This is something I think about a lot and I thought the article was pretty solid. My father is a musician, so he always told me to do what I love. I tried to do that by becoming a research mathematician, that didn't work on and now I do something I don't love (but like some days) that consists of sitting at a computer writing code.
>One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
I've had 3 careers: working with high school students in low income areas, being an academic research mathematician, and now being a data scientist. The people I liked the best and who I would like to become like were the teachers I worked with at the high schools in low income areas.
>Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
This pretty well states the soul-suckingness of working in industry.
I know the teacher thing is a nice 'feel-good' example, but based on the experience of my own mother's colleagues, for many teachers in these low income areas, the paycheck is also all they care about.
For me, it wasn't just about a feel-good thing, I enjoyed being around and had the most fun time on a day to day basis when hanging out and working with the high school teachers. I met them all at a summer program, so it was probably the more engaged teachers. Also, the teachers were from the same demographics as the students, so it wasn't white savior type people, but people from the actual community.
Can someone help me understand the first footnote?
>[1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome.
Yes, clearly different passions lead to different industries which mean different economic outcomes.
But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
I have no idea of how to solve this or create the perfect utopia, btw. I'm just confused on the point of the footnote.
Of course a potter will make less money than a software engineer. Nothing surprising or necessarily bad here. The problem however is the system under which having less money has stark negative impacts on your quality of life. For example a for profit healthcare system may result in the potter being utterly unable to receive necessary dental care.
A fair system would ensure that no one suffers just because they don't make a lot of money.
This is not the case even in many rich countries, where persons without a lot of money are forced to skip on health care and live in sub standard housing that doesn't suit even the most basic of needs.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right?
Seems you're focusing on the Floor whereas pg refers to a Ceilings?
It's normal that enterprise sales lovers ends up as taller poppies than pottery lovers. You could take it a step further and say: it's normal than Tom Brady and Ronaldo ends up rich but mediocre football players make $0 from football, even though both have interest in football.
That's the typical Ikigai diagram stuff: if someone's "what you love" naturally aligns with "what you can be paid for", pg point is that this person will be richer. (On top of this, if someone's "what you're good at" also aligns naturally with "what you can be paid for", they'll also be richer).
But you're approaching a different question: do pottery lovers have a good enough quality of life? Do they deserve one if nobody needs any of their pottery stuff?
Does everyone's deserve a good quality of life regardless of what their passion is? What about people with antisocial passions (crime, exploiting others etc)?
I think you make a really good point at the end, that those with antisocial and pathological passions shouldn't be encouraged for the sake of societal health.
They can really make a huge profit if done in a certain way, right? Exploiting others like using dark patterns or scams definitely can reap huge rewards.
As a layman, I'm curious to know what you and others think about what standards should be held to meet the floor, what standards should be held to reach the ceiling.
Hobbies is probably not the right word, rather it's what they're good at. It just so happens that building a hobby makes you good at something.
And this isn't necessarily in your control either. If you grow up on a farm you'll probably be very good at farming. If you grow up rich, you'll probably be great at networking and maybe sales.
Some topics, domains, whatever make a lot of money and then a lot don't. If you're good at physical stuff then you're kind of fucked from a societal perspective. You chose wrong, or more likely got dealt a bad hand.
If you're good at writing computer programs you got incredibly lucky. That's one of those topics that makes a lot of money.
Some of this you can build and some you can't. My sister would never be a programmer because she hates it. But she loves kids, and she's a fantastic teacher. Unfortunately, teaching is a topic that doesn't lend itself to high pay. So that kind of sucks.
I know you're being sarcastic, but there is truth to that. Without judgement, it is well-documented that those in poverty will spend, as a proportion of their income, 20 or 30 times as much on lottery tickets as someone who is rich. Now they have their reasons, I think a lottery ticket lets one dream what life could be like, at least until the draw happens, but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.
No, of course not. Obviously if a poor person spends up to 5% [0] of their income on lottery tickets that will have no impact on their financial situation at all. There's no way that changing that behavior could improve their life; 5% is just too small to matter.
From my experience*, the lottery tickets they buy most are scratch-off. And every once in awhile they spend $2 and win $15-$20 (or $13-$18) then use that to buy "luxury" items; cigarettes, beer, candy for the kids or tacos from a taqueria or were able to make an extra lay-away payment. They still (I assume) end up losing more in the long run, but instead of saving that $2 a few times week to be able to have the $20 at the end of the month, they get a little bit of enjoyment from a crap situation. It's more rewarding to be able to get the items they were not planning to have and a little treat, as opposed to the sheer depression of thinking, if they saved that $2-8 a week, then in a month they can buy treats for their kids...
*Part of my childhood was living "on the other side of the tracks", my family wasn't rich, but we had more than many I went to school with. A much richer school district lines split the neighborhood - I wasn't on that side. Many kids at my school probably were in the poorest zipcodes. Most of them were on food-stamps and free-lunch, working parents (or parent); they didn't spend frivolously, goodwill, swap meets and garage sales is where their clothes came from. My direct experience was w/ couple families I spent time with and saw the result of winning scratch offs. That was when they would splurge on "luxuries". It was not about striking it rich and fantastical dreams of yachts; It was probably that experience which taught me the most about being practical and how to stretch a dollar.
You know it sounds silly, but it is broadly correct.
The coffees are inconsequential, but the mindset change is not. I have seen it in my own family. People given the same opportunities, same life, same family background, and yet outcomes are different based on what you value. Those who are often called 'cheapskates' end up much better off than those who spend more wantonly. Everyone made a choice. It's not the lottery tickets alone, it's the net result of having a small inclination to pay for things that you could have forgone. Over time, it does result in a net difference.
It's like how your 401k will end up substantially differently if you invest in a fund with 0.01% management costs v 1%. Yes it's 'only' a hundred or so a year, but it adds up.
I hear a lot of focus on money and not just quality of life. One issue with quality of life is that as you improve it for the bottom, the expecations of what a minimal quality should be tend to go up. So you may never really "solve" it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continually trying to improve.
There's really not much to understand. He's pointing out an inherent flaw in capitalistic structure (that the market disproportionately awards some labor over others, leading to gross imbalances and to runaway problems like climate change) and trying to convert what would be a legitimate critique of such a system (i.e. it seems bad that this economic system is structured in such a way that the social values we have are secondary to individual economics) into a character judgement "well, it's not my fault you happen to have the poor people hobbies lol!"
It's the sort of dodge that's extremely typical of people who have gotten extremely lucky and benefited heavily from this economic system. If pg wound up taking up painting more heavily instead of programming as his primary means of subsistence, I damn well guarantee he wouldn't be reducing economic imbalance to a "natural consequence" of mere "difference of hobbies"
I don't think it's really a flaw of capitalism itself, but a flaw of capitalism on a mass scale and without additional safeguards. Smaller-scale, local capitalism in small populations but with some social safeguards would not have nearly as much problems, even if unusually talented people were rewarded a bit more.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
Then why is it that the same people who go on about inequality continue to go on about inequality when countries raise the entire standard of living but have more inequality as a result.
For example, by and large, the modern day economic system (let's just call it capitalism) has caused the greatest increase in standard of living for the average world resident. We live at a time of unheard of prosperity and abundance for the vast majority of people. They are way better off today under this economic system.
Yet the constant criticism of this system is that there are really rich people. Why is that a criticism when the data are pretty unequivocal that the system also makes things better for everyone else?
Directly analogous to the fact that drugs have side effects. Massive inequality and other attendant ills are undesirable side effect of a net beneficial system.
Alright sure, but like if you are on metformin for diabetes and you complain about the side effects, that's one thing, and we can try lessening them (and should). But inequality is used as an argument against capitalism. That's like using the side effects of metformin as 'evidence' that it's not effective at increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering blood sugar. The data are quite unequivocal... it is.
Art tends to be the most unequal of professions, while the 'capitalist' work like finance and all are actually more equal in pay. This is simply due to the fact that finance bros get paid a salary whereas art is almost a winner takes all industry
The "these examples" in the footnote refers to the preceding content in the main part: the example of Bill Gates, and:
> There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.
He's just saying that people who are especially interested in making money are likely to make more money (just as say, people interested in listening to music are likely to listen to more music).
(No comment on whether this is a good point or a satisfactory explanation of economic inequality or whatever, just explaining the point of the footnote, as that's what you asked.)
i think it's pretty clear what pg means. more useful products = more money = better outcomes in life. no one wants more pins and posters of some artist's OCs, they want software that helps the world and actually changes lives for the better. studio pottery won't do that.
To be clear, I like the idea of making something really useful and being rewarded from bettering other people's lives. I don't doubt that if you make something really useful for the world, you can gain a lot from it.
But when people talk about fairness, (I assume) they're usually thinking about the successful scammers, predatory practices, people not contributing to the world yet profiting a lot from it. They may also think about "essential workers" who, in contrast, may live paycheck to paycheck.
It becomes blurrier to me when I think about who "deserves" what.
Well, as the interests that yield any given amount of money vary with time, location, and even the identity, personality, or abilities of the person with a given interest, the implied conclusion that one should simply choose a "higher-yielding" interest, and that failure to do so is a personal matter that absolves any interest/pay relationship of unfairness, seems... incorrect.
Maybe axiom was the wrong word. The intent was to convey that the original quote meant to present "and that some interests yield far more money than others" as an "obvious", self-evident notion immune to decomposition or factoring. And it isn't.
I’m no socialist, but yeah, “natural” doesn’t mean fair, right or desirable.
Of course PG didn’t say “it’s fair that I have billions and others can’t afford basic necessities.”
With robust supply of necessary goods, and a political system that limited the ability of wealth to influence policy, then I do think inequality would be less of a concern. But that isn’t the world we live in.
Maybe it's the youth in me, but I wholly and fully agree with PG here, and I strive to live by it. However, there's another fascinating school of thought that I read about back when I was an undergrad. It comes from Richard Muller, who used to be quite active on Quora back in the day:
> “Follow your passion” or the similar “Follow your dreams.” I’ve seen this advice lead people into paths in which they could not have productive lives or support themselves or families.
