> Since Taylor, management gurus, led by the Toyota Corporation, devised “lean production,” with its systematic hiring, work teams, cross-training, just-in-time inventories, and kaizen. This last, Japanese for “constant improvement,” is an insidious form of continuous speed-up. Management stresses the production system—by, for example, taking away a team member or speeding up an assembly line—and work teams are pressured to keep production running smoothly. Autoworker Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead, described modern auto factories as gulags. And no wonder. Workers must labor 57 seconds of every minute.
> Only a radical change in how work is done and who controls this can make labor once again an integral part of life, one through which we can fully develop our capacities as thinking, acting human beings.
uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...
#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
#2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I've seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I'll pass, I never liked the horror genre.
Why do you assume the only options are being controlled by a different self-serving employer, or having the government regulate everything? After all, shouldn't those who actually form the workforce of a company and shape the products and services it offers be in control? Why not have those who actually do the work collectively control the fate of the company, instead of having to hand over that power to someone else?
Co-ops are quite common but I guess the problem is that if they grow the old co-ops guys becomes the shareholders of a corp. So co-ops stay small or becomes corps.
You are right that people can absolutely form co-operatives. However, if I wanted to work on, say, World of Warcraft, I could hardly show up and demand Blizzard be turned into a co-operative.
Maybe you meant “well, if people are so upset by the status quo, why don't they just all quit and form their own co-operatives to make Starcraft 3?”. This is a great point, and a really interesting question. I think we should all encourage these more just ways of organising companies, but I think people really hesitate to do this because it's really drilled into us culturally that the current system is the only way. In particular, we want to be successful, and be seen as successful, and we get a lot more points in that category if we work for a successful corporation such as Meta, compared to forming some ragtag co-operative.
I do think, and hope, that this is starting to change. I admire the fact that sourcehut [0] is basically organised as a co-operative, and for that matter, so is Valve.
Part of the issue (in countries where you're not liable to be shot or accused by the police of running a cult or what-have-you) is that worker co-ops do not generally have access to significant capital or loans from VCs and banks which are scared of them, so cannot usually spend outside their means to grow - while companies that mesh well with current financialised society can.
As a result, co-ops need to grow differently and often compete differently; you can't afford to pay 50 people right out the gate to build Starcraft 3 to sell in 2 years' time. You need to be making money from day 1, and you can't compete directly with companies that have access to capital or you lose immediately.
There do exist co-ops in the video game industry - Motion Twin, behind Dead Cells, is one.
I'm very interested in this point! Do you think there is something about the structure of co-operatives that intrinsically makes them less attractive to investors? Or do you think that the fear you mentioned is just a result of them being currently unconventional, and this problem will be fixed once we culturally become more open to alternative ways of organising work?
We could ask! This is HN, which a non-insignificant cohort of various types of investors (angels, VCs, maybe bankers?) visit.
So let's open a couple of Ask HN/Pool HN: Are you an investor? Did you invest in a coop-like startup? Would you invest in a coop-like startup? Under which conditions?
This is a wonderful idea. I'll try to draft something like this, but if you post this yourself, or notice it posted by someone else with more experience in the VC world than me, would you please ping me? Contact details at https://vladh.net. :)
>there is something about the structure of co-operatives that intrinsically makes them less attractive to investors?
It's the intrinsic structure of being owned by the workers that makes co-operatives less financially attractive to outside investors. My previous comment about why:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166080
Co-operatives also have to compete in the marketplace (compete in both the costs & revenue) with other companies that are not co-ops. This financial pressure from other global economic actors is what causes co-ops like Mondragon to outsource labor to subcontractors or workforce in other countries who are not true members of the co-op. Mondragon appliances, etc still have to compete in sales with everyone else.
This is an interesting answer, thank you! I agree that co-ops using only funds contributed by their members will struggle to compete with companies that receive large investments. However, the bigger question is why investors would not want to invest in a co-operative. As far as I can tell, you're saying that investment in co-operatives is intrinsically less attractive because investors would obtain some kind of fixed return, as opposed to permanent ownership of shares in the company. Is that what you meant?
If so, the question that remains is a relatively open one. Let's say that, for the sake of argument, we reached the conclusion that organising companies as co-operatives would bring considerable social benefits to the majority of people compared to the current way or organising work. If this were true, what would have to be changed so as to make them a reasonable option? Perhaps our values of prioritising economic values over social value? Perhaps regulations on shareholders?
Yanis Varoufakis proposes a system that answers this question in Another Now [0], but I'm also curious to hear other answers.
> However, if I wanted to work on, say, World of Warcraft, I could hardly show up and demand Blizzard be turned into a co-operative.
You can always start a co-op which makes a WoW clone. Nothing stops people from that. The fact that it's practically never done says a lot about real-life applicability of co-ops.
Do you think that just because something is not regularly done, that automatically means it is bad or not feasible? Relatedly, do you think the fact that our culture has somewhat of a focus on individual economic success and the accumulation of power might have something to do with the fact that co-operatives are not at the forefront of our radar?
> Do you think that just because something is not regularly done, that automatically means it is bad or not feasible?
I think it proves that co-ops are just worse at complex tasks. A company requires just one dedicated and driven individual (the founder), and the rest of people can be hired and just do tasks assigned to them. Whereas, in a coop, the decision-making process is much harder, and just doesn't work as well for complex organizations. And, game devving (like many other complex tasks) is so hard and fraught with perils, that you don't want to throw in additional complications if you don't have to.
Actually, there are significant legal obstacles. It took around 200 years to create good legal framework and regulations around publicly-traded corporations, so that for example, when you invest, you can make sure you won't get scammed. (And it's still not perfect.)
Worker collectives, because they are uncommon, and do not operate under well-known legal framework, face significant obstacles in, for example, getting loans.
> Nothing significant stops people from forming worker collectives
This seems to be very much in contrast with the linked article. There are significant legal obstacles as well as much resistance in the form of illegal violence.
> After all, shouldn't those who actually form the workforce of a company and shape the products and services it offers be in control? Why not have those who actually do the work collectively control the fate of the company, instead of having to hand over that power to someone else?
That is viable in some cases.
The underlying issue is that distribution of corporate growth is relegated to a small percentage of all organizations out there. To put it simply, a small percentage of companies above a certain size grow quickly while the rest are slowly dying. As a result, not only are the distribution of outsized monetary rewards highly biased in favor of a small percentage of companies, but the fight to maintain position once that period of growth is over is intense. Modern companies growth fast, survive for a time, and then go away.
This leads to an unfortunate dynamic where any competitive advantage that leads to either growth or survival matters. If a top-down managerial structure where rewards inside of the company are distributed to a small layer of top level managers and owners provides even a slight economic advantage over an employee-owned structure, the former is going to win out.
This may sound unfair, and it likely is, but the question becomes: if I am a worker at 'traditional corp.' with a 100K salary and a funded 401K, will I do better than if I was a worker at 'employee-owned corp.' with the same salary but an ownership share? The deciding point being that traditional corp. has a 20% chance of going away over the next ten years while employee-owned corp. has a 20%+ chance of going away over the same period of time.
That reasoning makes sense to me. Do you think there actually _is_ some material disadvantage to co-operatives that leads them to be less economically successful than companies where shareholders have all the power and ownership? If so, do you think there is something that can correct this imbalance such that companies structured in more equitable ways can work just as well as the current inequality-laden corporations?
> That reasoning makes sense to me. Do you think there actually _is_ some material disadvantage to co-operatives that leads them to be less economically successful than companies where shareholders have all the power and ownership?
This is hard to say. I think there are two competing trends:
1. Co-operative ownership is becoming more prevalent. This is particularly true in situations where entrepreneurial bricolage (making do with what you have on hand) is a factor.
2. However, there aren't that many examples of legitimate co-operative ownership in larger corporations. They do exist, but the sample size is small.
As far as I'm aware, employee co-ownership is more associated with the concept of 'psychological ownership', where the organization tries to make an employee feel like they own a portion of the company. This can come from actual ownership via RSUs or stock options, or through other factors, such as company culture. The idea here being that psychological ownership increases employee effectiveness.
The issue is that 1. top management generally has more influence than owners and 2. it's not always (or usually) in the best interest of the employee to have more than a small percentage of their net worth tied up in their employer.
Think about it this way. In a (greatly simplified model of) democracy, voters essentially "own" the government. However, the politicians they elect as well as an employed bureaucracy are the ones generally calling the shots. Democracy works because it provides a floor where, if performance falls to a certain point, the top management layer is replaced by a different set of managers.
However, corporations are not governments. Governments (especially local governments) - and bureaucracies - last a very long time, to the extent that they generally survive well after whatever state they were originally part-of goes away. In other words, they're robust. You can have a bad set of elected, or unelected, officials and regardless of what happens, odds are that the entity they represent will still be around decades if not centuries later.
Corporations are the opposite. The failure rate is sizable. Like I wrote in my previous post, a small number of larger companies are adding economic value, while the rest are in the process of fading away. The question here is whether a co-operative model provides enough of a benefit beyond the standard corporate ownership structure to provide some benefit to either of these phases.
My guess is that the answer is no for the growth phase and, depending on the organization/industry, maybe or a slight yes for the later maintenance phase. That said, the sample size of employee owned co-operatives in growth-oriented industries is so small that I don't know if the data exists to take a shot at answering either question.
