this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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That's established economic science. Billionaires cannot possibly create added value to account for their wealth, just as you or I cannot become billionaires at the sweat of our brow. These people end up billionaires for being at the giving end of an oppressive labor system, and often, of untaxed inheritance.
this is not established economics. It's labor theory of value derived by Marx that was never fully accepted, and was thoroughly debunked like 80 years ago at the latest.
Maybe look up definition of wage theft first. The one most people use.
In addition:
Name one thing that one person created that became worth billions. Something that is rightly credited to a single person.
Google is rightly credited to two people and valuable enough to make both billionaires.
World wide web is credited to a single person, idk if rightly. It is probably the most valuable piece of sw in history, despite being given away for free. Even if it was really made by a decently sized team, would be billions in value per person.
well, i simply dont agree that googles worth comes down to the work of those two people. what they did may have been necessary for the success of google, but so was the work of a lot of their employees.
again, the www is founded on the work of uncountably many people. the person credited is usually the one at the end of the chain of production. the end of the chain is necessary for there to be a product at all, but each of the other nodes of the chain is equally as important.
So do you believe that if I have two quality assurance people doing exactly the same procedure, if first checks Nokias and the second checks iPhones, the exact same work of the second one is 10 times as valuable, just because he works on iPhones?
What about a baseball player signing a ball and changing its value from few $ to 10s of thousands. Is he stealing the wages of the people that made the ball if he doesn't trace back the people who made the ball and share portion of the money?
In case of google, if it is not the founders who made the valuable part, the same marketing and other support people doing the exact same thing generated 10x the value than their colleagues at Bing? What about the janitor? Is his floor cleaning producing 10x the value if the building has Google logo on it instead of Bing?
What about people making parts like screws? Does the value of a screw retroactively change based on whether you put it into a Nokia or an iPhone, or an Alibaba alarm clock?
Ok, so how does this work? Group of people makes a computer, that is used for accounting at CERN. They take equal part of the Value created by the accounting, split with the actual accountants. But then a researcher creates www. The computer was suddenly worth much more and they should retroactively get more money? What about the accounting Value? Do they have to return money to accountants because their computer was used for www and since it was used for multiple things, the share of accounting Value they took originally was too high?
No, thats not what im saying.
Just that if everyone involved in the process of making something was paid fairly, there wouldnt be enough money to make the end node billionaire.
That massively depends on what you consider fair.
Is a million dollars a year fair?
Alphabet (google parent), based on employee numbers had about 1,550,000 man years of work put into it in its entire history 1.
Alphabets current market capitalization is 2.5 trillion dollars.
If each employee was paid an extra million $ yearly in addition to what they were already paid (excluding stocks), there would still be almost a trillion dollars left over for the founders and investors.
Now sure, I had to make a lot of simplifications to calculate this, but even so, it should give you an idea just how valuable Google actually is, compared to the amount of work put into it.
So unless your definition of fair is something along the lines of splitting the profits evenly among employees, then they absolutely could have become billionaires while paying people fairly.
Would that market cap be so high if all those employees were paid that extra million yearly? Market caps depend on more than the actual value of the company's product to society.
Yes, that is what I meant by simplification.
On the other hand Google as search engine and ads (the part that makes money) needs fraction of the employees alphabet has. If they had to pay them that much, they would have never hired most of them.
exactly. A company tant doesnt overexplore its workers cannot grow like alphabet did. The underpayment of the workers is an essential feature of alphabet, and part of what makes its market capitalization that high.
This implies that the answer to my question is "no": if the workers had been paid properly from the start, there wouldnt be the discrepancy that makes the founder billionaires.
No, alphabet has always made most of its money from their ad business, supported by search. Most of their other efforts, including YouTube were never profitable or insignificantly profitable. If they did not over-explore, they would create even more value per employee by not wasting resources. Maybe even more value in absolute terms.
Revenue and market cap are two different things. The 2 trillion you mentioned is market cap, not revenue, much less it is profit.
I agree it would be a prettier picture if companies paid their workers fairly. But the companies would grow differently. Maybe they would grow better, but differently and more distributed. Comparing absolute values between our world and this dreamland seems silly though.
And I hope that in a world where we are paid fairly we would produce less crap, pollute less. Workers wouldnt be desperately making bad/useless products in order to just survive. A smaller gdp could be a good thing.
Google was started by two people who became billionaires. The very valuable company isn't run by just those two people. That's the point. No one has ever made anything or worked so hard they made a billion dollars by their effort and their effort alone.
If you really think otherwise, Would you hire me at a loss? Usually people hire someone and they make the company more money than what they are paid, because, you know, business, but if you want to hire me and pay me more money than what I make you, I'm down.
So you think that the same people doing the exact same work (marketing, sales, etc.) produce 10x more value if you put google logo on them vs Bing? Because the companies can be run in the exact same way with the core sw being the only differentiator.