> With this advice, many kids will choose to become professional athletes, and then fail. My daughter (Elizabeth Muller) once wanted to become a professional dancer. I think she is very glad now that she instead went to UC San Diego, majored in math and literature, and got a masters degree in international management. (She is now the CEO of our non-profit BerkeleyEarth.org.) One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
> I suggest to children that before they set out on a career path, they consider what will happen if they are the 1000th best in the field. If your field is boxing, you will either be completely out of work, be a sparring partner, or (if you are lucky) be running your own gym. (Or, maybe, you’ll be an enforcer for some mob.) If you are a ballet dancer, it is unlikely that you will be performing; you will probably be teaching children how to dance ballet. If your field is physics or math, you will have very good income, have the respect of your neighbors (maybe they’ll think you are a genius), and a good diverse and productive life.
> I suggest instead that you teach children to try to plan their future lives, to design their futures. They should approach it as they would a challenging homework problem. Learn more about possible careers, and what they are like. Don’t choose too early, since many careers (running Berkeley Earth?) are not obvious to a youngster. Get a broad education, and do a good job at it. Study hard and learn. Get familiar with the world. Beware of childhood passions; they are based on a limited experience, and may not be a good choice for a career.
Does a bike shop owner make comparable money to an EE in a large company? How about medical insurance for themselves and the family? As a bike shop owner, what do you do when a customer brings clearly a stolen bike?
It's nice to theorize about an idyllic life if you only think about the idyllic surface of it, from inside of a less idyllic but better-off life.
Along similar lines, I never really pictured what being a software engineer would be like.
I like solving problems and working with smart people, but sitting inside all day at a computer just isn’t for me.
Sunny outside? Sit inside all day.
Snowing? Sit inside.
Stunning fall colours? Sit inside.
After a few years I had to stop. That is not the life I wanted. Now I adventure around the world, write books and sell stories freelance to magazines. I have way less money, and I am way happier.
Could you elaborate more on what it is you do? I'm a current college student studying math. I enjoy what I study a lot, but don't think I could cut it as a mathematician. At the end of the day, I don't care much for money on its own, but I do accept that it is needed to enjoy the true freedom and enjoyment of life you describe. But, as such, I've had to look at jobs that seem kind of bleak to me, but do pay nicely like software engineering(I know that there are some very very interesting software engineering positions, but these are far and few and I'm personally not interested in AI). If I could skip this intermediate step, that would be awesome, so naturally I'm really curious what you do/how you started?
> One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
This can happen even if you're literally #1 in the world at one point. Floyd Landis now runs a bicycle shop.
When friends say they are "going to start a business", I ask them "Why? Do you know why, do you know what your goal is?".
In most cases people can't really explain exactly why, and that's fine and normal. Only after years of being in business did certain things come clear to me. Are you there to make money, to follow your passion, to succeed with something, anything, to own your own time and life? The naive might say "all of the above", but they are not compatible.
You may find that you care more about owning your own time than working on stuff you are passionate about.
I've seen quite a few people start a business to work on something they are passionate about and then go out of business, when they COULD have stayed in business if they had been prepared to make money doing stuff they didn't love. What is more important in this case, being in business or doing stuff you love?
I'm young and at a pivotal point in my life, where I need to decide whether to remain in my well-paying job in software engineering or pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. This article has deeply inspired me, hitting at just the right moment to encourage me to aim higher and take the leap.
Two things to check out: (1) find out the best university in your area, and see if they have a business incubator. Check out their events page - there's usually something interesting happening in the next couple of weeks - go to it with an open mind! Creators, investors, students, entrepreneurs all in one spot. Meet the organizer, and find out what kind of workshops would be valuable, and consider running one! They will help promote you! Usually, they'll have a busy group chat (WhatsApp) - get in there and see what services people need / offer...
(2) Find out if there is a community maker-space in your area, and take a tour. You'll meet some of the most creative, entrepreneurial people there, and you'll see up-close, what's possible with product prototyping these days - 3D printed ceramics, robotics, CNC wood carving bots, metal carving, etc - and computer/code labs!
I ran a "Get your product on Shopify" workshop in a maker-space. It was tons of fun and high value - got people booted up with a custom domain name, photo of their product online, Buy it Now button, make a business card with a QR code. For software experts this kind of thing is easy (a couple of hours etc), but for most people - it can feel like an extremely complicated mission (managing DNS records, or adjusting a theme's CSS - super tricky!). Not that you need to go be a Shopify installer! But the point is that you can help turn someones dream into reality, and its satisfying for all involved.
Work at a job that contributes highly to a retirement fund (401k o
If in the USA) and after you have maxed our your retirement savings for at least 5, if not 10 years, then go ahead and do something else.
If I had waited 3 more years before I tried to go the startup route I'd have another 200-300k in the bank right now and I would have the financial independence to do whatever I want for however long I want right now.
Compound growth is amazing, take advantage of it while you are as young as possible.
From reading stories of other entrepreneurs, I feel that the most balanced way to go is to validate the idea (obtain at least one paid customer, etc.) before leaving the job. Thanks for your reply!
You're welcome. I've started a couple of companies. The first time I went all in and I was lucky that it worked out. The second time, I went all in again but it didn't work out. The third time I started on the side and had one paying customer, quit my day job but it was still too early.
So my recommendation for my future self is: Only start switching over once you can pay your bills with your startup. This does not mean that you need to have the same high salary as before. Ideally, you can also start reducing your day job partially. Anyways, the situation is different for everybody, but this is just my learning for myself.
Here's advice from someone older, at probably the same pivotal point in life: only listen to those that say yes, go for it, those that have done. Then form your opinion, which you will do anyway.
Being contrarian, negative, saying it's impossible, telling you to stay in your lane is the default for most people, especially on the internet, especially if they feel smarter than average, as you might find on a forum such as this. My thesis: all negative advice has negative value and can be discarded with extreme prejudice. There is no exception to this rule.
Listen to those that have done, those you feel have something to teach, and put your personal spin to their advice when incorporating it in your own growth.
There is no pressure. There is no advantage to being an entrepreneur while young versus being older and more established. Contrary to the stories portrayed on here with young college drop outs raising valuations of billions, the more typical path and historically the one with a much greater chance of success is a middle aged engineer founding a company in a niche he knows about.
I too felt like you at a young age and am glad I stuck with the career. It let me do all the life things (get married, have kids, etc) in a stable environment. Now as I age, I also have (or rather, soon will have) the finances to freely choose to pursue something more independent.
It all depends on why you want entrepreneurship. I think if you just want to have money, then this it's a foolhardy path. But if you are excited by the idea of making something new, then there's really no rush. Just wait until the right time comes along, build up skills along the way, and bank your salary
BTW not a terrible advice. Unless you go broke and burnt out, it might be a good way to get hired to much higher and more interesting and impactful positions.
That's exactly how I think about this endeavor. If I fail, I can always get back to being a contractor. I think that with each failed attempt, my value as a software engineer or a manager will only increase.
By that time, the interest and the energy may have gone.
(If not, by all means pursue your passion after you have comfortably retired. I, for instance, assume that I will never have a chance to comfortably retire.)
> One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
> Please, don’t spend your late teens or early twenties in front of your computer at a startup. If you’re a young person, I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work – however that looks for you. Get an instrument, learn three chords, and go on tour; find a derelict boat and cross an ocean; hitchhike to Alaska; build a fleet of dirigibles; construct a UAV that will engage with the emerging local police UAVs; whatever – but make it count.
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
In fact driving a 4x4 from Alaska to Argentina only cost me the same as it did to live in a city and go to work everyday ~$1200 per month for everything
The time for discovery is childhood. As the trend is to extend adolescence more and more, maybe we need to cut back on regimented schooling during that time.
This made me feel some despair. The young people in my field are similar to me, and have interests and passions outside of work, but the older folks seem to have little in their lives which is enviable to me. Many of them are out of shape and hunched over from decades in front of their screens. They don't have strong interests in anything, and they seem to spend a lot of their time and energy thinking about their money: how to spend it, how to grow it, how to save it. They have families, but seem to view them as an obligation and a burden which they'd rather avoid.
I do know older people who retired from tech relatively early and live adventurous and inspiring lives. Maybe the key is just to get out before the career saps your vitality too much.
This is sad. My advice, as an older person, is find a job that doesn't suck, or even is actually fulfilling. Public sector did that for me. Some weeks will drain you, that's what we get paid for, it just needs to be, not all the time :) Then early retirement is less "necessary". This is perfectly compatible with kids (albeit not in a high cost of living area). While kids are young, adventures will be put on hold to some extent, but then having kids and watching them grow up is a delightful adventure in itself :) And you get to share adventures with them later on. I'm glad I travelled and stuff when young, but seeing others without kids, their life seems a bit boring and same-y to me, but that's a personal thing. Important to some to have kids, important to others not to have them. Those "ground down" people you describe probably need a decent holiday to recharge, they also may need to think outside the box , get off the treadmill and realise that chasing promotions and money is a trap, and in fact a middle-of-the-road tech salary combined with some intelligent frugal habits gives a great standard of living despite today's brutal house prices etc. (only caveat - in USA health costs can be major problem for people with certain conditions)
I honestly completely disagree. We had kids young and honestly it was so much easier in our 20s than it is now with a baby in our 30s. Despite having more money, babies are just harder as you get older. It's the moderate things. With our first, I was so active and nimble. Now I have slight back pain and stuff but it makes me noticeably less active with my third.
By the time my oldest is an adult, I will be in my early 40s. That's still young enough to do whatever you want to do. I encourage people to have kids young. Honestly, we should normalize having kids in college (free daycare, etc). This would be great for young women especially. Yes, it might stretch out how long it takes them to get a degree. But if dad completes it in four years and starts working, by the time dad starts working, the child is school aged and now doesn't need daycare. Then mom can complete her degree while dad works full time, and graduate with a six year old and job prospects. Kind of jealous of all my mormon friends at BYU who did this lol. By the time their kids are grown they'll be 40 year olds with professional careers, ready to do whatever they want, with the bonus of money.
On the other hand, the first-time parents I know in their mid 30s are struggling. It's harder. You're more tired. Also, by the time you're done you're getting ready to retire.