First, do you know what Soviet stands for? The relevant meaning of the word in Russian is "council", and it refers to "worker councils", "soldier councils", etc. that made the revolution happen (the Petrograd Soviet, or council, in St Petersburg was the main alternative power structure to Provisional Government that took over from the czar), that were supposed to "democratically" run things like factories, and send delegates to higher levels to democratically run things there. Somehow, this all ended up a dictatorship, as it did pretty much every time something like this has been tried.
Then, economically, co-ops are perfectly legal in the West. There are some successful ones, like REI. I shop at REI a lot, and I really don't give a damn if employers are wage laborers or co-op members - I doubt most people do. If anything, some people might prefer co-ops because they would give them the same warm fuzzy feeling as green-washed products do, so a co-op would start out with a competitive advantage at least among the well-off liberals. Why not go build a coop to replace your local restaurant or a laundromat; or Exxon, or Google, or whatever? Perhaps because generally, it doesn't work so well? Heck, I don't know how much of a "real" co-op REI is anymore, at this scale.
We can choose who we work for (sometimes), but we can't choose not to work at all. Our engagement in the capitalist labour market is mandatory; otherwise we starve to death. Doesn't sound like we have much control over our labour to me.
I'm concerned my response will be taken poorly so I will try to phrase this well. I hope you take this in the manner I intend it - with love in my heart.
We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide. To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
Now, we as people are also compassionate and we want the elderly to not starve and we want the infirm cared for. We have instituted social programs to cover these smaller cases. But, to believe that a normal human being can do nothing and that someone else will provide for them - wholesale across our country - doesn't seem very sustainable.
I'm not sure what you want, or I may be mischaracterizing your view - if so I apologize. If you can explain better your point or who would provide for those who don't want to, I would appreciate it.
> We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide.
So then why do we have inherited wealth, why not ban that. Make things equitable, born with nothing but you can scavenge yourself.
> To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
You mean like "private property"?
Your logic only makes sense in an equitable world, where everyone is born equal, but that's not the case. Just look at the wealth inequalities around the world, like 1% of people owns majority of all wealth.
This is diving into a conversation that may be best not had on HNN. @Dang - delete this if you like man, no offense taken.
I don't think the goal is equity but equality. At least, that is my goal. I want the lowliest shoeshine boy to have the opportunity to do amazing things.
I make no apologies for the country I was born or the circumstances. I grew up on a poor farm in a broken trailer surrounded by my backwoods relatives. I chose to do something different.
My view does not make sense only in an 'equitable world' - consider the inverse. If everyone decides not to work because they are 'owed food so as to not starve' then who will harvest the grain, who will sow the fields, who will till the earth. A policy that would require people to work and then give away all of their product is not equity its slavery.
I really think you would get some interesting perspective out of reading “The Tyranny of Merit” by Michael J. Sandel, and I'm really curious how the ideas in the book would come together with your views. I would be happy to gift you the book if there was a way to do so.
Whos sweat and blood was used to make the machine that was taken from him and given to someone else?
Look, at some point we may be in a true post-scarcity environment where we can fabricate food/clothing/items with just energy from an abundant resource. At that time, I will consider this question anew.
It is quite possible we could live in a post-scarcity economy today, at least in rich countries, if we chose to eliminate scarcity on food and clothing and shelter and health care.
During the pandemic, many (most?) US schools stopped charging to feed kids during the school day. Food suddenly became free. My own daughter still brought lunch from home every day, but a lot of kids ate better than they had been, and food scarcity, in that small context, stopped being an issue. This year they seem to be ending that, but it definitely demonstrated that we could do more than we are, if we wanted to.
I think a post scarcity environment is achievable with today’s technology. It’s today’s political and socioeconomic systems which are preventing that from becoming a reality.
>> We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide.
> So then why do we have inherited wealth, why not ban that.
It doesn't say that people are forbidden from having more than they themselves can provide. For example, if someone chooses to grant them some wealth voluntarily, as is the case with inheritance.
> We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide.
Humans are entitled to nothing, because there is no metaphysical overseer that decides who does and does not deserve things. Entitlement is an idea created and perpetuated by human beings to justify certain kinds of behaviour.
> To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
Capitalist labour, by its very nature, is an extractive process that takes from workers what they earned. This is the genesis of that thing known as 'profit'. I followed the same logic as you when I became a socialist bent on upturning the current social order.
> But, to believe that a normal human being can do nothing and that someone else will provide for them - wholesale across our country - doesn't seem very sustainable.
I don't really care about what's sensible or sustainable, compared to what is good and just. (Our current way of doing things is certainly neither!) I wouldn't feed someone because they're infirm and can't get their own food; I'd feed them because they're hungry, end of story.
Visit any large city in the US and you'll find hundreds or thousands who have made that choice. They line the sidewalks and alleys. Yes, you have that choice; you may not like the lifestyle it provides but you have that choice.
Parasitism was a crime in the USSR. Venezuela for a time, maybe still, had compulsory field labor during the oil price crisis. Where exactly - "capitalist" or otherwise - can you choose not to work without having to submit yourself to extensive checks for actual means tested poverty to get guaranteed food/clothing/shelter?
This - the very same people that push far left collectivist ideas like the ones linked intentionally sidestep the fact that every single socialist set up had compulsory labor participation. The only difference is that with the latter set up, they get to fully control what you do.
The reason why I saw no homeless people growing up is because the commies locked them all up.
Your need to work is tied directly to your need for food and shelter - in other words, biology. You can alternatively grow your own food and build shelter, but that's also work. Sustaining life requires work. Whether we engage in a market where we exchange some of our labor for vouchers that we can use to exchange for the fruits of someone else's labor or do the work ourselves doesn't change that.
>#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
Sometimes this is not straight forward for example when you have some responsibilities in your life, or when your career is too specialized with little to no transferable skill (like when you´re proficient at an internal process of a company).
Unless we could quit and be self sustainable without a job, then yes, at that point you could say one can quit anytime we want to find another place to work for.
I think my point is being misunderstood just slightly.
Its not that 'finding a job is easy' its that we are not slaves and while we can not necessarily choose who we labor for, we can choose who we do not labor for.
I believe I understood your point, we are just treading a fine line, which is:
You need to work for a living, and while you´re not a slave (because it´s not forced labor), your livelihood depends on it - and that has a conditioning effect on many levels (emotional, financial, relationships...)
Of course we always used a form of work to sustain ourselves, the difference might just be on the rewards we get from it.
Maybe that´s why some people exaggerate when they say they´re slaves of work, perhaps is a coping mechanism that allows them to frame that activity as something they´re being forced to do, rather than a deliberate choice they´re not happy about.
I would argue that as long as our health insurance is tied to our current job we are basically slaves of that job. I can't choose to quit if I need insurance to cover chronic problems, or to cover kids, etc. Not to mention all the aspects of not everyone can afford to take the time off to search for other employers, or move to wherever a new employer might be even if they wanted to. Quitting is only for the privileged.
> uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...
> #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
We change who controls our labor by making those who control our labor us, the workers creating wealth, not the heirs who own companies and expropriate our surplus labor time via dividend profit checks.
The idea that a worker controls his own labor seems to be the one idea that is alien to your prescription.
No, I'm a big fan of workers controlling their own labor.
If a person wants to 100% control their own labor, they can create a business and provide their services (at a price someone else will pay for them) to the world at large.
What is alien to me is that a person believes they can take over other peoples property (factories, existing IP [go to microsoft, say 'windows is mine now' and try to sell your copy of the source). I'm a big fan of property rights.
So, I think we mostly agree right? Someone should be able to start their own business, using their own funds, and have their chance to excel in this world.
I suspect the author would say that we currently live in a system that is designed to reward a certain way of doing business, and that artificially makes things harder for those determined to control their own labor.
Some of that system is government, where laws naturally benefit larger business and are explicitly aimed at "small businesses," which are still traditional work-for-someone-else concerns with four or more employees.
Some of that system is non-governmental, where it seems to be much easier for an S-corp with a few employees to get an operating loan than it is for a self-employed person.
It is easy to say that the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under the bridge, but it is a too-narrow focus that ignores many, many assumptions.
- Would you be willing to oppose corporations controlling the government with bribes/campaign contributions?
- Support a judicial system where poorer people can access justice?
- Tell your representatives that wage theft should be punished as seriously as theft and fraud?
I don’t think this vitriol is warranted or reasonable.
* I would support completely disbanding corporations who bribe officials, and jailing its officers
* I think the biggest problem with our judicial system is the prevalence of plea deals leading to a lifetime of regret for those who ignorantly take them. Fix it.
* I believe wage theft is theft and would like to see jail time for those involved.
I imagine I’ve a harsher view than you on these elements. But, more to the point, even if I wasn’t this opinionated I dont think this hate is warranted.
Apologies for my misunderstanding. I meant zero hate or vitriol.
I categorised 'wish you the best' the same as 'thoughts and prayers' but you probably didn't mean it like that. I wanted to draw a contrast between actions that only effect an individual, like your example of quitting a bad job, and actions that effect society, i.e. changing the rules to close the loopholes that businesses use to exploit their workers.
I think we both agree that systematic societal change would be a good thing. Cool.
