There's an older tradition of thought on the matter with better intellectual pedigree and epistemological hygiene: "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

The easiest way to earn a million dollars is to start a business that makes sense and work your ass off running it well. Maybe that's even the easiest way to reliably earn ten million dollars, a million isn't what it used to be.

But at some scale that's far short of a billion the game becomes about asymmetry.

This asymmetry takes many forms. For Steve Cohen it was trading on inside information, for Jim Simons it was (as far as anyone can tell) novel mathematics.

For most of the technology companies in the 21st century it was about privatizing the commons and/or externalizing costs that a well-refereed market would place on your company.

The United States used robust public/private partnerships and a vibrant, thriving university system to build the greatest pile of latent wealth in the sum history of humanity during the 20th century. Everything from the transistor to the integrated circuit to the laser to Velcro to tang to the internet to the web was a product of this holy Trinity of innovation: defense and related public money, well-refereed private companies (even a notable natural monopoly or two under muscular regulation), and a paved path between the Academy and the other two. The gains accrued enough to individuals to keep everyone motivated but largely in the form of status, which confers a desirable station in life but does not compound directly into political power. Feynman and von Neumann and Einstein all seem to have led very enviable lives and are easily as smart and accomplished as anyone in the front row at the last Inauguration (and if we're honest, a lot more), but none of them had a billion dollars or untoward access to the levers of government. All of them paid far more into the ocean of latent wealth deeded to the body politic than they took out of it.

And at some point (my money is on the kneecapping of Brooksley Born, whose architect is now resigning in disgrace from everything for Epstein affiliation and whose most recent post was on the board of pg's protege) the flow reversed. The access caste started to be d away from the competence caste and the singular fortune deeded to the public started to accumulate as a dozen private fortunes that were substantially just the 20th century stuff with a named owner.

You get a billion dollars by stealing it, this is qualitatively different, a distinction of kind not of degree, from how you get a million or even a few tens of millions.

To get a trillion dollars as we have now seen, well first you steal a billion.

▲

groundzeros2015 7 hours ago | parent [-]

PG actually addresses this in other essays. That adage does have more history. But the world literally changed;

1. In pre-industrial society there is less technological leverage, so that it’s very difficult for an incidental or group to help very many people.

Perhaps the closest analog before then was land discovery or conquest (taking other people’s stuff).

2. Post-enlightenment society is one of the first which doesn’t predefine your social role by birth. So you can claim new roles and status from your own wealth.

America has a much stronger sense of 2 which is why European attitudes towards wealth differ.

▲

reinitctxoffset 6 hours ago | parent [-]

My copy of Hackers and Painters is the first printing, I'm extremely versed in the last twenty years of pg's writing and public speech, and the glowing arc of that thought over that time.

Early pg wrote about Lisp and engineers should do their own testing and commodity FreeBSD on commodity Intel was better than Oracle on Sun for starting a company.

He wrote that makers and managers needed different schedules. He wrote that math has asymmetrical upsides. He wrote that you do things that don't scale while you're in the garage.

In his wheelhouse he was best in the genre, maybe not the Balzac he fancies himself as an essayist or the painter he fancies himself at all, but the best guy to listen to if you were doing a garage band startup that involved the Internet. He was surrounded by legitimate legends like Robert Tappan Morris and Trevor Blackwell, and he wrote about things he understood.

Late Soviet Paul Graham exists as the lobbyist for Garry Tan Y-Combinator, which isn't even really prestigious anymore. As far as the signalling value goes? I'd rather have a strategic from NVIDIA before YC. I would think about YC's money if literally no one else was interested. This is "ChatGPT Tha License Dawg", "die motherfuckers die motherfuckers die" tweets tagging elected officials Y-Combinator he's defending, and the vampire companies he cites as his clean wins are suitable filleted in the rest of the thread that mine would be redundant.