Most of my friends had kids young. They were busy working and hardly saw them grow up. A few were fortunate that the mothers could and wanted to stay home. The others all had their kids raised by daycare workers. When they found out what was happening in schools all they could do was scream about it. When covid hit and the schools shut those parents were buried and their kids suffered setbacks in their education. That's the standard routine. No thanks.
This is gold: it resonates a lot with my own experience and of those around me. Thanks for sharing. Looks like it was published right when I graduated, sad I missed it. Though I did end up doing some of the things on his list, and they were by far some of the most meaningful periods of my life.
If you have anything else like this article, please do share
Hasn't the SPE been criticized as unscientific and basically fraudulent? Makes it hard to read this article if that's the main literature it cites to draw conclusions from.
That is a world class article, thanks for sharing it. Saving to share with anyone in the future that needs advice.
>They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.
When you work for money, you'd rather do something else, and you aspire to save up enough so that you can stop and do something else.
When you love your work, it doesn't feel like work, and you don't want to stop.
(having said this, I know some people who started out wanting money in order to do something useful with it later, however now they are so hooked to optimize their income more and more -- money has become their main driver and primary motivation.)
Have you ever been in a situation where you really want to do what you love to do, but simply don't have the money to exist and have to do something else?
Does anyone who has successfully followed their passion project and has been financially successful as well provide some comments on this article? Is it just PG's way of luring in wannabe-enterpreneurs with words or does it hold some value? I am in no position to judge this since I am still working a day job.
There are plenty of ways of getting non-dilutive capital, PG just wants the blood-equity of young people that are beginning to wise up to being Transylvania’s cattle
You dont need to be young, you dont need to give up preferred shares to investors, and the real survivorship bias in this game are the entrepreneurs that can afford to try again multiple times on other startups in quick succession…. because they already have capital
Selling that dream to people excluded from that class while deflecting on what the survivors biases really are is how you know it’s a lure
I wonder what Paul's definition of "young" is in the sentence and why he qualifies this as only applicable to "young" people. Is he proposing that "old" people will have misaligned thinking about what needs to be built?
I am 41 with two kids.
> if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built
Personally I feel that "Beating the averages" was an awesome article that was of technical interest and can apply to many things not just making money, and worth reading perhaps by every s/w developer. Whereas this article is of nothing like the same quality, it seems largely money oriented to me.
Please if you are young and still in full-time education and reading this, please please please take it with a pinch of salt.
What you are reading is essentially a sales-pitch trying to lure you in. This has the tell-tale signs of classic hard sales pitches - playing on the fear of losing out, offering big rewards, comparing to a negative stereotypes, appealing to your ego/self-worth about not being ignorant, flattery by dismissing it as not greed but an intellectual puzzle for smart people like you etc etc. Your internal alarm bells that stop you getting suckered into things should be going crazy about now!
He has a vested interest in getting as many people as possible to throw themselves and their lives 110% into doing a start-up so that he can invest in it and make money off of your work.
For every successful billionaire (or hell even millionaire) that comes out of his "sales funnel", there will be hundreds if not thousands of people whose full-potential/career-potential/earning-potential will be severely curtailed as a result. They'll waste many of their most productive years, potentially building up massive debts in the process, chasing some start-up dream before eventually capitulating and failing before trying to get a "steady job" when they find themselves burnt-out and debt-ridden with nothing to show for it after 5-10 years of slog.
Meanwhile 5-10 years at a FAANG you would have pocketed several million in total-comp (probably in the region of 5+mil USD in the bay area I guess), working in low-stress environments with some of the best engineers, researchers, PMs, and leaders in the world while still having time and energy to live your life too.
It is a numbers game for him. Think carefully about what you are getting into before throwing your future life away. Good luck.
>you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else
I think this is where most people are and it can be common for all effort to amount to nothing more than "survival activities", with fewer options than normal occurring under increasing macro economic challenges.
In that case I would think it's good to never completely stop doing what you love most that is realistically within reach. Even if you can not give it very much of the full dedication it might deserve.
If you can't be fully "in the game" due to insufficient resources or something like that, maybe you can function somewhat adjacent in an even more sustainable way, maintaining better readiness through time for some rare opportunities that are almost never attainable, or for very long.
And keep it in perspective for opportunities to up the priority or focus, even as less-elusive things might come more easily within reach along the way.
Probably the culture of where I live is very different from the other side of the ocean, but... why is money such a big point in this article? I love my work and I'm decently paid and... I don't really want to be rich. With the given title, I would advocate for/stress on contentment rather than monetary richness.
There’s no such thing as a reasonable quality of life on an average income anymore. People who don’t prioritize money will live like poor students for the rest of their lives renting with roommates. They will never have a family, healthcare, hobbies, or respect from their community.
Stop pretending that not prioritizing money is an option. It’s incredibly condescending. In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
> In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
In America, you really do not (I don't know about other parts of the world). We have lots of really sweet towns and things where you can live on a totally average income. Just visited my cousin in the rural midwest (town of like 1000 people) and she and her husband live a great life, with their own plot of land, their eight kids, and a normal income (single income -- only husband works). And before I get the 'oh well that's only for white people' response, we're brown-skinned; she's an immigrant; and she's not only accepted but embraced and actually holds elected office.
In my experience, the people making these kinds of claims have some innate bias against these places. But they're like a dime a dozen. We passed by dozens of similar towns on our four hour drive from the nearest airport.
Granted: If you live in America, depending on your situation, you may need wealth or a good job to have access to decent healthcare.
But, "They will never have a family... hobbies, or respect from their community." This is completely out of touch. Plenty of Americans in flyover country accomplish all of these on an average salary. Source: They're my neighbors.
In the culture where you live there are good chances you don't finish college with a couple hundred thousands dollars in debt, and getting a reasonable home near the place where you want to work doesn't cost a million dollars.
On top of that, bad luck in America can be very expensive. the wrong illness can make living a low stress life difficult
Therefore an American that sees a pile of debt in their future, the kind of career that can pay for that kind of debt, and therefore lead to just being reasonably content and independent, is not all that far from one where you end up in the neighborhood of being rich. It's definitely what happened to me: The difference between not having a lot of economic stress and 'oops, I could retire tomorrow' was about 5 years.
Same. I think PG and the bay area has been such a goldmine the last few decades most people in tech and VC driven by the rewards. Most people in American are somewhat more money driven than Europeans, but most are relatively content than the Bay Area population.
Because America has such a poor social safety net that it is very easy to go from well paid to homeless in just a few years.
Accordingly, everyone is fighting to make enough money to not get fucked over during each of our cyclical "economic recessions". During each recession more and more people permanently fall into poverty and everyone who is left fights even harder to not be a victim the next time the economy goes south.
I don’t want to lead with the mean retort that people who say they don’t care about money often don’t have any, so let me give you the kinder version - I think you come from a place of immense privilege. Either born in a first world country, or born to well off parents or in a rich society.
otoh, Where I come from , we have a proverb that’s hard to translate but describes our misery quite accurately - “we don’t even have enough water to wipe our anus after we poop”.
So that’s why I seek wealth. Not because I’m not content, or stressed out or whatever. Because the people I was born with, my cousins, brothers, relatives - they are still digging ditches. I am no smarter than them perhaps, but because I chose to pay a little extra attention at academics, atleast I have some money to buy some water so I can wash my butt after I poop.
Don’t hate on people who want money. The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
I understand most of the world population is very poor.
> Don’t hate on people who want money.
Why would I?
> The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
I have a hard time understanding this tiny bubble part. Both my parents came from poor farmer families. My father was a carpenter who maintained a tiny farm before and after his daytime job. My mother helped with that and took care of the children. My father saw the sea for the first time aged 65, though it is only 200km.
I try to put things in perspective... I read the average water consumption per person per year in USA is on average 90000 litres. That is our yearly household consumption.
I can confirm that more or less. A month ago I visited a village where a new groundwater well was just completed. Some of the people there have to walk miles to get to that well to fetch water. Every day. And if they had to pay for the water, they would struggle.
Last week I took my kids and a friend to dinner. We spent about 50$. Not much for us for 4 people. But for quite a lot of locals we just blew a months earning or more in one evening. This income difference baffles me every time.
Myself I am out of work for a year, and while I saved some money, if I don't find some remote work soon I'll have to pack my bags and move my whole family back to Europe to file for unemployment. But I am not complaining because at least I do have that option. The people here around me don't. So despite my situation I am still privileged.
Besides removing distractions, having more money raises the limits on what you can build before it needs to become self-sustaining. Retirement should be a consolation prize but not the entire goal.
honestly, I want to be rich. I do make a decent living, but not enough to quit my job. At this rate I'll have to work until I'm 50 or 60, which is same as everyone else, so cry me a river, but even so, it would be nice to dedicate more time to hobby which at this rate I can at most dedicate a weekend to, but in practice it's a bit less because I have to go out with the wife and I have visit my family, etc. Most weeks I have a full day at most to pursue anything.
From what i understand my life is very similar as yours. One out of 7 seems not too shabby though.
Maybe a cliché but... my advice would be to try to get most out of each simple experience. Today my spouse and kid went for a long walk together with me... while I could have been doing woodworking. I _tried_ to teach the kid the joy of walking without having too much on his mind. I also started conversations with strangers while waiting in the ice cream queue. There's always something to learn from that. I guess you by now understand my advocating for contentment.
this afternoon i couldn't have been doing woodworking because i don't have woodworking tools. that's not just because i can't afford them; my apartment is not really big enough for a woodworking shop, and i worry that the wiring might catch fire if i tried to plug in a high-powered saw. i'm having a hard time being content, despite going on a walk with my wife this morning and having lots of lovely conversations with strangers over the last three days, because the rent is due in two weeks and i'm nervous about whether i'll have enough. ever since i got covid for the third time in april, at which point i couldn't get paxlovid, i don't remember things like i used to. (i suspect that with enough money i could have gotten paxlovid.) also, my aunt is going to die soon, and i don't have the money to visit her before that
i really wish i'd spent more effort on making, and saving, money 20 years ago. i wouldn't want to spend my life on it, and no amount of money will keep me from dying, but right now i'm spending a lot of my life coping with the consequences of not having it
Passion is too generic of a word and that gets confusing when it comes to advice like this. It could be someone is passionate about the activity itself, passionate about the idea of being successful, obsessed intellectually with a question, passionate about wanting to prove something…
He's targeting a particular audience in this essay. Doesn't mean he hates everyone else. In fact, in other essays he says that being an older founder can actually be an advantage in some ways.