#1 The article is suggesting radical change across a wide swathe of society, while you are suggesting a minor adjustment for individuals. Yes, ideally we can choose any one of many options that require us to work, work, work to make someone else rich. The suggestion is that none of those options are ideal.
#2 There are more options than "private individuals" and "government control." The author specifically says, "Cooperatives and communes, organized and controlled locally, are two avenues to pursue." Feasible or not, neither of those options are "government control."
If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500.
That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US.
Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%.
This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement.
Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase.
Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase.
And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers.
It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich.
And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor.
Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth.
Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question.
They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself.
Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally.
Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?
Great question! Maybe they are, maybe they're not, and you're right that this should influence how the company is structured. But our current system goes quite a bit past simply "solving" this problem with investor shareholders, because that sole shareholder is entitled to any future profits the company makes, regardless of whether it makes a completely different game, and regardless of the massive contributions future employees may have made in the meantime. What do you think? I discuss this in more detail in this essay: https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
It's the same argument if someone should take options in lieu of salary in a startup, and the answer is almost always no. Options tend to end up worthless as most startups fail.
IMO, a better question is to ask what allowed the single investor to become an investor to begin with. The nature of investing means the investor must be able to also lose all their capital. What can we do as a society to make easier for the 99 other employees to 'invest'. For me this means having social safety nets like healthcare and UBI so that people can take less salary or risk what little they have in a venture like you originally described.
The challenge is that the company you work for is almost never the best investment on its own. That's why retirement funds are diversified. I would worry about giving everyone the ability to bet 99% of their wealth on a single company. The reason there are investors is because they've previously invested their money in a risk appropriate way. Now there's a whole argument around intergenerational family wealth which skews everyone's starting point, but it's probably better than concentrating that wealth in a single point of failure (the state who gives you UBI). Probably the right approach to wealth inequality is more tax on non-beneficial uses of money(yachts), and more incentives for mutually beneficial pursuits (cheaper energy).
Bolt (the 1-click payment) company tried this, and immediately after (justified) layoffs you saw articles about people taking out (relatively) massive loans to buy now-worthless options: https://www.wired.com/story/bolt-stock-loans/amp
Had Bolt made it, those employees would have become investors...
Yeah, I was just thinking something similar. "Rich means someone who earns more than me". As someone pointed out, even earning $50K a year puts you in the top 1% globally and arguments about "it's all relative" aside, I think most people are a bit more attached to their income than they think "rich" people should be.
I think the sad truth is that a lot of us don't necessarily believe deep-down that us forgoing, say, 10% of our potential income will actually be an investment into the world but will simply be sucked up somewhere else. That's why I like schemes like micro-investment where you can see that your money is genuinely invested in making the world better.
No, it is not wage theft, because wages are not assets. The shareholders take the risk. Employees get their salary regardless of whether the game is a success, flop, or somewhere in the middle. Bonuses tread that middle ground. I personally do not like bonuses, but they are exactly that: give the employee the opportunity to partake in the profits in a way that exposes him to some risk.
Yes, this is the prevailing view! However, I think the magnitude of the reward an investor should get, as well as the actual amount of risk they are exposed to, is overstated. Also, there is nothing stopping us from having a system where the employees become "members" of the company and shoulder some of the (diluted) financial risk, thus doing away with shareholders. This comment has a couple more thoughts on this, as well as a link to my essay on this topic. Let me know what you think! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32424519
A counterpoint with 5 minutes of searching: from [1], Peter Kern (3rd highest paid CEO) got $296M in 2022 overseeing ~15k employees (from [2]). Distribute that salary evenly and everyone gets a ~19k boost which, on an average base of $108k (from [3]), is about +17%, if I'm not mistaken.
If you want an even more ludicrous example, David Baszucki (Roblox, 7th highest, also [1]) got $232M in 2022 overseeing ~1600 employees (from [4]). Even distribution gives a $145k boost on an average base of ~$135k (from [5]) is about +107%. Which is a bit better than Intel's +0.2%, no?
In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
Congratulations. You found one extreme case, and included links to some others.
There are many.
There are also 5000+ large companies in the US that employ tens of thousands of people. 20,000+ companies globally.
This isn't the average. Use a normal distribution, and you'd expect 20+ companies with 3 sigma (where CEO pay would increase pay by 6%+). Corporate profits definitely don't have a normal distribution, neither does CEO pay. This isn't surprising to me.
Elon Musk has $200B. He's an edge case of an edge case. Should we pretend all billionaires are like him, too? The average Billionaire has almost 50x less money. The average CEO makes much less than 50x the links you cited.
The average CEO for the top 350 companies made $24M in 2020 (a good year). The average CEO for all companies over the last decade makes less than $1M - according to BLS it's $190k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/top-executives.htm#:~:tex.... And that's the average not the median - so people like the links you provided are skewing that higher than the median...
> In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
This is called cherry picking. You can always find what you're looking for if you're willing to cherry pick hard enough on a large dataset.
Your starting hypothesis is that CEO pay is ridiculous - and you're finding examples to confirm that - rather than looking at averages to easily disprove the idea that the examples you cited are the exception not the norm.
Still you gotta admit there is a problem with CEOs making off with huge salaries/stock value especially in very hot sectors, with some of them even trying to dodge taxes. Sure you can make an argument for the increased salary with the increased responsibilities and risk, but there is no cap there and little say from the employees.
When CEOs make a few lifetime's worth of money in a year while the employee makes far less in a year, that's going to raise inequalities and eventually render systems unstable. The balance is not there.
> Still you gotta admit there is a problem with CEOs making off with huge salaries/stock value especially in very hot sectors, with some of them even trying to dodge taxes.
I couldn't agree more.
It doesn't mean they're the reason workers aren't significantly richer.
Imagine a world in which the only product is apples.
If everyone needs 3 apples per day to be healthy and happy - and you only produce 1 apple per person - it does not matter if the richest 0.1% get 200 apples per day. If you distributed them evenly, there is still not enough apples. And distributing them evenly does not even improve things in any significant way.
Sure, it is a problem. The bottom decile that lives on .1 apple per day now gets .3 apples per day. But they still don't even have close to enough apples! Neither does anyone else!
People like to hand-wave this away. But GLOBAL GDP per capita is less than $11,000 per year. That is NOT enough money for everyone to have a house with a white picket fence, and a car in the garage, and a chicken in the oven, and a wife who stays at home and takes care of the kids. It's not even enough for everyone to live a life that resembles being upper lower class in France.
And remember, the rich pay most of the taxes. Now you have to pay an even share - so of your $11,000, 25% of that is taxes! You only actually get ~$8,200.
~$8,200 per year wouldn't even qualify you for a mortgage to buy a $35,000 house. That's barely buying you enough materials to build a dollhouse. It's not buying you land anywhere you'd want live. And it's definitely not enough to connect to utilities.
Distribution is a problem. THE problem is total output. ~$11,000 per person per year. Remember this is in inflated 2022 dollars - ~$9000 in 2019 dollars - this is including all-time highs due to massive stimulus and unprecedented levels of debt. ~$9000 in 2019 dollars is Mexico's GDP per capita - Bulgaria & Belarus. I love Mexico to death - but these are not paradises.
Globally, the much bigger problem is that there are not enough apples being produced!
Locally, in the US and the EU - GDP per capita is quite high. If we lived in a socialized society, sure, things could definitely be better for minimum wage workers.
But I'm quitting my job at FAANG tomorrow to be a yoga teacher if I make the same amount of money. I don't know who in their right mind is going to continue being a nurse or most doctors. I'm not sure why many people are going to do hard physical labor like construction or dangerous jobs like fighting fires and crime - if everyone makes the same amount of money... Good luck keeping production high and society functioning...
I do think relying on production has it's limits. Countries would rather save up on apples, be self sufficient for a rainy day rather than spend them.
Given how my (non-western) dollar converts to USD, I wouldn't hire a US person for grunt work unless he/she had specific expertise to teach or a local knowledge bias for when my firm expands to the US. So there's less inflow to the US, and only to a select few people. So where does that lead us to? The US printing money and doing as much as it can to mitigate the side effects.
So your population has only a select few who get the inflows. And you can tax them for distribution.
And chances are you're not going to get other countries to spend their apples. You could get workers to accept lower pay rates, but I highly doubt it's possible without upsetting stability. Are you doomed to huge amounts of money printing then? Maybe you'd get away with it since you're the US after all.
> How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?
Steve Jobs somewhat famously never wrote any code for Apple. So the answer to how a person becomes the sole shareholder without doing any work is that they focus on things like bank loans, which enable the hiring of people to do the "work" that leads to the company's success. Same as any company.
Many, many, many companies are headed by people who have never engaged in the low-level work done by that companies. Many of them are there because they deal with finance.
Presumably the CEO bring something to the table - capital, fundraising ability. I mean why else have him/her?
CEO hires a bunch of employees, all who get paid. The game is a success and since he put the capital at risk, he gets most the reward. The employees get their salary.
Unfair?
Well, what if it doesn't work out? Employees all get their salary, CEO loses his capital.
Workers can certainly get a similar trade off in some industries - plenty of tech start-ups will pay you $50,000/yr (when you could be making $300,000 at Google) and a chunk of the company.
Why not take that job if you want CEO-type risk and reward?
