because it's not a "country" asking for this. It's politicians. Who make these kind of proposals for their own, selfish goals. Lately populists have managed to gain more and more support pretending what they propose is for the good of "the country" but in the end it's them who profit the most.
Politicians are, more or less, democratically elected in the US. A country is just a huge net of social relations, and those social relations express power in electing a representative. A country isn't going to express any preference because it's collectively imagined, and the closest we're currently capable of expressing the preferences of those who are apart of this imagination is through democracy. These politicians don't just pop out of thin air.
You also didn't address my point about the missing tax revenue on use of capital.
"Legally" is a vague term. What's legal today can become illegal tomorrow and vice versa. What is legal depends entirely on who gets to define and enforce the meaning of the term.
That enforcement can happen in two ways. Either because individuals acknowledge that the state holds a monopoly on violence in return for lawful order through a social contract, or individuals get effectively subjected to violence coming from a stronger individual or group of individuals.
> And yes, they already paid tax on said money in the country they earned them.
You're appealing to a principle of fairness. However, such principle only applies if those who get to define the rules are willing to accept and enforce that principle. Either because there's a large social consensus, or because enlightened despots are in power.
A universal principle of fairness does not exist.
Society at large isn't rational. It's a collective that spawns irrational, often conflicting views and beliefs. And the net result is, in the best of worlds, an uneasy compromise. If the large majority of a community feels that an exit tax is a fair principle, then that's something you will have to accept unless you find a way to convince people of the opposite view.
"Legal" is not a vague term. What is legal at the time the money was made is pretty clearly established (in the court of law, if necessary).
> That enforcement can happen in two ways.
The enforcement, under the Rule of Law, happens in only one way: through the state. If you don't believe in the Rule of Law, then all this discussion is pointless.
> You're appealing to a principle of fairness.
No, I am appealing to the principle of The Contract. Going back and changing the terms of a contract is illegal. Under the rule of law, of course.
Or how about the American Revolution which was literally a conflict about taxes? As far as the British Crown was concerned, sending an expeditionary force was all about enforcing the rule of law among rebellious subjects. And if the British had won, we would now consider a short-lived Congress just a bunch of irresponsible rebels.
How about the Civil War? Slave owners have balked for a long time over Abolition violating their rights; yet, today nobody in their right mind would consider slavery as something that should to be legalized once again.
What's "legal" or "illegal" has little to do with "The Contract" and everything with who gets to define the rules.
I'm sorry, but I think there's an upper bound on necessary accumulated wealth.
This may also be the reason why the number of billionaires per country correlates so strongly with the population numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...
I'm in the same boat. I'm not particularly worried about the coronavirus, but I spent too many hours discussing and looking for information.
“I’m smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.”
There are a huge number of Open Source contributors here who have produced way more wealth than Graham.
Also I presume he had substantial help in starting YC.
Many successful people like Bechtolsheim and Khosla go into the VC business. Still these two would probably list Sun as their major work.
The OSS contributor comment still applies: In the technology business one would need to go into the league of companies like Intel to even start comparing the wealth generated by companies vs. the wealth generated by OSS.
True, but not very interesting.
I happen to think both were fairly innovative. Both viaweb and YC were at the forefront of a newish idea that seems pretty obvious in retrospect: Server based applications, and startup incubators. Both existed before to some extent, but pg recognized their value pretty quickly, and did them both well enough to make an impact. (I'd learn toward more credit incubators and less for server-based apps, but whatever.)
Selling shovels was one of the fundamental concepts during the first bubble, nothing new.
Webshops were nothing new either.
His innovation was turning startups into movement, largely using this website and blog about it so tirelessly (always using the term "startup") that he is credited with the concept.
If you’re selling shovels, you can succeed without any of your customers ever finding gold again. You happily sell shovels even if you knew the customers could never find gold.
When you’re buying percentages of multiple companies, you need somebody to succeed for you to succeed.
But they were only founded in 1994.
I don’t have any particular admiration for someone so wealthy that “mentoring” is in their job description.
Arguably the tech industry is (or was up until recently) so disruptive that any idiot with money could invest in it and come out ahead (the SoftBank strategy).
Generally agree that a lot of tech luminaries are overrated and often not qualified to speak on topics out of their field though.
The difference is that none of your coworkers got to sell a company to Yahoo! at an inflated dot com era price to fund a venture capital firm.
Sure, YC is a famous seed accelerator, but it’s also not unlike a number of other early stage investment firms that also provide mentoring and guidance to early stage founders. The success of these venture firms boils down to a math equation and a selection process, not any sort of unique secret sauce.
It is a venture of owning capital and growing it, not of any sort of unique skill set.
They invented this model!