I gladens me to see that the sentiment here on HN is getting increasingly critical of PG and other VCs and Silicon Valley figures. Let's just hope that PG doesn't decide to pull the plug on HN some day.
Aren't we the court jesters who entertain them with our wit, or the court scientists who provide them with early insights into which technologies will be worth investing in?
I love his point about following your passion if your passion is in a narrow niche (especially if it involves technology). Trying to be the best at something popular will probably lead to failure, but I think people would be surprised how easy it is to become top 100 at something niche.
When your goal is to make a modest or steady income, you often have to focus on what the market values. It's like a big luck when your interests align with market demand
Yeah. I feel like I've already used up all my luck getting a job where I can work on a computer indoors in air conditioning as a woman wearing jeans, and not have to dress up, present myself, hurt myself, risk my life, like so many other jobs
Sometimes I wonder what retirement looks like when you're able to do this for a career while WFH - can we push a little further than many people because the work is less physically demanding, or is being still for this long every day it's own type of wear? I can't imagine just stopping one day, I'd really prefer to switch to part time work at a slower pace.
Also worth thinking about whether you want to be in the bridge of a ship with lots of other people on board, prefer working in a different deck like Engineering, or flying your own light shuttle craft about!
From a commencement speech by a young person called Grant Sanderson:
> Influence is not distributed uniformly in the population and I for one would feel a lot more comfortable if it was you who were at the helm guiding this crazy ship that we're all riding.
> If you step into the next chapter of life with an implacable focus on adding values to others, you're more likely to be the ones at the helm.
> If you recognize that action precedes motivation, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you ask what's possible now that wasn't 10 years ago, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> If you appreciate just how much power you have to shape the lives of the generation that follows you, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you remain adaptable to a changing world, treating passion not as a destination but as a fuel, following not dreams but opportunities, you're more likely to be at the helm.
new twist on capitalist pitch:
"There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them."
the older Paul gets, he sounds just like rest of his club mates!
I'm someone who is not rich but is interested in capital markets. My net worth is less than USD 100,000 and I spend hours each week downloading market data, looking for trade ideas, writing scripts, running statistical tests, implementing trading strategies, and analyzing the results.
I expect to be quite well off someday as a result of this hobby, but for now it's just an interest.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself.
What silly advice. I didn’t even know my “what to work on” existed until I was near the end of my junior year of college. XD
I took that phrase to mean "don't be blocked by any institution, person, or societal expectation to pursue what's interesting to you". Could be casual research, a cursory glance, or a deep internal investigation of yourself.
Which is always good to start as soon as you're aware of it. It's fine if you figure it out near the end of your junior year, your first job, or a midlife crisis. "Best time to start was yesterday, 2nd best is now" type of thing.
Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.
Also sometimes when adults try to pull kids towards something, they may be trying to validate their own life choices and pathway. Just like a parent getting his kid into football, always remembering that he lost the playoff game.
> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home
This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making.
[0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.
Farmers tend to have very high net worths and very low disposable income until they get old. You need several million dollars worth of land just to make the payments on that land/equipment and have enough left over to live on. And of course there are years where you will lose money and so you need to figure out how to ride that out. Then in 30 years you make the last payment on the land and suddenly what was just barely enough money to live on is a massive income and you are extremely wealthy.
I work in flyover country. I'm not a farmer my self, but several of my co workers are - they farm 100 acres of land after work, and it generates just enough money to make the payments land payments. They are looking to buy more land as soon as they can finance it (often leasing it to a neighbor to farm as they don't have time and so they lose money on the land). Their plan is in 15-20 years inflation will have made crops more valuable while the land payments are the same and so they can afford to quit the day job and farm all their land.
Getting started is the hard part. Getting two million dollar loan for 100 acres of prime farmland when you are not already a farmer is hard. Many farmers thus start with livestock, you can start on 10 acres of non-prime farmland which is affordable and then over a few years build enough credibility with the bank to get that first large field which is where the money is.
Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
I actually know this. I personally know a few people who do accept major financial restraint in exchange for pursuing their passion.
To be fair, I'm from Europe, so I can't personally verify whether this still works in the US or if the stories I've heard were false, but this does at least provide a counterpoint to this not being possible in western countries.
I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
Forget the PG essay. Doesn't it seem like there's something wrong here, something you're missing, some way in which your own feelings about your own life are too negative, perhaps like you're emotionally harder on yourself than you deserve?
Would love to know the details of their situation. I'm guessing this is a case of hedonic treadmill and keeping up with the Joneses, or just generally extremely high expectations. And even if you have a high income that doesn't mean you can have everything you want right away.
A "high income" is relative. They might actually have a well-calibrated expectation for what "high" means based on being close to people who don't have high incomes---that is, being in the top 25% should be high by any measure, but in plenty of US cities, even being in the top 25% is no guarantee that you'll be able to afford a mortgage as well as other very important expenses like childcare, paying off student loan debt, caring for extended family, etc, etc. You could look at a situation like this and tell someone to "just change something" or be patient, but the reality is simply much more complicated. People who are struggling to deal with these scenarios are the ones who are best equipped to assess them, not people looking in from the outside.
How much time do you spend following someone else's dream?
Wealth is inconsequential if you spend 80 hours a week at a FAANG and have no time left for yourself, to plan a different life. The famous golden handcuffs.
That's not quite true though, you can get a pretty well paid job in FAANG adjacent that leaves you with enough free time too.
Living in expensive areas has a lot of cons too, a social life for instance, which you don't really have in a rural area. If that's not important to you, great, seems like you have it all figured it out, live on a small income in the middle of nowhere, but not everybody's dream looks like this
That's just cope. With that savings rate he can save for 10 years and spend the next 40 years doing his own thing. As long as you keep your standard of living the same.
> How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home.
Many things in life are surprisingly optional. There are people out there, in the developed world, who do not consider themselves poor, spending scarcely more money than the cost of food (mostly homemade from basic ingredients), rent and utilities.
Speaking of rent: in a functioning market, it's cheaper than a mortgage + property tax, not to mention you have much more flexibility to pay for more or less living space. The money that you don't put towards home equity could go into... equity (i.e. stocks and bonds) instead.
It's not a bad article, and right now there's a lot of hand-wringing in the comments by people who in all frankness probably just don't have the balls to pursue their passion.
Pretty early in my career I decided that the future of a tech bro at a FAANG was not for me so I quit. For one thing I saw that the men who were 10-20 years ahead of me on that track didn't actually have great personal lives. For another Big Tech was rapidly morphing into a net negative for humanity and I was sick of enabling it.
I knew I wanted to work with open source because it was ethically superior but didn't know exactly what or how.
It led initially to several years of wandering the world as a digital nomad and freelancing to pay the bills.
In the long run I started a bootstrapped open source company, now have about 12 people on payroll, and am 15 years expatriated and living in a country that I'm way way happier in with plenty of money and the markers of what people consider "success."
It also required me to do many many things that I didn't want to do or never thought I would do, a great example is learning how to sell things effectively, because initially if I didn't, I wouldn't eat. Then later, because it was the difference between just getting by and becoming rich.
It is completely possible to live your passion while being successful. To do it you have to temper your passion with realism. You cannot lie to yourself about what the world wants from you nor can you ever use it as an excuse for inaction.
Passion requires sacrifice, it's choosing A over B repeatedly, this is its definition. It certainly does mean that you might have to move, or make compromises in other areas of your life.
But if you're at the stage where you're still single and childless, and you're light years away from your passion because of money - frankly I think you're just a pussy. You have more freedom at that stage of life than any other. If you're doing something you don't care for, you have nothing to lose by blowing it to smithereens.
Or you can go on bitching about it on social media, like 95% of people do, and getting deeply involved in reasons that your dissatisfaction is someone else's fault. Look at older people who stayed in a situation they hated because that was where inertia and a lack of balls kept them. Get to know them. If you want their life to be yours soon enough then keep on doing what you're doing.
I think it's great that you had the conviction and risk taking appetite to find success and in retrospect be able to say it was the "right" choice for you. I also think there's some great advice in there about benchmarking the road that you're headed down and asking yourself if it is the right road for you.
However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end.
Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.
That's a very patient and balanced response, which I appreciate!
I think that in the last few years Hacker News and Reddit have made me super jaded and that's why I communicated like this - I responded to a comment that was brief and amounted to a rich guy bitching that he can't afford a house.
It feels like these forums are filled with an endless stream of people who either don't work that hard or don't know how to manage their money, complaining about how the system is rigged against them.
That complaint is fucking dumb. I'm sorry, but "I'm rich but I can't afford to buy a house or take a risk pursuing my passion," is just a dumb take and not a real problem. For those of us who started out life on food stamps, and yet did also grow up in a house, it's kind of an offensive take, in fact. I can't imagine a worse possible excuse for not taking some risks in life -- like this is not someone who has a fire under their ass because they've realized they need to get out of the ghetto, that's for sure. Their problems don't sound serious yet here they are bitching.
Are you really sure the soft and considerate communication style is what people like this need? Maybe there are some out there who are a little too comfortable and just need to get whacked on the head.
I think it depends on the audience. I have some closer friends that I would be comfortable taking a more aggressive communication style because they know my intent is to help them and sometimes people do need someone to shock them into making a change.
For internet strangers, at least in my experience, I think putting people on defensive footing through more aggressive language makes it more difficult to get your point across to most folks. Your goal, however, might be to talk to a group out there that does respond to a more "tough love" angle.
I do find it can make productive discussion with those who are going to perceive the language as insulting more difficult if not impossible. Just something to keep in mind depending on your communication goals.
I had Tourette's symptoms as a kid - motor and vocal tics. They were relatively mild, but serious enough that I had the shit kicked out of me on more than one occasion because I was that weird little kid who kept on twitching and grunting. They got better as I aged but to this day if I'm under stress or sleep deprived they start to creep back in. Sometimes, people still notice.
After being beaten up multiple times I devised a way to lessen them: when they started I would tap my tongue rhythmically against the back of my teeth in a clockwise pattern. This satisfied the compulsion to perform the other tics, at least somewhat. Enough to stop me getting knocked down by other kids.