> Presumably the CEO bring something to the table - capital, fundraising ability. I mean why else have him/her?
You're so close! In fact, there's an expectation that the more you pay a CEO, the better they perform, and that those making the most must be the best. This seems to be a largely-unexamined assumption that "just makes sense," but it turns out when you try to see whether it's true, it's not[0].
By and large, highly-paid CEOs are a drain on corporate profits. As the research paper I linked shows, even those highly-compensated CEOs who win awards end up performing worse than their non-award-winning counterparts.
Everybody seems to like the idea of a CEO providing strong leadership and deserving their high compensation. The stress, they say, makes it worth it. Besides, if we didn't pay them that much, someone else would! And yet the facts don't seem to support any of that.
Why did you completely ignore the capital part I talked about?
Instead of raising $10M for a business through a CEO (either their own money or through road shows), there is nothing stopping a company of 100 employees from ponying up $100,000 of their own money and reaping a share of the rewards (or losing it all).
Are you really that surprised that workers prefer a risk-free salary instead?
I mean I have the option of taking cash or equity at my company and I turn down the equity every time. I don't begrudge the ones who take the risk and make 10x what I do.
I'll be honest, you don't seem to understand how businesses work today - you're working from a flawed understanding.
> By and large, highly-paid CEOs are a drain on corporate profits. As the research paper I linked shows, even those highly-compensated CEOs who win awards end up performing worse than their non-award-winning counterparts.
You're forgetting who decides CEO pay - the board / shareholders.
They are aware of this. And despite that, they keep these pay packages.
Is it fair? I dunno. I personally don't think CEO's should be getting paid what they do. Does anyone care? No.
Is anyone's salary fair? I dunno.
If you distribute the CEO's pay to the rest of the company it wouldn't materially impact average workers wages (less than a 1% increase) - except in rare cases (less than 5% of large companies).
Why should I get raged out that my CEO makes $100M+ per year? If you distribute that to everyone at the company - it's not even a 1% increase. There's much easier ways I can make 1% more money...
It's really not worth discussing except in rare cases - and those are exceptions that don't change the larger picture.
Instead of focusing on distributing CEO pay to the rest of the company--where I think your math is off--consider things like annual bonuses for employees that are affected by company performance. Something like "you get $20k, or a little less if you or the company is doing poorly, or a little more if you and the company are doing well." Pretty common among developers.
When those come in at 90% or 95% of target based on company performance, and yet the CEO still takes home tens of millions, that's when what seems like a tiny thing on a raw number basis, a matter of $2k for a single employee, can seem like a large thing. As an employee who performed well is still feeling the impact of company performance that fell short of expectations, probably on the basis of nothing the employee did, probably more attributably to the CEO (who helped set the expectations, and is more likely to have had a material impact on the result), it's natural for employees to at least wonder why the impact seems to be falling more on them.
That kind of thing is very common, not a super-rare case.
The employees also get wages if the game craters completely and company looses millions on it. Unless the employees are willing to eat up the losses as well (i.e. pay back some portion of the wages they got earlier), they should not enjoy 100% of the profits.
>The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself.
What is actual work?
The coding or the graphics or perhaps the music? What about the QA?
The way your comment is formatted, I guess you don't mean the accounting, parole, shipping and receiving.
On this forum, I often see developers lamenting how much unrelated work, overhead and meetings they have to do and how saying how they could be more productive if they could just be allowed to sit down and code.
How much more "actual work" can you and others like you do when you have to meet with lawyers, file trademarks, order hardware/software while staying in a budget. Or perhaps, the CEO does some of those tasks so you can do the "actual work".
My comment oversimplified the work to be done for the sake of argument. Feel free to replace some of those 100 programmers with accountants or other kinds of employees. I agree those other kinds of work are very important, and my argument remains the same.
The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude.
The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.
They have that trillion because we buy things from them... from Amazon, from Tesla, etc. You don't like those things exist? Stop exchanging your money for their goods/services.
That is a problem when Amazon buys up everything that moves and integrates it into their product line. At some point it becomes impossible to avoid. Most of the snack and soft drink industry is owned by like what, 3 megacorps?
You don't like existing? Just die. Nobody's stopping you.
Solution #1 - don't buy properly crap food that is literally slowly killing you and making/keeping you addicted, while you pay the money to said corporations. A generally smart move. Yes they also own normal food(TM) brands, but here in Europe there are tons of alternatives on shelves, ie 1 cocoa powder from nestle, other 5 from small often fair trade producers.
Maybe in US Amazon owns everything, although I doubt it. But US is what, 5% of the world? In most of the world, Amazon is OK but nothing big. In Switzerland for example, there is no Amazon and its non-trivial to order anything from other countries, many sellers simply do not ship here. Stuff comes via Swiss post/small companies, from local eshops. So yeah not giving much to Bezos even if I wanted to.
Now what did I solve though? Nothing apart from good feeling (and paying more for postal serviecs and eating more healthily)
But this is leftist propaganda that makes no sense.
I just disproved that ALL billionaires (including the centibillionaires) do not have a meaningful amount of money to distribute to the country (or the globe) in any reasonably fair way.
Singling out the centibillionaires - Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Gates and Buffet - doesn't make my point irrelevant. If you're only looking at them - their contribution is more unequal, sure! But they don't even have half the billionaire total. They aren't even half the problem. Taking their money wouldn't even do half as much!
Do they have disproportionate power? Absolutely!
Are they using that to get even more money? I think it's hard to argue they aren't.
Is that a problem? I think so.
Are they skimming all the money so we have nothing? This idea is laughably wrong, and the amount of times it is parroted is infuriating.
For those in the top of earnings, it feels good to ignore wealth inequality. To imagine it's somehow 'ok' that a handful of people own over half the economy, is tragic.
Consider: the bottom half of American wage-earners (those below $97,000(!)) have combined wealth of approximately 1% of the American total.
So maybe we're talking about the wrong 1% - we can instead consider those sharing <1% of the 'American pie' who's income is hopelessly distant from anything that could dig them out of the bottom.
I have to imagine, the parrot in the room is not me. I wonder why somebody "far left" can fool themselves this way.
This is a strawman argument. It is a diversion. It is not about billionaires and their wealth.
It is about the expropriation of a worker's surplus labor time by the heirs. It is about control of all the worker's work time (surplus and non-surplus) by the heirs.
This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980:
I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized...
Do the math. It's literally division.
When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal.
But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich.
Is inequality a thing? Yes.
Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about.
Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.
The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.
This has to be downvoted because people aren't writing things like this because they want to do any deep understanding or enact meaningful change, they are doing it because it makes them feel better to complain about how unfair it is.
> If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Immense concentration of wealth affords the power to significantly affect change and mold society. This power in the hands of the few is the actual issue, given that social stratum is strongly correlated with political outlook and mores.
Exactly. The vast majority of mom and pop investors don't hold voting shares. They're not connected to the board members. They don't control the corporations their investments are allocated to, other than very tangentially through their ability to exert downward pressure on the stocks.
Billionaires are different.
They own the controlling shares of a corporation, even to the point where their votes count for more in the case of Facebook. They can take on corporate debt then use that to buy another controlling stake into another corporation. Use that corporations assets for more leverage to take out mortgages, etc. Their ability to then borrow against their own stocks gives them even more working capital without paying any amount of tax while they continue to differ capital gains. I'm not even going into the lobbyists or international tax schemes here. Just the power of layered leverage.
I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm usually somewhere near the centre and tilt a bit to the left on most economic issues. I'm not against capital formation. But the economic and social damage that most billionaires exert on people in wealthy societies is a very real thing and it's going to keep getting more severe as computers allow for increasingly more centralization of information and control. "Data is the new oil." And all that.
We don't need billionaires (or, soon, trillionaires) to have a well functioning capitalist economy. We could have a ceiling and we could refuse entry families that exceed these limits to our countries. Same thing with open source, etc.
You quote sources but you don't seem to use their numbers: US billionaires have 4.18T (not 1.3), divided over 300M gives 14k per person (not 0.5k). You were off by a factor of 28.
14k per person is actually a years worth of minimum wage (7.25x40x50).
The average US household is 2.6 ppl, so that would give 36k per household (you know, kids). That is serious money to a lot of people. Another way
On top of that, if you include the people worth 100M+ into the pie, the total amount of money goes up a lot, as there are so many more of them.
Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, just the sheer money they have that others don't is not the problem.
The issue is not so much a one-time cash grab, it's that with that concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power that distorts society.
Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to have an outsized effect on society.
BTW, you seem to have misread the site you linked. It says that billionaire wealth grew by $1.3T in 11 months, not that they have $1.3T. It's literally in the first box on the page: "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion during the roughly first eleven months of the coronavirus pandemic -- a 44% spike in wealth. This increase in wealth is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,900 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America." So that would be a one-time $3,900 check to everyone just for 2020.
The second box says "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to $4.18 trillion in March 2021." So you're off by quite a bit, and seem to have misread your source site consistently.
As an example of the sort of societal distortion I'm talking about, consider Elon Musk, who wanted people to buy his cars rather than take trains, and so lied about a fantastical system of tunnels he would surely build, and... well, the quote is "So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project and to get in the way of that actually succeeding."[0]
That's a recent example of a single person behaving incredibly badly, but a list of people using their wealth to do things like disport beach access, reduce housing options, badly mistreat employees, and so on, it would be endless.