They were the first to realise that web-based startups didn't need a whole lot of capital and that the mentoring and guidance part was where the USP was for the investor in this sector.
You are also completely dismissing that Y Combinator grew from nothing into the top seed stage firm in the world. Look up typical returns on accelerators and incubators. Look up the number of unicorn companies that have come from Y Combinator as well.
I do think that YC, from a Performance perspective is light years ahead of all the others that launched just after it did.
For me, the skill of PG was being relentlessly focused on the core of what made startups in that era super leveraged. That insight is obvious now but it wasn’t at the time. The essays did synthesize explicitly how and why startups work. No one else was taking such an extreme position: that you just needed to make Stuff people wanted and the rest would be viable.
Lots of VCs to this day still think there’s all this other shit you need. And if I’m being honest, some YC leaders have bought into that too.
I agree, like all white male founders and rich before and after PG, that 90% of it is extreme privilege and chance but that’s literally all of tech Wealth at the moment
Do you perhaps mean the acquisition wasn't helpful to Yahoo?
I point out once again that the only reason he’s on the front page here is his association with YC. He often has nothing revelatory to say and yet he’s on here due to the cult of personality.
Every time I mention this it stirs up controversy which in itself kind of proves my point. People want to hear what this dude says because they fantasize about the pure-luck impossibility selling a company to Yahoo! years ago and getting to spend the rest of your life as a semi-retired wealthy man with ample time to write essays.
I.e. it's like complaining about every celebrity biopic ever. Your point is valid, just like my argument that the sky is blue.
If you like, I could post some stories about the kind of clothes Mark Zuckerberg is wearing today.
Personally, I’d prefer to see interesting technical or related content and I’m disappointed that other people interested in technology upvoted an article about what a wealthy person thinks of Elizabeth Warren.
I also like the fantasy of selling a company and retiring early to write essays and work on my software projects.
Instead of bragging about the person who is interviewed, point out answers you don't like or agree with and post your point of view.
Repost the exact same interview, but substitute your name and experience for his. Give the same opinions and life advice.
If it makes it to the front page of HN, then we have some evidence that this community cares more about what is said than with who says it.
On the other hand, if this community ignores it, than we have some evidence that this community values who gives the advice as much as the advice itself.
Now, if the latter is the case, if ”who gives the advice” matters for some reason, then it seems relevant to discuss who gives the advice, and whether their life experience lends weight to their advice.
Also, 4chan is more than just their 'random' board.
Of course he was already a (relatively minor) entrepreneurial success through Viaweb, which gave the essays a boost. But when starting Viaweb, he was just a smart 30-ish guy who had published a couple of books on a niche programming language.
It's easy to see how this would feel like a lucky chain of events and that a random person could have jumped in at any given point and done as well, but I'm very skeptical of that hypothesis.
I was just trying to suggest that it's quite clear that HN takes his identity and experience into account when choosing to upvote his work, and therefore it seems reasonable to discuss his identity and experience when evaluating his work.
Without taking a side, when we admire someone and give their words extra credence, it seems very reasonable to be on our guard against “false positives,” situations where someone we otherwise admire releases a clunker.
The answers are utterly trivial, which is par for the course with PG.
Its not cult worship. I feel that way about other people as well (who aren't wealthy well known venture capitalists)
Ok.. should I feel differently about that?
And there is truth to the charge that his current popularity is inflated due to him being an investor. Many investors receive an undeserved amount of attention and adulation. After all, their entire job is to hand out millions of dollars. That tends to incline people towards paying attention.
But I, along with many thousands of others, have been reading Paul Graham's essays since long before YC. That's how he launched YC (and Reddit, and Hacker News). This is proof that he was genuinely compelling long before he was an investor.
His Lisp books were also great. So he was a successful book author, successful founder, successful essayist, then a successful investor. Not an example of someone failing upwards, as is disappointingly-common in The Valley.
Likewise I remember when someone wrote (don't remember who) how they thought it was great that the janitor put a supply of plastic trash can liners at the bottom of the trash can so they'd be there in supply when needed (and when the trash was emptied by taking the existing filled bag). This is something I had done myself forever. Just seemed obvious. So it's more "what's the big deal why are you making like the janitor has figured out some really ingenious trick'"?
Also the other thing that I would guess bothers people is when they say the same things it would get no notice at all (from friends or in an online comment). So it's more like 'why is this guy getting attention and I am not for these simple thoughts'? (This might have been parodied on SNL as 'deep thoughts by Jack Handy' iirc.
Having started several companies I can truthfully say PG has figured out a lot of stuff every founder faces and it's removes a layer of complexity for everyone.
Can you think of a startup thought leader that is more important? To me it's a very short list. In addition to PG mine would include Mark Andreesen, Steve Blank, Brad Feld and Naval Ravikant.
