> Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?
Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract.
Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than garbage collector jobs.
We can't have a debate from the position of exceptions.
The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
The fact is that this inequality manifests itself in far more different ways before it appears as income/wealth inequality.
Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter. Wealth inequality comes far later.
> Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter. Wealth inequality comes far later.
If you are poor enough, chances are fairly good you will never get to touch a piano to even find out if you can be good or bad at it.
So no, it does not come far before someone is rich and poor. If you are poor, a whole lot of avenues close off to you early regardless of skill, and the odds of you remaining poor is overwhelmingly higher than that you will be able to overcome it, irrespective of how hard you work or how smart you are.
> Bill Gates is good at a lot of other things including programming. And I'm not talking about skill. Its also work, persistence and variety of other things that add up.
According to the metrics our society uses to reward him, he's quite litterally the 85.000.000.000x dev.
>>People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
Because in "modern" society it's not politically correct to recognize, let alone discuss, any differences whatsoever between age, race, sex, education, skill, etc. If you have the gall to try, you'll immediately be torn apart by the howling "progressive" masses.
> The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
What I'm questioning is not whether people's merits are unequal, but the tool used to measure them. My point is that a measure is inherently relative.
The thought experiment I offer is another way of measuring someone's utility. It is inherenthy flawed and unfit to the needs of our society. But again, the person I responded to didn't establish that his measuring tool is an optimization function for our society either.
Also this is not related to whether two people are compared on their job, but to whether two people good at different jobs are compared.
Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract.
Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than garbage collector jobs.