If the California High Speed Rail project was ever going to succeed - it would've went from Los Angeles to San Diego (118 miles almost entirely densely populated).
The fact that they planned for it to go from Los Angeles to the Bay (340+ miles almost entirely nothing) is pretty strong evidence that basically everyone involved was only trying to win elections and not really make HSR happen.
Los Angeles to San Diego is makes much more sense. Just having a bullet train from the West Side to DTLA to Long Beach to somewhere in OC would've had massively higher ridership and cost less money.
Everyone involved just wanted to waste money to win elections (and to no surprise, it worked).
I hate Elon as much as anyone. If he even played a small part in this - the much larger blame goes to the politicians.
Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly.
Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet.
It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you.
You got on the one hand, the Open Free Market System in America, you have on the other hand, the exact opposite, the closed, controlled, command economy of the Soviet Union…
The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed.
The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!
I agree that the last thing we should do is to go back to the Soviet Union, but its relationship to many of the alternatives available today is a common misunderstanding. The Soviet Union was described as "socialist" simply to cover up the awful inequality and abuse of power that was at the centre of it. The Soviet Union was basically the opposite of socialism, and this is easy to understand if you compare it to the most basic tenets of socialism, such as socioeconomic inequality.
I think that there are a lot of alternatives to both our current Western economic system and the Soviet Union, and I think that if you try to look a bit closer at many of the systems "the kids today" are talking about, in particular the principles and values behind them, without getting caught up in the labels, you'll be pleasantly surprised!
My response was a bit - tongue in cheek as that's a quote from Singapore's PM during an election campaign. His point was if you remove the competitive aspects - the individualistic ones, the system grinds to a halt.
The USSR and China were abusive because you need to be abusive to force people to give over labour for which they don't own the proceeds of. Small time farmers in Vietnam had riots over the collectivization of their land into communes (and the "Communists" there dropped it in favor of capitalism). These are subsistence-level farms who can't read or write - yet they understood the injustice of taking away one's freedom to live of the fruits of your own labour.
A far better solution is to separate the economic system with the political one (which communism tries to meld). There is nothing that says you can't have a capitalist system that protects worker rights, or that heavily taxes and redistributes.
Rather than killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, figure out how best to use the eggs to the benefit of everyone.
Thank you for expanding on your point! I understand what you meant a lot better now. If you had any resources that expand on your views, I'd be happy to read them.
> tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you
An employer does not give a raise and disposable income to a worker. The worker is the creator of wealth, and the heirs collecting dividend profits are who are being given to. Your confusion about the directionality of created wealth within the relations of production is the whole point of the article.
The employer needs the worker's labor and ghe employee needs the employer's concentration of power. One needs the other and vice versa. Or are you suggesting the directionality is only one way?
Marxists do think that way and they are wrong. The thing they are missing is the third factor of production (labor, capital, land) that was magically omitted from classical economics to make the conflict strictly between labor and capital. You end up with the left right divide blaming each other for wrongdoing even though these two factors are in symbiosis. It's the slumlord on the sidelines that enters the equation unnoticed, convinces the the parties to hate each other, while sucking away their blood like a good parasite.
Re: Georgism/LVT I’ve gotten interested in how it affects land use.
I’ll check out that long video (listening now, sounds like they get past the introductions at the 30 minute mark) but here’s a couple shorter videos about it meanwhile. The guest of the podcast’s articles are here: https://gameofrent.com/
No, I don't think that. However, the site linked that this article is on is using communist imagery, so is no doubt communist. Criticizing an article that implies a call for communism for that call is not a lack of imagination on the part of the reader, but rather recognizing what is being implied.
> ...between 1971 and 2018, 3,280 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia.
> Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it.
Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.
> Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work?
They're killing union organizers because unionization _does_ work... when the organizers don't die in the middle of setting up a union.
(Of course, "works" doesn't mean "works perfectly and always", or that unions don't have their own internal challenges and risk of bureaucratization etc. etc.)
In 1985, FARC entered a peace process and began working electorally and non-violently. The right never went for this and despite the government agreeing to a peace settlement, the right slaughtered political candidates, trade union leaders, etc. So eventually FARC reformed and began its armed campaign again. Something to think about for complaints about FARC "terrorism" from 1985 on. Actually they began doing so well that the US began having to bankroll the Colombian military with Plan Colombia (not a new thing, Kennedy was doing the same thing on a smaller scale).
Very familiar sentiment to thoughts I have been thinking and feeling over the past year or so. Interesting to see more of this stuff popping up. I am starting to think unionizing is going to be the path to start pointing the majority of folks towards.
We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds.
However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining".
Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".
This is missing a lot of history. There was a lot of Anarchist violence in the 30s that led to things like the Inheritance Tax, now repealed. Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. The past was not impossible. It actually happened. And we should be able to use that experience to craft something better if we really care to. Getting distracted with "Not within this system" talk is useless. The system can be changed and honed so let's do that.
There is another bit of history that possibly informs the change. ~Up until Reagan, US needed to present an alternative to communist and socialist systems. Post USSR collapse, 'history ended', and that's when the neo-liberal genie was let out of the bottle. This is a somewhat cynical view, but imo not an unreasonable speculation.
Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage
At least according my grandparent's that's an absolute falsehood. Unless you assume "live well" in a 600 sq. ft. house doing manual labour in the sun and having your spouse take care of grandma who is dying of cancer for which there is no treatment.
In case anyone is curious, there have been a variety of different estate taxes at a federal level in the United States from 1797 through the present. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/ninetyestate.pdf
The "modern" estate tax was enacted in 1916. It was repealed for a single year -- 2010 -- but returned the following year and is currently in force. The exclusion amount has grown considerably over time.
> Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills.
This feels like an oft-repeated trope to me. Do you have books or stats that back this up?
The unionization factor is interesting. It's not a zero-sum game. The more everyone does, the better everyone is.
Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour.
There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour.
Unionization doesnt work well when there's so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming.
The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it's a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement.
So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers.
The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits.
The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threaduhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...
#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
#2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I've seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I'll pass, I never liked the horror genre.
Resource 1 by me: https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
Resource 2 by Yanis Varoufakis: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49098225-another-now
More resources: https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
Maybe you meant “well, if people are so upset by the status quo, why don't they just all quit and form their own co-operatives to make Starcraft 3?”. This is a great point, and a really interesting question. I think we should all encourage these more just ways of organising companies, but I think people really hesitate to do this because it's really drilled into us culturally that the current system is the only way. In particular, we want to be successful, and be seen as successful, and we get a lot more points in that category if we work for a successful corporation such as Meta, compared to forming some ragtag co-operative.
I do think, and hope, that this is starting to change. I admire the fact that sourcehut [0] is basically organised as a co-operative, and for that matter, so is Valve.
[0]: https://sourcehut.org/
As a result, co-ops need to grow differently and often compete differently; you can't afford to pay 50 people right out the gate to build Starcraft 3 to sell in 2 years' time. You need to be making money from day 1, and you can't compete directly with companies that have access to capital or you lose immediately.
There do exist co-ops in the video game industry - Motion Twin, behind Dead Cells, is one.
So let's open a couple of Ask HN/Pool HN: Are you an investor? Did you invest in a coop-like startup? Would you invest in a coop-like startup? Under which conditions?
It's the intrinsic structure of being owned by the workers that makes co-operatives less financially attractive to outside investors. My previous comment about why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166080
Co-operatives also have to compete in the marketplace (compete in both the costs & revenue) with other companies that are not co-ops. This financial pressure from other global economic actors is what causes co-ops like Mondragon to outsource labor to subcontractors or workforce in other countries who are not true members of the co-op. Mondragon appliances, etc still have to compete in sales with everyone else.
If so, the question that remains is a relatively open one. Let's say that, for the sake of argument, we reached the conclusion that organising companies as co-operatives would bring considerable social benefits to the majority of people compared to the current way or organising work. If this were true, what would have to be changed so as to make them a reasonable option? Perhaps our values of prioritising economic values over social value? Perhaps regulations on shareholders?
Yanis Varoufakis proposes a system that answers this question in Another Now [0], but I'm also curious to hear other answers.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49098225-another-now
You can always start a co-op which makes a WoW clone. Nothing stops people from that. The fact that it's practically never done says a lot about real-life applicability of co-ops.
I think it proves that co-ops are just worse at complex tasks. A company requires just one dedicated and driven individual (the founder), and the rest of people can be hired and just do tasks assigned to them. Whereas, in a coop, the decision-making process is much harder, and just doesn't work as well for complex organizations. And, game devving (like many other complex tasks) is so hard and fraught with perils, that you don't want to throw in additional complications if you don't have to.
Worker collectives, because they are uncommon, and do not operate under well-known legal framework, face significant obstacles in, for example, getting loans.
This seems to be very much in contrast with the linked article. There are significant legal obstacles as well as much resistance in the form of illegal violence.
That is viable in some cases.
The underlying issue is that distribution of corporate growth is relegated to a small percentage of all organizations out there. To put it simply, a small percentage of companies above a certain size grow quickly while the rest are slowly dying. As a result, not only are the distribution of outsized monetary rewards highly biased in favor of a small percentage of companies, but the fight to maintain position once that period of growth is over is intense. Modern companies growth fast, survive for a time, and then go away.