How in the world can you make that kind of statement? 'Most of us???'. You say that as if it's an easter egg hunt with 100 participants and PG came up with the most eggs that 'the others clearly could not find'.
Can you give an example?
Regardless of how you feel about pg, his selling Viaweb to Yahoo was not pure luck - he had to build Viaweb first.
For comparison, Amazon was founded the year before. eBay was also founded in 1995.
Enabling businesses to sell stuff online as an alternative to phone or fax orders was probably the most obvious commercial application of the World Wide Web.
That said, I don't enjoy his essays one bit. They are not thought provoking, they don't offer any real lessons, they are his thought of the moment. Like how he had kids now he likes to talk about having kids. We don't need more blogging (esp. not in tech blog) about the things you can only know if you actually have kids anyway. Reading it is a waste of time. Writing about it is actually fantastic for the author, so I don't fault him. Writing is great. But the cult of personality that actually draws readers rubs me the wrong way. His are poor writings, for audiences I mean.
I'd rather watch TK than PG.
But the thing is that was more or less earned. They'd say something and then over time you'd find they were right or not and so you tended to listen to what they said more and consider them 'smart'.
Sometimes you'd consider them smart just because they had answers to things that you didn't [1] and often even because you didn't (pre-internet) have a way to see if they were even right at all. So it was easier for sure to run circles around people when knowledge wasn't so accessible.
But very generally wasn't something (that I recall from my experience) bestowed on people based on things that vaulted them to prominence which could be attributed to luck.
[1] A good example of this on HN for me is tptacek who amazes me with his writing and what he knows (that I don't) but honestly I don't know enough to know how correct he is and I suspect others may not as well. Noting that on a topic (that I will not mention) that I am an expert on a HN discussion is typically totally wrong many times.
The most entertaining/snarky way I can describe it is he is a try hard auditioning for the role of Peter Thiel's best friend.
It's a little disappointing considering the regard I held for him for so long. I try to separate the essays from the twitter account.
I have a hard time believing a Harvard PhD and rapid support of capitalism has never encountered a critique of the topic outside of a third grader's worldview.
Generally, i don't like the view that there is nothing between radical capitalism on the one side and stalinist communism on the other. And that everything that is not 100% "true capitalism" is automatically socialism hich is, by the above logic, stalinism style communism. Every European country prooves otherwise.
In at least one of his essays he argues that founding a company creates wealth and wealth creation does two things.
1) Makes society as a whole better off. i.e. "A rising tide lifts all boats", so the poorest in society benefit as well as the richest. The mean value of all individual's wealth increases.
2) Increases inequality because the distance between richest and poorest increases. The variance in individual's wealth across the population increases.
Of course, these are just arguments he puts forth. Others may disagree with them. ...but I think it's worth trying to understand the distinction he makes between "inequality", "wealth creation" and "improving society as a whole".
He even once wrote, no idea in which essays, that he would prefer to be poor in an advanced society to be rich in an non-advanced one (something along these lines). Now, as we know that automation and software are enabling companies, and their investors / founders (with VCs investors more than founders IMHO), to create a lot of whealth that is not very well distributed across society. Which we see every day. So, working from his earlier statement on which society he would rather life in had he the choice, I assume PG has some level of understanding about the social realities. He is now also in a position to actually do something about it, him being arguably very rich and influential in his own way.
And what is he doing? Arguing against taxes for the rich to make life easier for the poor, against reducing the economic and social distribution and faisness in society. Because, according to him as far as I understood his later essays, as long as everybody can be enabled to found a company that problem will go away. Which it will not, not everyone can start one, regardless of access to capital. And even then most of the return will end up in the hands of the rich investor class with founders being more often than not cogs in the system.
Call the opposite approch socialism if you want, but if we as a socuiety don't think about these issues, hard, we will end up in deep trouble. Not just in the US where these problems are way more extreme than in Europe. I'm just way beyond believing that rich people will voluntarily do something about the poor if it would cost them a single dime.
Has Paul Graham ever made use of this freedom?
I agree with him that financial independence and a bully pulpit give one freedom and, as a public spirited person at least, responsibility to make use of that freedom to voice otherwise supressed opinions that merit some airing (whether correct or not). If he's actually doing it, it would certainly enhance my opinion of him.
Is this accurate? I thought it was a spec for a new Lisp?
BTW, I'm like the world's biggest fan of PG's Lisp work, but given that the bel spec doesn't have an efficient association data type in 2020, I find it completely impossible to take it seriously. (This is speaking as someone who wrote a production app in arc that is still in use)
That's a slippery-slope fallacy. Anything can "slip" further. If you claim X is more slippery than Y, you need to provide solid evidence.
I'd rather hear his opinion on start-ups and technology rather than politics.