this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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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.