> There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share...

Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.

Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact.

What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.

Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand.

> The disparity is insane right now though

The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions.

Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor.

In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want.

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satvikpendem 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly, thank you. I can't believe how many people like this there are on a forum that's ostensibly about startups, but I suppose HN has long since stopped being about startups now.

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lkjdsklf 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The entire reason I disagree with the way wealth is shared is because I workedi n startups for years.

I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work.

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satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You agreed to this when you signed up, maybe you should have negotiated more equity instead or went to some other company or started your own company which is the risk (and reward) those founders took. Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.

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lkjdsklf 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You agreed to this when you signed up

Have you ever actually worked in a start up?

That's not how it works. You can negotiate whatever you want. The deal can still change out form under you as new investors come on.

Not to mention, you're negotiating from a point of information asymmetry. They know way more about their plans for the company than you do and will often tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. You can make some attempts at discerning if they're being honest or not, but ultimately you're left to just make a guess.

They also enter the negotiation from a strong position economically. They aren't going to miss a rent payment without a Job. The company itself may be fucked if they can't hire, but not the investors/founders.

So the negotiation is inherently unfair from the start.

> Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.

This is not relevant to whether their actions were moral, ethical or fair.

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csallen an hour ago | parent [-]

You can ask about all of these things during negotiations, and an increasingly large share of people do. I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.

Ultimately it's possible to get screwed, but you can also choose not to work at startups and get a traditional job with less risk.

And the existence of some bad actors and screwy deals in the startup community is not really valid commentary on the greater picture of "the way wealth is shared." That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.

	▲	ceejayoz 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators. Just to be clear, we're talking about the same LLMs that were recently silently tuned to kneecap competitors? https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
	▲	lkjdsklf 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors. Except it's not. It's the norm not the exception. It's pervasive through the industry, and YC and pg have done it themselves to multiple companies. Hence why it was literally turned into a meme plot on a TV show.

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Noumenon72 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm genuinely curious whether HN's political turn represents generational turnover or a small group of vocal agitators. The anti-car faction I can safely say is the latter, the anti-billionaire people I'm not sure about.

	▲	ceejayoz 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My account's from 2010. What if HN hasn't taken a political turn? What if politics took a giant turn, and HN is roughly the same as it was?

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lkjdsklf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why should they pay more than market worth?

That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.

> When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion.

> The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology

The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.

> What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.

Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing.

but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact.

> Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc.

Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.

	▲	csallen 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today. This system doesn't work because what people consider to be fair is completely subjective and arbitrary, and of course under a system like that, people with less money are going to just tell people with more money to give it to them. The only actual fair way to decide prices and wages is to let the market decide. If you truly think that, based on your arbitrary, subjective, personal opinions, that founders should be sharing more wealth than early employees, and that the market's pricing is unethical, then what number would you choose? How do you choose that number exactly? What makes your choice for that number any better than anyone else's choice for that number? And why don't you apply that thinking to other analogous walks of life, like charity and taxes? How much of your income do you give to those less fortunate than you in this great project we call our country, or other in the world? If you think our taxes are too low, how much extra tax do you pay voluntarily? What number is appropriate? At what point is it unethical? There are plenty of billions of people who don't live in the first world who consider even a lower-class American to be living a luxurious, privileged life. Is that person any less deserving of one's funds? I don't think we're ever going to agree here, because a central part of your subjective opinion about what counts as ethical behavior is related to how much more money and many more things some other person has than you. Whereas that doesn't factor into my ethical belief system at all, and at no point in my life have I ever cared how successful anyone else is, and it continues to boggle my mind that others care so much. > The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. This is an unprovable claim, an extreme claim, and almost certainly a false claim. It's also extremely subjective and depends entirely upon what metrics you choose to follow, most of which haven't been tracked for very long. Worse, in my opinion, it's just a meme spread by politicians engaging in demagoguery to get people riled up against their fellow citizens, even as the government itself -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people -- controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money. > That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another time period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions. I agree with you about the real questions, but I disagree that the other question is important. I agree with you about the latter questions, but I disagree that the former question is unimportant. In the US, we have an entire generation of people on both the left and the right side of the political aisle who are being brainwashed into believing that things were so much better in the past, for two very different reasons. And it's causing us to blame and distrust social and economic mechanisms that have benefitted millions to an unimaginable degree. We live in an era of unprecedented wealth creation, technological progress, extreme poverty elimination, and quality of life improvements, and people are literally clamoring to tear it all down because they keep being told that it used to be better. It's important to understand that no, it didn't. Your actual quality of life, the thing that mattered, would not have been better in the past, for the vast majority. But again, I do agree with you that we should try to make tomorrow even better. The focus should be more on allowing more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us. I just don't see the focus being directed that way. I see far more people discussing how to tear down the rich than how to help the poor. Far, far, far, far, far more people. There's a strong and popular perception that somehow doing the former will lead to the latter. > Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller. I don't know what to say except for the fact that we extremely disagree. You absolutely can't do all of these things. By historical standards throughout all of human history, almost every human who ever existed would pretty much agree with me. If you zoom in on incremental 1% improvements, artificial scarcity and exclusivity, and things like that, sure, maybe Bill Gates has had some cheeseburger that you haven't. Maybe he's been in some exclusive room that you haven't. But if this is the level of inequality that we're complaining about, minuscule and artificial differences that would require an education in luxury goods/experiences to even notice, then I don't know what to tell you. How is that not a HUGE victory? > Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller. The only reason the middle class in America has shrunk is because the upper class has grown!! We are literally moving in an upward direction, providing more and more wealth, to more and more people! It's genuinely so depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country because they're being brainwashed by demagogues who are telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.