What about a janitor. Is his cleaning the floors 10x more valuable if the building has Google logo on it compared to Bing?
Lol, you strawmaned him so hard you just straight up pretend he said the opposite. Good job lad.
Google what straw man argument is. I am asking a question.
There are two types of employees in google. The ones who created the search engine SW and the support staff. He claims the creators of the SW are not the people who created billions in Value, so it must be the support staff. The support staff that does more or less the same kind of work as support staff in all other tech companies, yet Google is wastly more profitable per employee, so these support staff somehow create much more value by doing the exact same thing. So who exactly is creating the Value?
Google AKA Wikipedia says "refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion"
They said that it takes a lot more than the sweat of literally only 2 people to make Google. And "No one has ever...made a billon dollars by...their effort alone.".
So to answer your question for them, no, they do not belive that. They belive all those people deserve a piece of the pie, as all of them are needed to keep everything afloat. Without your so called supporting staff, the 2 so called visionaries wouldn't be able to bring forth shit and they sure a shell didn't just put in more effort than everyone else to deserve the wealth an entire city would blush at.
Also your weird fixation on logos is irrelevant here, or rather a completely separate discussion you started fighting the strawman.
As for the janitor example, I'd need to do some wild assumptions like you to answer for them, so I'm not gonna bother.
As for my personal opinion in all this? I'm honestly having too much fun watching from the outside to ruin it xD Fuck you're a silly goober.
I am not arguing they made a billion alone, I am arguing their work increased the value of Google by billions (which IMO makes them deserve some percentage of the billions).
If all the support staff went to do the exact same work for a average different company, the product/value of that company would be less than Googles by over a billion. I used Bing as a comparable example.
Also, you accuse me of straw-maning while straw-maning yourself? What is this, Donald Trump debate club?
Your point is irrelevant to what they said, as it is arguing a completely different point. The question of what work can one person possibly bring and how much they deserve for it vs the question of is your value to society dictated by your employer's market share. Two quite distinct can'o'worms. The idea of one being multiple times more valuable due to their market is in direct conflict with the idea of "a person can only make so much". Regardless of which argument is right or wrong, it's a strawman, just because they literally can't hold that view xD
And plese, do explain to me how me stating something, regardless of the truth of that statement, that has nothing to do with you, is strawmaning you? I'm genuinely curious how you arrived there lol. You can't just keep using "no you" over and over. OR CAN YOU??? XD Or hold up, ya saying I'm strawmaning them instead? Please do elaborate xD
Also I'm not disproving you, I'm being pedantic about semantics, you trying to double down just digs a deeper hole around you. If you don't understand, I'm ending it here, a predictable discussion is quite boring.
Yeah, I am arguing against their belief by showing a contradiction with an obvious truths such as that things have intrinsic value and people can increase said value by much more than others. That is what arguing is. If you think disagreeing with people is straw-maning them, then there is no point for me to waste my time with you.
The contradiction didn't exist, until you assumed another idea they never demonstrated. They wouldn't agree that a company's market share should directly translate into compensation for individuals, because it has "intrinsic value". It's only a contradiction if you belive that they belive in the same dogma of "obvious truths" you propose. They could very well say that everyone's work or life has intrinsic value. Again, who is right or wrong doesn't matter in this case, just that they belive something else, than what you assume they do.
Personally, I'd argue "intrinsic value" is subjective bullshit as we people are the harbingers of meaning and in turn value, and that a system that awards value as you describe is monopolistic and so detrimental to society at large and thus has negative value.
You can say I'm wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that it's yet another example of a view that isn't contradictory to your "obvious truths" as it simply builds on different values. A thing that's different in every culture FYI.
It doesn't have intrinsic value. At least not the same as its market cap. I use it as an (imperfect) approximation for the value a company creates by providing goods or services.
If you don't think goods and services have intrinsic value, what is the point complaining about wages? Money is tied to the value of goods you can exchange it for. So if value of goods is subjective, then so is value of money. Therefore, fair wages are subjective and there is no way to compensate people fairly.
A homeless person forcefully providing the "service" of cleaning my window has negative value to me. So does Google ruining websearch and undermining web security and in tern national security too. Google hasn't provided my life any value, while making the world a worse place. I was inclined to say YouTube provided me value in the past, until I remembered Google didn't make it and that it used to be much better before they bought it.
And yes, money is quite literally subjective. That's not a hotly debated subject, rather a cornerstone of all modern economic models. And complaining about wages makes sense, because we're forced to live under this fragile system that directly dictates our well being, while heavily favoring making the world worse. Capitalism requires constant cashflow and it'll use any tool (like inflation) to coerce people into complying. It literally can't exists without shit like planned obsolescence or induced addiction as people being satisfied and contempt with their material possessions would hinder the flow of money.
Right, so let's burn all the money. Everyone will just work and help each other from the goodness of their hearts.
I can't argue points this absurd. We obviously don't share the same perception of reality, so I am done here.
Goodbeye.