What I did not ever do, at any point, was use this as an excuse for any failure of any kind. It was my problem and I dealt with it and I moved on to the next 10,000 problems.
I figured out how to get on with my life. Sounds like what you have done is medicalized your problem and used it as an excuse for your failures. I could not care less whether you love or hate me and I will forget this conversation even happened in a day or two. But I will tell you now as a statement of fact that your life will be better if you solve your problems instead of finding excuses for living with them. Weakness is detestable and it brings with it only misery.
This is probably one of the most dickish comments I've read in a while. I have tourettes too. I would never use it as a weapon to diminish other people's difficulties. Just because my problems are manageable doesn't mean other people's are.
Work is what you do to keep society and your place in it going.
Hence it's an intersection of what society needs and what you are capable of.
The issue with modern degenerate society is that nobody'll tell you what society needs - you're supposed to figure it out through gossip.
This is extremely stupid.
People who write articles attempting to solve collective problems at an individual level are blaming the victim and giving terrible advice without realizing it. So it goes.
Well the reason is that nobody knows what society needs… or stated differently, what ends up being useful is non-obvious. So you can’t plan it outside of some general parameters.
The way to make billions, or even millions, is OWNERSHIP.
Own the profits or some of the profits of other people's hard work and creativity in some way, either directly or indirectly (eg property), or the promise of such profits (stocks), and trade that.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard or create, yourself. Just that hard work, creativity, etc, in and of itself, doesn't pay. It pays off when you work harder (or smarter, or just luckier) than other people, in order to win or create ownership, that other people will then contribute to. Just like pg did.
If you make studio pottery you likely own everything, and still dont make money.
Many FAANG employees are clearly in it for the money or status and have no real ownership. (Inb4 RSUs. They are treated as cash.)
The Marxist analysis makes most sense in the context it came from - the Industrial Revolution where most economic value was concentrated in expensive machinery.
Their comment said to own other people's profit. And that is true: the only way to get really rich is to own results of work of millions other people. Like Musk, Zuckerberg or Mohammed bin Salman.
Sport stars and top actors, musicians etc. are really rich too and they don't own other people's profit (or, at least, they made majority of their wealth off their own work, and then added extra money on top via investing their earnings).
They indeed have a better claim to earn directly from their work, but don't forget the army of producers, stage-hands, runners, security guards, marketers, even ghostwriters, etc, etc, who support them, and who typically don't get a cut of profits.
From an investors perspective looking at a group of people with randomly distributed interests, it seems like great advice to motivate each and every one of them to pursue their interest with all their energy and waste their lives on it. Some might get lucky and make the world a better place.
From the perspective of an individual who only gets assigned one or a few subjects to be interested in, not knowing whether these will bring fortune or not, not so useful advice. Chances are that you will fail, lose money and friends, and forget to spend time with your loved ones.
> ... but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
It's sad to me that the wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism, that people like Graham full throatily endorse, creates this mentality.
"If you're young" is a euphemism for "if you are free from the necessities of responsibility, and so are able to forego the lack of consistent income (and if you're in the states, a lack of employer provided health care".
pg, encourage the companies you give money to pay an equal portion of profits to their employees, and maybe even the "olds" can be free do what they love; rather than the fear induced indentured servitude currently so predominant.
May even give us better products and solutions, or as you say, allow people to do actual "great work".
> wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism
I've been having this conversation over dinner with my wife for the last few years. What else is there? Here are the broadly categorized economic systems that I'm aware of (I sincerely request correction if I'm incomplete or mistaken):
- Despotism, feudalism, and other ruler-based economies that mix governance with economy by fiat
- Marxism (and it's entanglements into governance: socialism and communism)
- Capitalism, though it eventually captures governance as a failure mode
Of these systems, with the possible exception of subsistence, only capitalism really works. All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing. Even with a benevolent dictator for life, that life ends and the system degenerates at most in two generations of hereditary leadership.
How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)? How do you turn back the clock on regulatory capture, and monopolized consolidation where firms move to become parasitic instead of exchanging value?
Is there something else?
And no, Marxism and collectivism is not it. Drowning the individual is not it. Marxism hasn't lost its appeal precisely because it's one of the few models that addresses dramatic pay disparity. But it was created in Britain thinking about the factory workers of the time. We know now that it includes errors and misunderstandings of fundamental human behavior that make it turn into tyranny every time. We also know that it necessarily leads to central planning which is fragile and collapses. So that's not it.
In my opinion, a good first step is to stop looking at socialism and capitalism in absolute terms. I think its a mistake to idealistically cling to one archetype as the best of all possible archetypes. When you go the idealistic route, you are doomed to repeat the failings of the past.
I would argue that the most successful economies are blended economies that have achieved success by blending elements of both systems and perhaps other systems as well.
For example, the USA once had working conditions as described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle .” Those working conditions are no longer legal thanks to regulations. But regulations are an element of command-economy, not of free markets.
An example from the other side is the rise of China’s economy. I don’t believe China could have become “the world’s factory” without introducing elements of free market capitalism.
During the cold war, propaganda made socialism the bogeyman to the west, and capitalism the bogeyman to the east. I don’t think this fear is rational. To me they are just two economic archetypes of many. Each has its own merits and faults. The key is to apply them where they make sense.
To me the real enemies are: authoritarianism and corruption.
I see regulatory capture as a form of corruption. The regulators are corrupted by those who would like to externalize their costs onto society. How do we fight corruption? It’s a tough battle, but remember it has been done before. Tammany hall, etc.
> All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing.
What you call a Marxist system is something that Marx said could only work in the most advanced country if it was ready for it, which in that time was Germany. He said such a system would not work elsewhere.
So what form of Marxism failed? Even Lenin, who many Marxists did not consider Marxist, was a Marxist enough to say that Russia would not establish communism. That the Russian self-described Marxists had the chance to take power in Russia and they took it. That Lenin wanted to take power in early 1917 came as a surprise to Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev etc., in fact Trotsky was not even with Lenin then. It surprised them because it was not a Marxist idea. Then Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, i.e. capitalism. Then he died.
Marx clearly spelled out what not to do, and some did what he said not to do, then people attribute the failures of those who did what Marx said not to do, to Marx.
"Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.
There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it. If you say that none of them have actually implemented it, you should consider that strong evidence that it cannot actually be implemented. These attempts have clearly universally led to great harm, which is evidence that the attempt inevitably leads in that direction.
If you expect to defend Marxism this way from the accusation of having "failed", then at best you are kicking the ideological can down the road, and at worst engaging in No True Scotsman fallacy.
> Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.
> There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it.
To implement what? People at the time of Marx asked him what system they should eventually implement. Marx replied he was not August Comte and did not write recipes for the cookshops of the future.
You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.
Also, China by some measures has the largest economy in the world. Hanging over party conferences and Five Year Plan meetings are pictures of Marx and Mao. How has that failed. "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond. Speaking of no true Scotsman cope.
>You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.
No, I have not. I have pointed at every national-scale real-world system which its proponents argued to be intended as Marxist.
> How has that failed.... "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond.
Now who is conjuring non-existent things?
Or are you seriously arguing that China is an example of "the most advanced country" which "[is] ready for [Marxism]" in the modern age, and that Maoism is an example of Marxism which you wish to claim as a success (while denying any Russian regime such status), and that "by some measures the largest economy in the world" (with several times the population of the USA) is ipso facto a success?
I don't think your argument merits a serious response, but there's a passing attempt anyway.
This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.
There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.
No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.
Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.
Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.
> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.
Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.
It's far too late in the history of discourse to try and change this perception, but 'Marxism' is not really so much of a system in-of-itself more than it is a grouping of influential ideas that were propagated by Marx and disseminated throughout history. Marx at no point ever attempts to describe an ideal economic system - Communism as an idea is far more intagible to him, and many 'modern Marxists' have long since re-oriented their ideological critique away from 'the establishment of Communism' and towards 'survival under Capitalism' as modern society is inexorably more alien than Marx could have ever known.
The one that jumps out at me is implying “socialism is a form of Marxism” when it’s the opposite that is true.
There are thriving socialist governments right now. What benefit does your argument get from ignoring those?
Why do you have “capitalism” and “despotism, feudalism, and other ruler based economies” separate? Are you unable to see the oligarchy of the US?
> Drowning the individual is not it.
Spreading ownership across those necessary for a thing to exist is drowning them? Or is it drowning the Csuites?
If your online bookstore turned imitation product megastore requires the people boxing the goods and driving the trucks then they should own a piece of what their work creates; that means ownership in the company and a share in the wealth it creates.
Is it because a CEO is golfing with war criminals that they deserve to capture the economic production from the labor of so many?
The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
> The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
I agree here. Even during the feudal era, if you happened to be employed in the envoy of one of the world's richest trading fleets, you would be treated with far greater respect than an Amazon worker.
> The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.9 percent average rate, nearly eight times higher than the 3.3 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers
> The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.
The post I was replying to suggested that everyone pay the same tax rate. I'm opposed to this. Progressive taxes are more fair, due to the marginal value of money.
I'm not sure the best way to change minds is using a facetious tone and quoting meticulously-crafted numbers from a right-wing think tank.
Billionaires get richer through asset appreciation, not income. The White House report is focusing on how fast the rich are getting richer and that's how they arrived at 8%.
A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Our current system (in which long term capital gains tax is much lower than income tax) rewards the owner class and punishes the workers.
The figures are misleading because if you have low income, your effective tax rate is indeed lower than the wealthy. But then you're barely surviving anyway. So if you're poor, you're screwed because you're poor. If you have a livable income, you're screwed because of high taxes. But if you're wealthy, the system exists to serve you.
You will discover that the numbers are reported correctly.
> A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%
The bottom 50% are taxed at 3.35% of income. That's the IRS' number, not something "meticulously crafted by a right-wing think tank". Or completely made up.
> their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Good. It would be an absolute disaster to tax unrealized gains because, well: they're unrealized. I'm sure the numerous serious problems with doing that will occur to anyone thinking about the question honestly for a little while. The most obvious would be the total destruction of what social mobility we do have.
> a wealthy [sic] person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%
This is insufficiently general. Anyone's gains from assets are taxed at a 15% rate for long-term gains. 60% of American families are homeowners, so it isn't correct to gloss receiving capital gains as exclusively the province of the wealthy.