This leads to an unfortunate dynamic where any competitive advantage that leads to either growth or survival matters. If a top-down managerial structure where rewards inside of the company are distributed to a small layer of top level managers and owners provides even a slight economic advantage over an employee-owned structure, the former is going to win out.
This may sound unfair, and it likely is, but the question becomes: if I am a worker at 'traditional corp.' with a 100K salary and a funded 401K, will I do better than if I was a worker at 'employee-owned corp.' with the same salary but an ownership share? The deciding point being that traditional corp. has a 20% chance of going away over the next ten years while employee-owned corp. has a 20%+ chance of going away over the same period of time.
This is hard to say. I think there are two competing trends: 1. Co-operative ownership is becoming more prevalent. This is particularly true in situations where entrepreneurial bricolage (making do with what you have on hand) is a factor. 2. However, there aren't that many examples of legitimate co-operative ownership in larger corporations. They do exist, but the sample size is small.
As far as I'm aware, employee co-ownership is more associated with the concept of 'psychological ownership', where the organization tries to make an employee feel like they own a portion of the company. This can come from actual ownership via RSUs or stock options, or through other factors, such as company culture. The idea here being that psychological ownership increases employee effectiveness.
The issue is that 1. top management generally has more influence than owners and 2. it's not always (or usually) in the best interest of the employee to have more than a small percentage of their net worth tied up in their employer.
Think about it this way. In a (greatly simplified model of) democracy, voters essentially "own" the government. However, the politicians they elect as well as an employed bureaucracy are the ones generally calling the shots. Democracy works because it provides a floor where, if performance falls to a certain point, the top management layer is replaced by a different set of managers.
However, corporations are not governments. Governments (especially local governments) - and bureaucracies - last a very long time, to the extent that they generally survive well after whatever state they were originally part-of goes away. In other words, they're robust. You can have a bad set of elected, or unelected, officials and regardless of what happens, odds are that the entity they represent will still be around decades if not centuries later.
Corporations are the opposite. The failure rate is sizable. Like I wrote in my previous post, a small number of larger companies are adding economic value, while the rest are in the process of fading away. The question here is whether a co-operative model provides enough of a benefit beyond the standard corporate ownership structure to provide some benefit to either of these phases.
My guess is that the answer is no for the growth phase and, depending on the organization/industry, maybe or a slight yes for the later maintenance phase. That said, the sample size of employee owned co-operatives in growth-oriented industries is so small that I don't know if the data exists to take a shot at answering either question.
First, do you know what Soviet stands for? The relevant meaning of the word in Russian is "council", and it refers to "worker councils", "soldier councils", etc. that made the revolution happen (the Petrograd Soviet, or council, in St Petersburg was the main alternative power structure to Provisional Government that took over from the czar), that were supposed to "democratically" run things like factories, and send delegates to higher levels to democratically run things there. Somehow, this all ended up a dictatorship, as it did pretty much every time something like this has been tried.
Then, economically, co-ops are perfectly legal in the West. There are some successful ones, like REI. I shop at REI a lot, and I really don't give a damn if employers are wage laborers or co-op members - I doubt most people do. If anything, some people might prefer co-ops because they would give them the same warm fuzzy feeling as green-washed products do, so a co-op would start out with a competitive advantage at least among the well-off liberals. Why not go build a coop to replace your local restaurant or a laundromat; or Exxon, or Google, or whatever? Perhaps because generally, it doesn't work so well? Heck, I don't know how much of a "real" co-op REI is anymore, at this scale.
We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide. To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
Now, we as people are also compassionate and we want the elderly to not starve and we want the infirm cared for. We have instituted social programs to cover these smaller cases. But, to believe that a normal human being can do nothing and that someone else will provide for them - wholesale across our country - doesn't seem very sustainable.
I'm not sure what you want, or I may be mischaracterizing your view - if so I apologize. If you can explain better your point or who would provide for those who don't want to, I would appreciate it.
So then why do we have inherited wealth, why not ban that. Make things equitable, born with nothing but you can scavenge yourself.
> To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
You mean like "private property"?
Your logic only makes sense in an equitable world, where everyone is born equal, but that's not the case. Just look at the wealth inequalities around the world, like 1% of people owns majority of all wealth.
I don't think the goal is equity but equality. At least, that is my goal. I want the lowliest shoeshine boy to have the opportunity to do amazing things.
I make no apologies for the country I was born or the circumstances. I grew up on a poor farm in a broken trailer surrounded by my backwoods relatives. I chose to do something different.
My view does not make sense only in an 'equitable world' - consider the inverse. If everyone decides not to work because they are 'owed food so as to not starve' then who will harvest the grain, who will sow the fields, who will till the earth. A policy that would require people to work and then give away all of their product is not equity its slavery.
Look, at some point we may be in a true post-scarcity environment where we can fabricate food/clothing/items with just energy from an abundant resource. At that time, I will consider this question anew.
Until then, I just don't think it has legs.
During the pandemic, many (most?) US schools stopped charging to feed kids during the school day. Food suddenly became free. My own daughter still brought lunch from home every day, but a lot of kids ate better than they had been, and food scarcity, in that small context, stopped being an issue. This year they seem to be ending that, but it definitely demonstrated that we could do more than we are, if we wanted to.
> So then why do we have inherited wealth, why not ban that.
It doesn't say that people are forbidden from having more than they themselves can provide. For example, if someone chooses to grant them some wealth voluntarily, as is the case with inheritance.
Humans are entitled to nothing, because there is no metaphysical overseer that decides who does and does not deserve things. Entitlement is an idea created and perpetuated by human beings to justify certain kinds of behaviour.
> To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.
Capitalist labour, by its very nature, is an extractive process that takes from workers what they earned. This is the genesis of that thing known as 'profit'. I followed the same logic as you when I became a socialist bent on upturning the current social order.
> But, to believe that a normal human being can do nothing and that someone else will provide for them - wholesale across our country - doesn't seem very sustainable.
I don't really care about what's sensible or sustainable, compared to what is good and just. (Our current way of doing things is certainly neither!) I wouldn't feed someone because they're infirm and can't get their own food; I'd feed them because they're hungry, end of story.
The reason why I saw no homeless people growing up is because the commies locked them all up.
Sometimes this is not straight forward for example when you have some responsibilities in your life, or when your career is too specialized with little to no transferable skill (like when you´re proficient at an internal process of a company).
Unless we could quit and be self sustainable without a job, then yes, at that point you could say one can quit anytime we want to find another place to work for.
Its not that 'finding a job is easy' its that we are not slaves and while we can not necessarily choose who we labor for, we can choose who we do not labor for.
You need to work for a living, and while you´re not a slave (because it´s not forced labor), your livelihood depends on it - and that has a conditioning effect on many levels (emotional, financial, relationships...)
Of course we always used a form of work to sustain ourselves, the difference might just be on the rewards we get from it.
Maybe that´s why some people exaggerate when they say they´re slaves of work, perhaps is a coping mechanism that allows them to frame that activity as something they´re being forced to do, rather than a deliberate choice they´re not happy about.
> #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
We change who controls our labor by making those who control our labor us, the workers creating wealth, not the heirs who own companies and expropriate our surplus labor time via dividend profit checks.
The idea that a worker controls his own labor seems to be the one idea that is alien to your prescription.
If a person wants to 100% control their own labor, they can create a business and provide their services (at a price someone else will pay for them) to the world at large.
What is alien to me is that a person believes they can take over other peoples property (factories, existing IP [go to microsoft, say 'windows is mine now' and try to sell your copy of the source). I'm a big fan of property rights.
So, I think we mostly agree right? Someone should be able to start their own business, using their own funds, and have their chance to excel in this world.
Some of that system is government, where laws naturally benefit larger business and are explicitly aimed at "small businesses," which are still traditional work-for-someone-else concerns with four or more employees.
Some of that system is non-governmental, where it seems to be much easier for an S-corp with a few employees to get an operating loan than it is for a self-employed person.
It is easy to say that the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under the bridge, but it is a too-narrow focus that ignores many, many assumptions.
speak for yourself, i sure as hell can't.
My friend - grow to where you can.
I wish you the best.
- Would you be willing to oppose corporations controlling the government with bribes/campaign contributions? - Support a judicial system where poorer people can access justice? - Tell your representatives that wage theft should be punished as seriously as theft and fraud?
* I would support completely disbanding corporations who bribe officials, and jailing its officers
* I think the biggest problem with our judicial system is the prevalence of plea deals leading to a lifetime of regret for those who ignorantly take them. Fix it.
* I believe wage theft is theft and would like to see jail time for those involved.
I imagine I’ve a harsher view than you on these elements. But, more to the point, even if I wasn’t this opinionated I dont think this hate is warranted.
I categorised 'wish you the best' the same as 'thoughts and prayers' but you probably didn't mean it like that. I wanted to draw a contrast between actions that only effect an individual, like your example of quitting a bad job, and actions that effect society, i.e. changing the rules to close the loopholes that businesses use to exploit their workers.
I think we both agree that systematic societal change would be a good thing. Cool.
