> You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.
And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.
> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".
Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.
> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"
Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.
Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.
Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".
In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.
> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.
Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.
> The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their own benefit.
This is correct, and the 'poor' do the same, within the limits of their abilities.
> This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income...
This is the Internet and saying this is free. Even so, I don't care about you specifically, I am talking about the average behaviour at the level of the society. There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.
Typical employees (the 'poor') have way fewer levers to do this, as well as less financial education, due to the way the system is structured, but the desire to keep more of your earnings to the detriment of everyone else is the largely the same.
> It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs.
> Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation.
In retrospect, it is true that I presented a false dichotomy since I never considered that your defense might be "there is virtually 0 correlation".
I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.
> you're not necessarily even in the majority.
I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.
> Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"?
Yes, I did, but then you are simply wrong.
> Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.
You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term). So Musk is greedy and vain. After he got his 100+ millions from the sale of PayPal, would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth? Probably not.
> In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.
Finally, we agree on something. This is exactly it. The problem is the system, which I am happy to change. The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.
Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.
> To me, it's not an axiom.
I struggle to understand why anyone would think this. So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money? That would be an incredible statement to defend.
> The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike?
If you have subjectively decided that Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI are not impressive, then I'm afraid we simply view the world differently. I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress.
The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures. I can.
> Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler?
Anther clue that we simply think very differently. Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example. Imagine if this same amount of work, ingenuity, scrappiness was applied from 'good'. Then we might have had two rich entrepreneurs that you'd find just as despicable simply for being rich.
> Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.
Back to what the real problem is - the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.
I don't think you're stupid or a liar, but there are two strong trends I'm noticing recently - playing the contrarian and a hate for the rich.
To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth. What you've done in previous replies is a typical reductionist approach, which is to pretend that a multivariate problem, with those variables on various continuums, can be presented as "Elon Musk doesn't work harder than someone stocking shelves with shampoos". I honestly do not understand how someone frequenting HN could genuinely think that this is a valuable argument.
In simpler terms, if you exclude all the obvious counter-examples like inheritance, crypto pump and dumps, lottery winners and so on, it is empirically true that richer people work harder than poor people. Before you give some example of how some billionaire simply got lucky, I did say about that this is a multivariate equation. There are many, many things that go into it, and luck is one, hard work another.
The simple logic is: you work harder -> your productivity is higher -> you make more money. You may find some exaggerated counter-example, but this is the truth.
If Elon had just been involved in the PayPal business, yeah, he would be some forgotten rich dude living his life on some island. It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.
There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.
Look, to be honest, I just think we have vastly different opinions and views on the world and how it works. There is absolutely nothing in your message that gave me any pause, and I think we start from irreconcilable positions.
> I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.
I do think that there is probably too much inequality for it to be healthy for society, but I am not of the opinion that "billionaires should not exist" or that anyone rich is some version of evil.
I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output. Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.
> I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here
In previous replies you associated hard work with physically strenuous work. I think they are orthogonal concerns. Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities. By your definition, someone shovelling bricks for 8 hours is working harder than someone working 8h in an office. By mine, that is not necessarily true.
Also, even if your definition was true, paying someone purely on how 'hard' they work would still not be a good idea.
> Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.
This sentence does not sound as good as you think it does.
Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".
> I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds
Me neither, but have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX, in a field entirely dominated by national agencies. No matter which way you cut it, SpaceX has ushered in a new era in space exploration. I won't even bother arguing more about this, this is honestly ridiculous.
> Regardless of what other people mean by "hard work", what exactly do you mean by it, and how exactly do the wealthy work harder than everyone else?
You get too caught up in the meaning of "hard work", as if your only purpose it to use its pedantic definition as a gotcha.
Hard work in the way you define it is not and should not be rewarded just for the sake of hard work. It cannot work this way and you don't want it to work this way, regardless of what you may think. If we did that, the world would stop working. So whether the wealthy work more or not is irrelevant.
> Musk
The anti-Musk sentiment is now at cult-like levels and I'm afraid that rational conversation is not on the table anymore. Somehow Elon's name is associated with some of the most revolutionary companies of the past decade, yet still you'd argue that he doesn't work hard, isn't smarter than his engineers, is basically just lucky. Whatever makes you feel better about yourself. If the guy who created SpaceX is not impressive to you, then I'm not sure who is.
He is kind of a moron in his tweets and has done some despicable shit, but I am able to separate this from his accomplishments.
I see this argument frequently and I never could understand quite where it's coming from.
Throwing manual labor into the conversation is disingenuous since nobody would ever make the argument that some tech billionaire has a harder working life than someone shovelling gravel 16h per day. It's obvious that's not what anyone means, so why even point this out?
Elon Musk may not be "smarter" than the engineers who work for him, but then why didn't they start a company like Tesla? The argument for Elon's success is built into the results themselves. There's no going around that, without serious mental gymnastics.
I definitely believe that wealthy people should be taxed at similar or higher levels than the average middle class employee, and I am definitely not some Elon fanatic.
With that said, I do think that there is a reason they have so much money and that they are inventors that are pushing the boundaries. I don't understand why people refuse to accept that some people are smarter, work harder, think at a grander scale.
That is only true in a small amount of areas, like the city center of Amsterdam. Bike lanes are separated from pedestrians, so the only issue would be crossing the street.
Cycling drunk is technically illegal, but often unenforced in the Netherlands. You should see the thousands of obviously 'drunk' people leaving festivals on bikes, under the eyes of the police.
And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.
> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".
Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.
> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"
Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.
Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.
Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".
In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.
> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.
Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.