As I said before, I support progressive taxation, and a higher rate for people who own (not earn) in the top 0.1%, say 20%, is something I would support.
But 15% is 4.5x of 3.35%, so in no world are the very wealthy paying a lower rate of tax than workers. It just isn't true. Therefore, if the OG poster got their wish, the 'capitalists' would pay much less tax, and the workers would pay a great deal more.
Income tax is an effective strawman. The only reason it's the predominant form of government tax income for the government is because of how taxes worked. Pre 1900, almost all tax came from trade, labour licenses and wealth/death taxes.
There are people in the US who increase their wealth by $1 million each year and pay no income tax because their increase in wealth was tied to assets, not increased income that year. By loss offsetting, or other evasion/avoidance measures, they can even end up paying little or no capital gains/asset taxes (which are already significantly lower than income taxes). And they aren't included in your figure.
These are the same people mentioned in the other comment reply to you, quote "A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all."
If assets and capital gains were taxed in the same way (no intermingling, no loss offsetting) as income taxes, then tax would be far more equally distributed - which according to you, would be better right?
You think it's unfair to ask "laborers" pay more tax, since the top 1% already pay 45% of income tax
Let's adjust the law then and have the top 5% by wealth pay 45% of all wealth+income increase via tax, this must be fairer to you?
Basically I would agree with your argument if the practical effects were that the people in practice with the most money and secure income(from any form, be it employment or wealth/asset gain) were paying 45% of all the taxes, however that's not the case. And you are ignoring massively the unrealized gains and ability to offset losses which is available only to those with wealth, but not income. (e.g. I can't set aside my gross salary as a net loss and then use an instrument to gift it to my children a few years later with no effective tax)
The current system is designed to
A) Easily extract taxes (do it before the commoners get the net money
B) Keep assets with those who already own them
C) Shift the tax burden on to the top 20-30% of earners by income, but not wealth.
The effective tax rates you quote for the US are both influenced by this system in a way we can't remove from the data, and show anyway that your belief is weaker than the facts you originally presented (ca. the 45% figure which ignored wealth/assets).
Capital gains tax is lower to offset the risk of taking a capital risk, which labor does not do in receiving a wage.
Much of “labor” participates in capital risk through retirement accounts and homes, blurring this 19th century distinction.
The “capitalists” are likely to sidestep taxation through politicians, lawyers and accountants (See the often quoted 1960s era “tax rate”) which is a phenomenon of power, that exists pre-capitalism.
This is something I think about a lot and I thought the article was pretty solid. My father is a musician, so he always told me to do what I love. I tried to do that by becoming a research mathematician, that didn't work on and now I do something I don't love (but like some days) that consists of sitting at a computer writing code.
>One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
I've had 3 careers: working with high school students in low income areas, being an academic research mathematician, and now being a data scientist. The people I liked the best and who I would like to become like were the teachers I worked with at the high schools in low income areas.
>Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
This pretty well states the soul-suckingness of working in industry.
I know the teacher thing is a nice 'feel-good' example, but based on the experience of my own mother's colleagues, for many teachers in these low income areas, the paycheck is also all they care about.
For me, it wasn't just about a feel-good thing, I enjoyed being around and had the most fun time on a day to day basis when hanging out and working with the high school teachers. I met them all at a summer program, so it was probably the more engaged teachers. Also, the teachers were from the same demographics as the students, so it wasn't white savior type people, but people from the actual community.
> people from the actual community.
Often doesn't make a shred of difference.
Can someone help me understand the first footnote?
>[1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome.
Yes, clearly different passions lead to different industries which mean different economic outcomes.
But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
I have no idea of how to solve this or create the perfect utopia, btw. I'm just confused on the point of the footnote.
You're right in thinking the passage is weird.
Of course a potter will make less money than a software engineer. Nothing surprising or necessarily bad here. The problem however is the system under which having less money has stark negative impacts on your quality of life. For example a for profit healthcare system may result in the potter being utterly unable to receive necessary dental care.
A fair system would ensure that no one suffers just because they don't make a lot of money.
This is not the case even in many rich countries, where persons without a lot of money are forced to skip on health care and live in sub standard housing that doesn't suit even the most basic of needs.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right?
Seems you're focusing on the Floor whereas pg refers to a Ceilings?
It's normal that enterprise sales lovers ends up as taller poppies than pottery lovers. You could take it a step further and say: it's normal than Tom Brady and Ronaldo ends up rich but mediocre football players make $0 from football, even though both have interest in football.
That's the typical Ikigai diagram stuff: if someone's "what you love" naturally aligns with "what you can be paid for", pg point is that this person will be richer. (On top of this, if someone's "what you're good at" also aligns naturally with "what you can be paid for", they'll also be richer).
But you're approaching a different question: do pottery lovers have a good enough quality of life? Do they deserve one if nobody needs any of their pottery stuff?
Does everyone's deserve a good quality of life regardless of what their passion is? What about people with antisocial passions (crime, exploiting others etc)?
I think you make a really good point at the end, that those with antisocial and pathological passions shouldn't be encouraged for the sake of societal health. They can really make a huge profit if done in a certain way, right? Exploiting others like using dark patterns or scams definitely can reap huge rewards.
As a layman, I'm curious to know what you and others think about what standards should be held to meet the floor, what standards should be held to reach the ceiling.
It's good to know people crawling themselves out of poverty just lack the right hobbies
Hobbies is probably not the right word, rather it's what they're good at. It just so happens that building a hobby makes you good at something.
And this isn't necessarily in your control either. If you grow up on a farm you'll probably be very good at farming. If you grow up rich, you'll probably be great at networking and maybe sales.
Some topics, domains, whatever make a lot of money and then a lot don't. If you're good at physical stuff then you're kind of fucked from a societal perspective. You chose wrong, or more likely got dealt a bad hand.
If you're good at writing computer programs you got incredibly lucky. That's one of those topics that makes a lot of money.
Some of this you can build and some you can't. My sister would never be a programmer because she hates it. But she loves kids, and she's a fantastic teacher. Unfortunately, teaching is a topic that doesn't lend itself to high pay. So that kind of sucks.
I know you're being sarcastic, but there is truth to that. Without judgement, it is well-documented that those in poverty will spend, as a proportion of their income, 20 or 30 times as much on lottery tickets as someone who is rich. Now they have their reasons, I think a lottery ticket lets one dream what life could be like, at least until the draw happens, but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.
> but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.
Is this the new "Millennials would be able to buy a house if they would stop buying a $3.50 coffee"?
No, of course not. Obviously if a poor person spends up to 5% [0] of their income on lottery tickets that will have no impact on their financial situation at all. There's no way that changing that behavior could improve their life; 5% is just too small to matter.
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...
From my experience*, the lottery tickets they buy most are scratch-off. And every once in awhile they spend $2 and win $15-$20 (or $13-$18) then use that to buy "luxury" items; cigarettes, beer, candy for the kids or tacos from a taqueria or were able to make an extra lay-away payment. They still (I assume) end up losing more in the long run, but instead of saving that $2 a few times week to be able to have the $20 at the end of the month, they get a little bit of enjoyment from a crap situation. It's more rewarding to be able to get the items they were not planning to have and a little treat, as opposed to the sheer depression of thinking, if they saved that $2-8 a week, then in a month they can buy treats for their kids...
*Part of my childhood was living "on the other side of the tracks", my family wasn't rich, but we had more than many I went to school with. A much richer school district lines split the neighborhood - I wasn't on that side. Many kids at my school probably were in the poorest zipcodes. Most of them were on food-stamps and free-lunch, working parents (or parent); they didn't spend frivolously, goodwill, swap meets and garage sales is where their clothes came from. My direct experience was w/ couple families I spent time with and saw the result of winning scratch offs. That was when they would splurge on "luxuries". It was not about striking it rich and fantastical dreams of yachts; It was probably that experience which taught me the most about being practical and how to stretch a dollar.
You know it sounds silly, but it is broadly correct.
The coffees are inconsequential, but the mindset change is not. I have seen it in my own family. People given the same opportunities, same life, same family background, and yet outcomes are different based on what you value. Those who are often called 'cheapskates' end up much better off than those who spend more wantonly. Everyone made a choice. It's not the lottery tickets alone, it's the net result of having a small inclination to pay for things that you could have forgone. Over time, it does result in a net difference.
It's like how your 401k will end up substantially differently if you invest in a fund with 0.01% management costs v 1%. Yes it's 'only' a hundred or so a year, but it adds up.
I hear a lot of focus on money and not just quality of life. One issue with quality of life is that as you improve it for the bottom, the expecations of what a minimal quality should be tend to go up. So you may never really "solve" it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continually trying to improve.
There's really not much to understand. He's pointing out an inherent flaw in capitalistic structure (that the market disproportionately awards some labor over others, leading to gross imbalances and to runaway problems like climate change) and trying to convert what would be a legitimate critique of such a system (i.e. it seems bad that this economic system is structured in such a way that the social values we have are secondary to individual economics) into a character judgement "well, it's not my fault you happen to have the poor people hobbies lol!"
It's the sort of dodge that's extremely typical of people who have gotten extremely lucky and benefited heavily from this economic system. If pg wound up taking up painting more heavily instead of programming as his primary means of subsistence, I damn well guarantee he wouldn't be reducing economic imbalance to a "natural consequence" of mere "difference of hobbies"
I don't think it's really a flaw of capitalism itself, but a flaw of capitalism on a mass scale and without additional safeguards. Smaller-scale, local capitalism in small populations but with some social safeguards would not have nearly as much problems, even if unusually talented people were rewarded a bit more.
> But when people talk about "fairness", it usually means quality of life right? The ability to afford good healthcare, high quality food, housing, security, providing for a family, social opportunities. How are we defining fairness?
Then why is it that the same people who go on about inequality continue to go on about inequality when countries raise the entire standard of living but have more inequality as a result.
For example, by and large, the modern day economic system (let's just call it capitalism) has caused the greatest increase in standard of living for the average world resident. We live at a time of unheard of prosperity and abundance for the vast majority of people. They are way better off today under this economic system.