#2 There are more options than "private individuals" and "government control." The author specifically says, "Cooperatives and communes, organized and controlled locally, are two avenues to pursue." Feasible or not, neither of those options are "government control."
In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/
That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US.
Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%.
This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement.
Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase.
Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase.
And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers.
It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich.
And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor.
Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth.
Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question.
They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.
Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally.
Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?
IMO, a better question is to ask what allowed the single investor to become an investor to begin with. The nature of investing means the investor must be able to also lose all their capital. What can we do as a society to make easier for the 99 other employees to 'invest'. For me this means having social safety nets like healthcare and UBI so that people can take less salary or risk what little they have in a venture like you originally described.
Had Bolt made it, those employees would have become investors...
It's all about luck IMO
I think the sad truth is that a lot of us don't necessarily believe deep-down that us forgoing, say, 10% of our potential income will actually be an investment into the world but will simply be sucked up somewhere else. That's why I like schemes like micro-investment where you can see that your money is genuinely invested in making the world better.
Do the math.
Intel employs 120k people. The CEO makes $10M per year.
Distribute his salary evenly to everyone at the company, it's not even a 0.2% increase to the average person's pay.
Let's say there's 10 execs like this. Still not even 2% (and there aren't 10 execs like that).
Most of the megacaps look the same. The salaries are massive. But they employ a LOT of people, and the average salaries at those companies are high.
You can find edge cases for sure with smaller startups that are wildly successful - or Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
A counterpoint with 5 minutes of searching: from [1], Peter Kern (3rd highest paid CEO) got $296M in 2022 overseeing ~15k employees (from [2]). Distribute that salary evenly and everyone gets a ~19k boost which, on an average base of $108k (from [3]), is about +17%, if I'm not mistaken.
If you want an even more ludicrous example, David Baszucki (Roblox, 7th highest, also [1]) got $232M in 2022 overseeing ~1600 employees (from [4]). Even distribution gives a $145k boost on an average base of ~$135k (from [5]) is about +107%. Which is a bit better than Intel's +0.2%, no?
In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
[1] https://www.equilar.com/reports/95-equilar-new-york-times-to... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EXPE/expedia/numbe... [3] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Expedia%2C_Inc... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279348/roblox-number-of... [5] https://www.comparably.com/companies/roblox/salaries
Congratulations. You found one extreme case, and included links to some others.
There are many.
There are also 5000+ large companies in the US that employ tens of thousands of people. 20,000+ companies globally.
This isn't the average. Use a normal distribution, and you'd expect 20+ companies with 3 sigma (where CEO pay would increase pay by 6%+). Corporate profits definitely don't have a normal distribution, neither does CEO pay. This isn't surprising to me.
Elon Musk has $200B. He's an edge case of an edge case. Should we pretend all billionaires are like him, too? The average Billionaire has almost 50x less money. The average CEO makes much less than 50x the links you cited.
The average CEO for the top 350 companies made $24M in 2020 (a good year). The average CEO for all companies over the last decade makes less than $1M - according to BLS it's $190k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/top-executives.htm#:~:tex.... And that's the average not the median - so people like the links you provided are skewing that higher than the median...
> In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
This is called cherry picking. You can always find what you're looking for if you're willing to cherry pick hard enough on a large dataset.
Your starting hypothesis is that CEO pay is ridiculous - and you're finding examples to confirm that - rather than looking at averages to easily disprove the idea that the examples you cited are the exception not the norm.
Still you gotta admit there is a problem with CEOs making off with huge salaries/stock value especially in very hot sectors, with some of them even trying to dodge taxes. Sure you can make an argument for the increased salary with the increased responsibilities and risk, but there is no cap there and little say from the employees.
When CEOs make a few lifetime's worth of money in a year while the employee makes far less in a year, that's going to raise inequalities and eventually render systems unstable. The balance is not there.
I couldn't agree more.
It doesn't mean they're the reason workers aren't significantly richer.
Still, I'm interested in your other reasons if you got any.
Imagine a world in which the only product is apples.
If everyone needs 3 apples per day to be healthy and happy - and you only produce 1 apple per person - it does not matter if the richest 0.1% get 200 apples per day. If you distributed them evenly, there is still not enough apples. And distributing them evenly does not even improve things in any significant way.
Sure, it is a problem. The bottom decile that lives on .1 apple per day now gets .3 apples per day. But they still don't even have close to enough apples! Neither does anyone else!
People like to hand-wave this away. But GLOBAL GDP per capita is less than $11,000 per year. That is NOT enough money for everyone to have a house with a white picket fence, and a car in the garage, and a chicken in the oven, and a wife who stays at home and takes care of the kids. It's not even enough for everyone to live a life that resembles being upper lower class in France.
And remember, the rich pay most of the taxes. Now you have to pay an even share - so of your $11,000, 25% of that is taxes! You only actually get ~$8,200.
~$8,200 per year wouldn't even qualify you for a mortgage to buy a $35,000 house. That's barely buying you enough materials to build a dollhouse. It's not buying you land anywhere you'd want live. And it's definitely not enough to connect to utilities.
Distribution is a problem. THE problem is total output. ~$11,000 per person per year. Remember this is in inflated 2022 dollars - ~$9000 in 2019 dollars - this is including all-time highs due to massive stimulus and unprecedented levels of debt. ~$9000 in 2019 dollars is Mexico's GDP per capita - Bulgaria & Belarus. I love Mexico to death - but these are not paradises.
Globally, the much bigger problem is that there are not enough apples being produced!
Locally, in the US and the EU - GDP per capita is quite high. If we lived in a socialized society, sure, things could definitely be better for minimum wage workers.
But I'm quitting my job at FAANG tomorrow to be a yoga teacher if I make the same amount of money. I don't know who in their right mind is going to continue being a nurse or most doctors. I'm not sure why many people are going to do hard physical labor like construction or dangerous jobs like fighting fires and crime - if everyone makes the same amount of money... Good luck keeping production high and society functioning...
Given how my (non-western) dollar converts to USD, I wouldn't hire a US person for grunt work unless he/she had specific expertise to teach or a local knowledge bias for when my firm expands to the US. So there's less inflow to the US, and only to a select few people. So where does that lead us to? The US printing money and doing as much as it can to mitigate the side effects.
So your population has only a select few who get the inflows. And you can tax them for distribution.
And chances are you're not going to get other countries to spend their apples. You could get workers to accept lower pay rates, but I highly doubt it's possible without upsetting stability. Are you doomed to huge amounts of money printing then? Maybe you'd get away with it since you're the US after all.
How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?
> How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?
Steve Jobs somewhat famously never wrote any code for Apple. So the answer to how a person becomes the sole shareholder without doing any work is that they focus on things like bank loans, which enable the hiring of people to do the "work" that leads to the company's success. Same as any company.
Many, many, many companies are headed by people who have never engaged in the low-level work done by that companies. Many of them are there because they deal with finance.
Presumably the CEO bring something to the table - capital, fundraising ability. I mean why else have him/her?
CEO hires a bunch of employees, all who get paid. The game is a success and since he put the capital at risk, he gets most the reward. The employees get their salary.
Unfair?
Well, what if it doesn't work out? Employees all get their salary, CEO loses his capital.
Workers can certainly get a similar trade off in some industries - plenty of tech start-ups will pay you $50,000/yr (when you could be making $300,000 at Google) and a chunk of the company.
Why not take that job if you want CEO-type risk and reward?
You're so close! In fact, there's an expectation that the more you pay a CEO, the better they perform, and that those making the most must be the best. This seems to be a largely-unexamined assumption that "just makes sense," but it turns out when you try to see whether it's true, it's not[0].
By and large, highly-paid CEOs are a drain on corporate profits. As the research paper I linked shows, even those highly-compensated CEOs who win awards end up performing worse than their non-award-winning counterparts.
Everybody seems to like the idea of a CEO providing strong leadership and deserving their high compensation. The stress, they say, makes it worth it. Besides, if we didn't pay them that much, someone else would! And yet the facts don't seem to support any of that.
0. http://d1c25a6gwz7q5e.cloudfront.net/reports/2014-02-2-Armst...
Instead of raising $10M for a business through a CEO (either their own money or through road shows), there is nothing stopping a company of 100 employees from ponying up $100,000 of their own money and reaping a share of the rewards (or losing it all).
Are you really that surprised that workers prefer a risk-free salary instead?
I mean I have the option of taking cash or equity at my company and I turn down the equity every time. I don't begrudge the ones who take the risk and make 10x what I do.
I'll be honest, you don't seem to understand how businesses work today - you're working from a flawed understanding.
Okay.
You're forgetting who decides CEO pay - the board / shareholders.
They are aware of this. And despite that, they keep these pay packages.
Is it fair? I dunno. I personally don't think CEO's should be getting paid what they do. Does anyone care? No.
Is anyone's salary fair? I dunno.
If you distribute the CEO's pay to the rest of the company it wouldn't materially impact average workers wages (less than a 1% increase) - except in rare cases (less than 5% of large companies).
Why should I get raged out that my CEO makes $100M+ per year? If you distribute that to everyone at the company - it's not even a 1% increase. There's much easier ways I can make 1% more money...
It's really not worth discussing except in rare cases - and those are exceptions that don't change the larger picture.