And the real mile marker of a guy whose audience has exceeded his depth is that he's lecturing a room full of people about how a single operation on the iPhone calculator app can teach you more about government and economics than is apparently understood by someone who has survived eight years in Congress designed to destroy people like her, who has an Economics degree cum laude from Boston University that she got while working as a bartender to support herself and her family after her father died, a situation with no parallel in pg's life or that of anyone adjacent to him in either it's highs or lows.

I got into this business substantially because pg's writing was so motivating to twenty year old me, and for that I'm still grateful. And just like I hope Kanye gets back on his Lexipro and starts making great music again, I hope that pg goes back to his roots and starts printing great technical and startup essays again instead of spewing solid waste.

But just like I can't follow Kanye down the "death con three to the jews in hollywood" road, I can't follow pg down the "think about the billionaires and don't listen to the honors economist multiple-term congresswoman" road.

One is dramatically more offensive in it's form, one is dramatically more toxic in it's substance, because there are people who take it seriously.

▲

groundzeros2015 6 hours ago | parent [-]

So do you have a counterpoint to his argument that 1 and 2 enabled new methods and scales of wealth creation?

▲

reinitctxoffset 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I wrote a 542 token rebuttal to his argument that you originally replied to, but to zoom in on that particular nub of a much more complicated picture:

No serious person acting in good faith disputes that new methods of wealth creation have started appearing at a dramatically higher rate in the last two or three hundred years than any precedent before that. Everyone, including AOC (who I agree with in this instance but am not in general a huge fan of, just to be clear, I can respect a person's credentials without blindly endorsing them), would concede that point cleanly unless they were trolling.

The second point is so ill-formed as to verge on oxymoronic when examined against either of mechanism on the ground or Bayesian prior of history. New methods of wealth creation have triggered market failures admitting new methods of wealth centralization a number of times in recent history, the Gilded Age being perhaps the poster child for this failure mode, and the Great Depression being perhaps the poster child of the magnitude of that failure mode.

The sleight of hand here is recursive, the two points are one that is trivially true followed by the shellcode that looks like a test fixture, and the shellcode is a subtle rename, `s/time bash -c 'my-command'/sudo bash -c 'my-commmand/`. It's almost reasonable, except that it grants arbitrary privileges to something that definitely shouldn't have arbitrary privileges.

In both instances, pg is smart enough to know he's arguing in bad faith.

▲

groundzeros2015 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Both points support the same conclusion. You can create wealth now without taking it. Glad you agree.

> The second point is so ill-formed as to verge on oxymoronic

Sounds like name calling. I don’t see a rebuttal.

> am not in general a huge fan of, just to be clear, I can respect a person's credentials

Are the credentials here a Bachelors from BU? Is this an LLM?

▲

reinitctxoffset 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If you're not aware, in addition to being generally frowned upon on HN because it's zero-signal snark, the no doubt satisfying BU diss is also such a meme about socially awkward teenagers that it's a bit in a hit movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtMmhcNKn0o.

At "Glad you agree" we've left plausible benefit of the doubt that you're arguing in good faith and so I'll bow out with one procedural grade discharge, which is that the LLM accusation is quite trivially prohibited in the stare decis of dang's rulings over the years, but still sometimes rallies downvotes, so my credentials as a human are that no LLM I'm aware of (and I work in AI) has YouTube channels of code streams.

Chain of custody on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511333 -> https://www.youtube.com/@b7r6-c3t so no, I'm not an LLM. I have Opus read my comments after I post them so I don't persist in trivial errors of reasoning, but I credit LLMs for their output just as I expect mine credited.

	▲	groundzeros2015 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh was your response not sarcastic name calling? The llm comment comes from this bizzare integration of random unrelated PG facts. As if you asked it to integrate that style. I was actually not knocking BU. I’m asking if the authoritative credentials you were referring to is a bachelors degree from a public university. Because most people have those and many of them don’t share then belief. If you are playing the credential game doesn’t PG have a Harvard PhD?