Yet the constant criticism of this system is that there are really rich people. Why is that a criticism when the data are pretty unequivocal that the system also makes things better for everyone else?
Directly analogous to the fact that drugs have side effects. Massive inequality and other attendant ills are undesirable side effect of a net beneficial system.
Alright sure, but like if you are on metformin for diabetes and you complain about the side effects, that's one thing, and we can try lessening them (and should). But inequality is used as an argument against capitalism. That's like using the side effects of metformin as 'evidence' that it's not effective at increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering blood sugar. The data are quite unequivocal... it is.
Also I bet there is extreme income inequality among studio potters. Could even be more unequal than the overall population.
Art tends to be the most unequal of professions, while the 'capitalist' work like finance and all are actually more equal in pay. This is simply due to the fact that finance bros get paid a salary whereas art is almost a winner takes all industry
The "these examples" in the footnote refers to the preceding content in the main part: the example of Bill Gates, and:
> There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.
He's just saying that people who are especially interested in making money are likely to make more money (just as say, people interested in listening to music are likely to listen to more music).
(No comment on whether this is a good point or a satisfactory explanation of economic inequality or whatever, just explaining the point of the footnote, as that's what you asked.)
i think it's pretty clear what pg means. more useful products = more money = better outcomes in life. no one wants more pins and posters of some artist's OCs, they want software that helps the world and actually changes lives for the better. studio pottery won't do that.
I've written software that has had a big impact, on a lot of lives. I'm still doing it.
I haven't been paid a dime for it, and I'm quite happy with that.
I don't think PG, or any VCs would be at all interested in my work. They might like the work, itself, but it's not gonna make anyone rich.
Can you please share some more about what you’ve done.
Not in the public forum. The very last thing our service needs, is thousands of curious geeks, signing up throwaways.
If you really want, you can figure it out, from my GH page, or send me a message.
To be clear, I like the idea of making something really useful and being rewarded from bettering other people's lives. I don't doubt that if you make something really useful for the world, you can gain a lot from it.
But when people talk about fairness, (I assume) they're usually thinking about the successful scammers, predatory practices, people not contributing to the world yet profiting a lot from it. They may also think about "essential workers" who, in contrast, may live paycheck to paycheck.
It becomes blurrier to me when I think about who "deserves" what.
>and that some interests yield far more money than others
Okay. Why?
This is presented as an axiom, but it isn't.
Do you mean to suggest that this isn't true or that we should question the reasons that it happens to be true, and possibly change them?
Well, as the interests that yield any given amount of money vary with time, location, and even the identity, personality, or abilities of the person with a given interest, the implied conclusion that one should simply choose a "higher-yielding" interest, and that failure to do so is a personal matter that absolves any interest/pay relationship of unfairness, seems... incorrect.
Maybe axiom was the wrong word. The intent was to convey that the original quote meant to present "and that some interests yield far more money than others" as an "obvious", self-evident notion immune to decomposition or factoring. And it isn't.
> In a world where some people like to write enterprise software
Come on now...
I’m no socialist, but yeah, “natural” doesn’t mean fair, right or desirable.
Of course PG didn’t say “it’s fair that I have billions and others can’t afford basic necessities.”
With robust supply of necessary goods, and a political system that limited the ability of wealth to influence policy, then I do think inequality would be less of a concern. But that isn’t the world we live in.
Maybe it's the youth in me, but I wholly and fully agree with PG here, and I strive to live by it. However, there's another fascinating school of thought that I read about back when I was an undergrad. It comes from Richard Muller, who used to be quite active on Quora back in the day:
> “Follow your passion” or the similar “Follow your dreams.” I’ve seen this advice lead people into paths in which they could not have productive lives or support themselves or families.
> With this advice, many kids will choose to become professional athletes, and then fail. My daughter (Elizabeth Muller) once wanted to become a professional dancer. I think she is very glad now that she instead went to UC San Diego, majored in math and literature, and got a masters degree in international management. (She is now the CEO of our non-profit BerkeleyEarth.org.) One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
> I suggest to children that before they set out on a career path, they consider what will happen if they are the 1000th best in the field. If your field is boxing, you will either be completely out of work, be a sparring partner, or (if you are lucky) be running your own gym. (Or, maybe, you’ll be an enforcer for some mob.) If you are a ballet dancer, it is unlikely that you will be performing; you will probably be teaching children how to dance ballet. If your field is physics or math, you will have very good income, have the respect of your neighbors (maybe they’ll think you are a genius), and a good diverse and productive life.
> I suggest instead that you teach children to try to plan their future lives, to design their futures. They should approach it as they would a challenging homework problem. Learn more about possible careers, and what they are like. Don’t choose too early, since many careers (running Berkeley Earth?) are not obvious to a youngster. Get a broad education, and do a good job at it. Study hard and learn. Get familiar with the world. Beware of childhood passions; they are based on a limited experience, and may not be a good choice for a career.
I'm not sure how to share the link to the post itself: https://www.quora.com/What-is-in-your-opinion-the-most-damag...
Bold to assume that someone managing daddy's nonprofit foundation is happier and more fulfilled than someone fixing and selling bikes for a living.
At a big electronics hardware company a group of us EEs would talk about our dream of owning a bike shop almost every day.
Does a bike shop owner make comparable money to an EE in a large company? How about medical insurance for themselves and the family? As a bike shop owner, what do you do when a customer brings clearly a stolen bike?
It's nice to theorize about an idyllic life if you only think about the idyllic surface of it, from inside of a less idyllic but better-off life.
It wouldn't surprise me if some bike shops are clearing over a million dollars in sales a year if they're good.
Maybe in revenue? Nobody running a bike shop is rich.
Along similar lines, I never really pictured what being a software engineer would be like.
I like solving problems and working with smart people, but sitting inside all day at a computer just isn’t for me.
Sunny outside? Sit inside all day.
Snowing? Sit inside.
Stunning fall colours? Sit inside.
After a few years I had to stop. That is not the life I wanted. Now I adventure around the world, write books and sell stories freelance to magazines. I have way less money, and I am way happier.
I too, could never imagine what being a software engineer would be like.
Sunny outside? Work from the deck chairs on the roof.
Snowing? Grab a seat by the window and enjoy the view.
Stunning fall colours? Great day to work at the park.
And that was before I went full remote.
Sorry I wasn’t more clear.
When it is sunny I go hiking.
When it is snowing I go snowboarding.
When the fall colours are out I go mountain biking.
Then when it’s dark I write articles about that stuff, working the least amount possible.
Could you elaborate more on what it is you do? I'm a current college student studying math. I enjoy what I study a lot, but don't think I could cut it as a mathematician. At the end of the day, I don't care much for money on its own, but I do accept that it is needed to enjoy the true freedom and enjoyment of life you describe. But, as such, I've had to look at jobs that seem kind of bleak to me, but do pay nicely like software engineering(I know that there are some very very interesting software engineering positions, but these are far and few and I'm personally not interested in AI). If I could skip this intermediate step, that would be awesome, so naturally I'm really curious what you do/how you started?
This measuring contest is fun to watch.
> One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
This can happen even if you're literally #1 in the world at one point. Floyd Landis now runs a bicycle shop.
When friends say they are "going to start a business", I ask them "Why? Do you know why, do you know what your goal is?".
In most cases people can't really explain exactly why, and that's fine and normal. Only after years of being in business did certain things come clear to me. Are you there to make money, to follow your passion, to succeed with something, anything, to own your own time and life? The naive might say "all of the above", but they are not compatible.
You may find that you care more about owning your own time than working on stuff you are passionate about.
I've seen quite a few people start a business to work on something they are passionate about and then go out of business, when they COULD have stayed in business if they had been prepared to make money doing stuff they didn't love. What is more important in this case, being in business or doing stuff you love?
I'm young and at a pivotal point in my life, where I need to decide whether to remain in my well-paying job in software engineering or pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. This article has deeply inspired me, hitting at just the right moment to encourage me to aim higher and take the leap.
Two things to check out: (1) find out the best university in your area, and see if they have a business incubator. Check out their events page - there's usually something interesting happening in the next couple of weeks - go to it with an open mind! Creators, investors, students, entrepreneurs all in one spot. Meet the organizer, and find out what kind of workshops would be valuable, and consider running one! They will help promote you! Usually, they'll have a busy group chat (WhatsApp) - get in there and see what services people need / offer...
(2) Find out if there is a community maker-space in your area, and take a tour. You'll meet some of the most creative, entrepreneurial people there, and you'll see up-close, what's possible with product prototyping these days - 3D printed ceramics, robotics, CNC wood carving bots, metal carving, etc - and computer/code labs!
I ran a "Get your product on Shopify" workshop in a maker-space. It was tons of fun and high value - got people booted up with a custom domain name, photo of their product online, Buy it Now button, make a business card with a QR code. For software experts this kind of thing is easy (a couple of hours etc), but for most people - it can feel like an extremely complicated mission (managing DNS records, or adjusting a theme's CSS - super tricky!). Not that you need to go be a Shopify installer! But the point is that you can help turn someones dream into reality, and its satisfying for all involved.
Best of luck in the next chapter of your journey!
Thank you, I found this advice very helpful!
Work at a job that contributes highly to a retirement fund (401k o If in the USA) and after you have maxed our your retirement savings for at least 5, if not 10 years, then go ahead and do something else.
If I had waited 3 more years before I tried to go the startup route I'd have another 200-300k in the bank right now and I would have the financial independence to do whatever I want for however long I want right now.
Compound growth is amazing, take advantage of it while you are as young as possible.
Note that Paul Graham has a vested interest in you doing that and he writes with that in mind.
I also thought about this :D
Don't go all in. Try starting your business on the side and see how it goes for a while.
From reading stories of other entrepreneurs, I feel that the most balanced way to go is to validate the idea (obtain at least one paid customer, etc.) before leaving the job. Thanks for your reply!
You're welcome. I've started a couple of companies. The first time I went all in and I was lucky that it worked out. The second time, I went all in again but it didn't work out. The third time I started on the side and had one paying customer, quit my day job but it was still too early.
So my recommendation for my future self is: Only start switching over once you can pay your bills with your startup. This does not mean that you need to have the same high salary as before. Ideally, you can also start reducing your day job partially. Anyways, the situation is different for everybody, but this is just my learning for myself.