When those come in at 90% or 95% of target based on company performance, and yet the CEO still takes home tens of millions, that's when what seems like a tiny thing on a raw number basis, a matter of $2k for a single employee, can seem like a large thing. As an employee who performed well is still feeling the impact of company performance that fell short of expectations, probably on the basis of nothing the employee did, probably more attributably to the CEO (who helped set the expectations, and is more likely to have had a material impact on the result), it's natural for employees to at least wonder why the impact seems to be falling more on them.
That kind of thing is very common, not a super-rare case.
What is actual work?
The coding or the graphics or perhaps the music? What about the QA?
The way your comment is formatted, I guess you don't mean the accounting, parole, shipping and receiving.
On this forum, I often see developers lamenting how much unrelated work, overhead and meetings they have to do and how saying how they could be more productive if they could just be allowed to sit down and code.
How much more "actual work" can you and others like you do when you have to meet with lawyers, file trademarks, order hardware/software while staying in a budget. Or perhaps, the CEO does some of those tasks so you can do the "actual work".
The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.
They have that trillion because we buy things from them... from Amazon, from Tesla, etc. You don't like those things exist? Stop exchanging your money for their goods/services.
You don't like existing? Just die. Nobody's stopping you.
Solution #1 - don't buy properly crap food that is literally slowly killing you and making/keeping you addicted, while you pay the money to said corporations. A generally smart move. Yes they also own normal food(TM) brands, but here in Europe there are tons of alternatives on shelves, ie 1 cocoa powder from nestle, other 5 from small often fair trade producers.
Maybe in US Amazon owns everything, although I doubt it. But US is what, 5% of the world? In most of the world, Amazon is OK but nothing big. In Switzerland for example, there is no Amazon and its non-trivial to order anything from other countries, many sellers simply do not ship here. Stuff comes via Swiss post/small companies, from local eshops. So yeah not giving much to Bezos even if I wanted to.
Now what did I solve though? Nothing apart from good feeling (and paying more for postal serviecs and eating more healthily)
But this is leftist propaganda that makes no sense.
I just disproved that ALL billionaires (including the centibillionaires) do not have a meaningful amount of money to distribute to the country (or the globe) in any reasonably fair way.
Singling out the centibillionaires - Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Gates and Buffet - doesn't make my point irrelevant. If you're only looking at them - their contribution is more unequal, sure! But they don't even have half the billionaire total. They aren't even half the problem. Taking their money wouldn't even do half as much!
Do they have disproportionate power? Absolutely!
Are they using that to get even more money? I think it's hard to argue they aren't.
Is that a problem? I think so.
Are they skimming all the money so we have nothing? This idea is laughably wrong, and the amount of times it is parroted is infuriating.
Consider: the bottom half of American wage-earners (those below $97,000(!)) have combined wealth of approximately 1% of the American total.
So maybe we're talking about the wrong 1% - we can instead consider those sharing <1% of the 'American pie' who's income is hopelessly distant from anything that could dig them out of the bottom.
I have to imagine, the parrot in the room is not me. I wonder why somebody "far left" can fool themselves this way.
It is about the expropriation of a worker's surplus labor time by the heirs. It is about control of all the worker's work time (surplus and non-surplus) by the heirs.
Correction: It says 4.2T on the site you linked when I clicked through to the google doc [0].
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE9...
That was $1.3T they made in the best 11-month period (which they have since lost $622B).
They had $4.2T at their all-time high, and are now at $3.6T.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person...
The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...
Do the math. It's literally division.
When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal.
But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich.
Is inequality a thing? Yes.
Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about.
Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.
Belle Époque was circa 100 years after the French Revolution.
The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Immense concentration of wealth affords the power to significantly affect change and mold society. This power in the hands of the few is the actual issue, given that social stratum is strongly correlated with political outlook and mores.
Billionaires are different.
They own the controlling shares of a corporation, even to the point where their votes count for more in the case of Facebook. They can take on corporate debt then use that to buy another controlling stake into another corporation. Use that corporations assets for more leverage to take out mortgages, etc. Their ability to then borrow against their own stocks gives them even more working capital without paying any amount of tax while they continue to differ capital gains. I'm not even going into the lobbyists or international tax schemes here. Just the power of layered leverage.
I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm usually somewhere near the centre and tilt a bit to the left on most economic issues. I'm not against capital formation. But the economic and social damage that most billionaires exert on people in wealthy societies is a very real thing and it's going to keep getting more severe as computers allow for increasingly more centralization of information and control. "Data is the new oil." And all that.
We don't need billionaires (or, soon, trillionaires) to have a well functioning capitalist economy. We could have a ceiling and we could refuse entry families that exceed these limits to our countries. Same thing with open source, etc.
14k per person is actually a years worth of minimum wage (7.25x40x50).
The average US household is 2.6 ppl, so that would give 36k per household (you know, kids). That is serious money to a lot of people. Another way
On top of that, if you include the people worth 100M+ into the pie, the total amount of money goes up a lot, as there are so many more of them.
Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, just the sheer money they have that others don't is not the problem.
Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to have an outsized effect on society.
BTW, you seem to have misread the site you linked. It says that billionaire wealth grew by $1.3T in 11 months, not that they have $1.3T. It's literally in the first box on the page: "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion during the roughly first eleven months of the coronavirus pandemic -- a 44% spike in wealth. This increase in wealth is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,900 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America." So that would be a one-time $3,900 check to everyone just for 2020.
The second box says "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to $4.18 trillion in March 2021." So you're off by quite a bit, and seem to have misread your source site consistently.
That's a recent example of a single person behaving incredibly badly, but a list of people using their wealth to do things like disport beach access, reduce housing options, badly mistreat employees, and so on, it would be endless.
0. https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...
The fact that they planned for it to go from Los Angeles to the Bay (340+ miles almost entirely nothing) is pretty strong evidence that basically everyone involved was only trying to win elections and not really make HSR happen.
Los Angeles to San Diego is makes much more sense. Just having a bullet train from the West Side to DTLA to Long Beach to somewhere in OC would've had massively higher ridership and cost less money.
Everyone involved just wanted to waste money to win elections (and to no surprise, it worked).
I hate Elon as much as anyone. If he even played a small part in this - the much larger blame goes to the politicians.
Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet.
It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you.
Explanation by a game designer: https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g
The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed.
The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!
I think that there are a lot of alternatives to both our current Western economic system and the Soviet Union, and I think that if you try to look a bit closer at many of the systems "the kids today" are talking about, in particular the principles and values behind them, without getting caught up in the labels, you'll be pleasantly surprised!
Perhaps you would find this list of books I compiled interesting? https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
The USSR and China were abusive because you need to be abusive to force people to give over labour for which they don't own the proceeds of. Small time farmers in Vietnam had riots over the collectivization of their land into communes (and the "Communists" there dropped it in favor of capitalism). These are subsistence-level farms who can't read or write - yet they understood the injustice of taking away one's freedom to live of the fruits of your own labour.
A far better solution is to separate the economic system with the political one (which communism tries to meld). There is nothing that says you can't have a capitalist system that protects worker rights, or that heavily taxes and redistributes.
Rather than killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, figure out how best to use the eggs to the benefit of everyone.
The author of the article and the related book is 76 years old. Are you calling him a kid?
An employer does not give a raise and disposable income to a worker. The worker is the creator of wealth, and the heirs collecting dividend profits are who are being given to. Your confusion about the directionality of created wealth within the relations of production is the whole point of the article.
Marxists do think that way and they are wrong. The thing they are missing is the third factor of production (labor, capital, land) that was magically omitted from classical economics to make the conflict strictly between labor and capital. You end up with the left right divide blaming each other for wrongdoing even though these two factors are in symbiosis. It's the slumlord on the sidelines that enters the equation unnoticed, convinces the the parties to hate each other, while sucking away their blood like a good parasite.
I’ll check out that long video (listening now, sounds like they get past the introductions at the 30 minute mark) but here’s a couple shorter videos about it meanwhile. The guest of the podcast’s articles are here: https://gameofrent.com/
https://youtu.be/jFQgOy-5Tng Land Value Taxation and the Built Environment (10 min)
https://youtu.be/h0DvT8_6Hx0 What are the on-the-ground effect of the land value tax? Lesson from the Pennsylvania experience (5 min)
https://youtu.be/wHwFyXDx2_U (28 min) For the Land is Mine. An old documentary with more philosophical/economic background of the idea.
100,000,000 dead but let's try it again, because that wasn't real communism.
> Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it.
Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.
They're killing union organizers because unionization _does_ work... when the organizers don't die in the middle of setting up a union.
(Of course, "works" doesn't mean "works perfectly and always", or that unions don't have their own internal challenges and risk of bureaucratization etc. etc.)
https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism...
What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That's not nearly as much fun as whining.
We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds.
However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining".
Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".
At least according my grandparent's that's an absolute falsehood. Unless you assume "live well" in a 600 sq. ft. house doing manual labour in the sun and having your spouse take care of grandma who is dying of cancer for which there is no treatment.
The "modern" estate tax was enacted in 1916. It was repealed for a single year -- 2010 -- but returned the following year and is currently in force. The exclusion amount has grown considerably over time.
This feels like an oft-repeated trope to me. Do you have books or stats that back this up?
Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour.
There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour.
Unionization doesnt work well when there's so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming.
The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it's a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement.
So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers.
The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits.
The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.