Here's advice from someone older, at probably the same pivotal point in life: only listen to those that say yes, go for it, those that have done. Then form your opinion, which you will do anyway.
Being contrarian, negative, saying it's impossible, telling you to stay in your lane is the default for most people, especially on the internet, especially if they feel smarter than average, as you might find on a forum such as this. My thesis: all negative advice has negative value and can be discarded with extreme prejudice. There is no exception to this rule.
Listen to those that have done, those you feel have something to teach, and put your personal spin to their advice when incorporating it in your own growth.
Good luck!
Thank you! I absolutely agree with your words
There is no pressure. There is no advantage to being an entrepreneur while young versus being older and more established. Contrary to the stories portrayed on here with young college drop outs raising valuations of billions, the more typical path and historically the one with a much greater chance of success is a middle aged engineer founding a company in a niche he knows about.
I too felt like you at a young age and am glad I stuck with the career. It let me do all the life things (get married, have kids, etc) in a stable environment. Now as I age, I also have (or rather, soon will have) the finances to freely choose to pursue something more independent.
It all depends on why you want entrepreneurship. I think if you just want to have money, then this it's a foolhardy path. But if you are excited by the idea of making something new, then there's really no rush. Just wait until the right time comes along, build up skills along the way, and bank your salary
Be an entrepreneur. If it's not for you, you'll know within a few years.
BTW not a terrible advice. Unless you go broke and burnt out, it might be a good way to get hired to much higher and more interesting and impactful positions.
That's exactly how I think about this endeavor. If I fail, I can always get back to being a contractor. I think that with each failed attempt, my value as a software engineer or a manager will only increase.
What are you thinking of building?
Don't do it. Wait until you have enough money to comfortably retire and paid off the mortgage etc, then do it.
By that time, the interest and the energy may have gone.
(If not, by all means pursue your passion after you have comfortably retired. I, for instance, assume that I will never have a chance to comfortably retire.)
I think that being in my 20s, I still have a chance to try entrepreneurship and get back to playing safe in my 30s (in the case of failure)
> One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
Reminded me of this gem: https://moxie.org/2013/01/07/career-advice.html
And this interview at Slashdot:
> Please, don’t spend your late teens or early twenties in front of your computer at a startup. If you’re a young person, I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work – however that looks for you. Get an instrument, learn three chords, and go on tour; find a derelict boat and cross an ocean; hitchhike to Alaska; build a fleet of dirigibles; construct a UAV that will engage with the emerging local police UAVs; whatever – but make it count.
— Moxie Marlinspike https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/12/19/179256/moxie-...
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
They can’t.
Need to have the day job and try to do something in the night, or vice versa.
We need a basic income.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=basic+income
Be born to rich parents, win the lottery, dumpster dive, live on the boat/aircraft?
A friend of mine from New Mexico calls them Trustafarians, where they exist in droves.
Hitchhiking to Alaska is very cheap.
In fact driving a 4x4 from Alaska to Argentina only cost me the same as it did to live in a city and go to work everyday ~$1200 per month for everything
Aw fuck. well at least I made a bunch of money I guess
We don't deserve Moxie. What an inspiration
The time for discovery is childhood. As the trend is to extend adolescence more and more, maybe we need to cut back on regimented schooling during that time.
This made me feel some despair. The young people in my field are similar to me, and have interests and passions outside of work, but the older folks seem to have little in their lives which is enviable to me. Many of them are out of shape and hunched over from decades in front of their screens. They don't have strong interests in anything, and they seem to spend a lot of their time and energy thinking about their money: how to spend it, how to grow it, how to save it. They have families, but seem to view them as an obligation and a burden which they'd rather avoid.
I do know older people who retired from tech relatively early and live adventurous and inspiring lives. Maybe the key is just to get out before the career saps your vitality too much.
This is sad. My advice, as an older person, is find a job that doesn't suck, or even is actually fulfilling. Public sector did that for me. Some weeks will drain you, that's what we get paid for, it just needs to be, not all the time :) Then early retirement is less "necessary". This is perfectly compatible with kids (albeit not in a high cost of living area). While kids are young, adventures will be put on hold to some extent, but then having kids and watching them grow up is a delightful adventure in itself :) And you get to share adventures with them later on. I'm glad I travelled and stuff when young, but seeing others without kids, their life seems a bit boring and same-y to me, but that's a personal thing. Important to some to have kids, important to others not to have them. Those "ground down" people you describe probably need a decent holiday to recharge, they also may need to think outside the box , get off the treadmill and realise that chasing promotions and money is a trap, and in fact a middle-of-the-road tech salary combined with some intelligent frugal habits gives a great standard of living despite today's brutal house prices etc. (only caveat - in USA health costs can be major problem for people with certain conditions)
Not having kids makes early retirement and an adventurous life much more practical. With enough money I suppose you could try both at the same time?
Try both what, kids and early retirement?
I think it could be done, especially if you're willing to relocate somewhere with reasonably low cost of living.
More realistically, I think I'll try to scale back work significantly if/when I have kids rather than fully retiring. Maybe part-time consulting.
Have kids later. After early retirement if you can.
I don't recommend having kids in ones mid 30s or later. It's been quite difficult for us. YMMV.
There are definite, unambiguous downsides to having kids when you're older.
Same for having them when you're younger, the downsides are just different.
I honestly completely disagree. We had kids young and honestly it was so much easier in our 20s than it is now with a baby in our 30s. Despite having more money, babies are just harder as you get older. It's the moderate things. With our first, I was so active and nimble. Now I have slight back pain and stuff but it makes me noticeably less active with my third.
By the time my oldest is an adult, I will be in my early 40s. That's still young enough to do whatever you want to do. I encourage people to have kids young. Honestly, we should normalize having kids in college (free daycare, etc). This would be great for young women especially. Yes, it might stretch out how long it takes them to get a degree. But if dad completes it in four years and starts working, by the time dad starts working, the child is school aged and now doesn't need daycare. Then mom can complete her degree while dad works full time, and graduate with a six year old and job prospects. Kind of jealous of all my mormon friends at BYU who did this lol. By the time their kids are grown they'll be 40 year olds with professional careers, ready to do whatever they want, with the bonus of money.
On the other hand, the first-time parents I know in their mid 30s are struggling. It's harder. You're more tired. Also, by the time you're done you're getting ready to retire.
Most of my friends had kids young. They were busy working and hardly saw them grow up. A few were fortunate that the mothers could and wanted to stay home. The others all had their kids raised by daycare workers. When they found out what was happening in schools all they could do was scream about it. When covid hit and the schools shut those parents were buried and their kids suffered setbacks in their education. That's the standard routine. No thanks.
This is gold: it resonates a lot with my own experience and of those around me. Thanks for sharing. Looks like it was published right when I graduated, sad I missed it. Though I did end up doing some of the things on his list, and they were by far some of the most meaningful periods of my life.
If you have anything else like this article, please do share
Hasn't the SPE been criticized as unscientific and basically fraudulent? Makes it hard to read this article if that's the main literature it cites to draw conclusions from.
That is a world class article, thanks for sharing it. Saving to share with anyone in the future that needs advice.
>They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.
When you work for money, you'd rather do something else, and you aspire to save up enough so that you can stop and do something else.
When you love your work, it doesn't feel like work, and you don't want to stop.
(having said this, I know some people who started out wanting money in order to do something useful with it later, however now they are so hooked to optimize their income more and more -- money has become their main driver and primary motivation.)
Have you ever been in a situation where you really want to do what you love to do, but simply don't have the money to exist and have to do something else?
Perhaps a lot of advice should start with: "Step Zero -- have enough money so that you can afford to do Steps One through Ten".
Does anyone who has successfully followed their passion project and has been financially successful as well provide some comments on this article? Is it just PG's way of luring in wannabe-enterpreneurs with words or does it hold some value? I am in no position to judge this since I am still working a day job.
There are plenty of ways of getting non-dilutive capital, PG just wants the blood-equity of young people that are beginning to wise up to being Transylvania’s cattle
You dont need to be young, you dont need to give up preferred shares to investors, and the real survivorship bias in this game are the entrepreneurs that can afford to try again multiple times on other startups in quick succession…. because they already have capital
Selling that dream to people excluded from that class while deflecting on what the survivors biases really are is how you know it’s a lure
This article assumes your passions are highly monetizable.
I'm not sure how you took that from the article. Its whole premise is that some passions are more monetizable than others.
I wonder what Paul's definition of "young" is in the sentence and why he qualifies this as only applicable to "young" people. Is he proposing that "old" people will have misaligned thinking about what needs to be built?
I am 41 with two kids.
> if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built
Personally I feel that "Beating the averages" was an awesome article that was of technical interest and can apply to many things not just making money, and worth reading perhaps by every s/w developer. Whereas this article is of nothing like the same quality, it seems largely money oriented to me.
Please if you are young and still in full-time education and reading this, please please please take it with a pinch of salt.
What you are reading is essentially a sales-pitch trying to lure you in. This has the tell-tale signs of classic hard sales pitches - playing on the fear of losing out, offering big rewards, comparing to a negative stereotypes, appealing to your ego/self-worth about not being ignorant, flattery by dismissing it as not greed but an intellectual puzzle for smart people like you etc etc. Your internal alarm bells that stop you getting suckered into things should be going crazy about now!
He has a vested interest in getting as many people as possible to throw themselves and their lives 110% into doing a start-up so that he can invest in it and make money off of your work.
For every successful billionaire (or hell even millionaire) that comes out of his "sales funnel", there will be hundreds if not thousands of people whose full-potential/career-potential/earning-potential will be severely curtailed as a result. They'll waste many of their most productive years, potentially building up massive debts in the process, chasing some start-up dream before eventually capitulating and failing before trying to get a "steady job" when they find themselves burnt-out and debt-ridden with nothing to show for it after 5-10 years of slog.
Meanwhile 5-10 years at a FAANG you would have pocketed several million in total-comp (probably in the region of 5+mil USD in the bay area I guess), working in low-stress environments with some of the best engineers, researchers, PMs, and leaders in the world while still having time and energy to live your life too.
It is a numbers game for him. Think carefully about what you are getting into before throwing your future life away. Good luck.
> Bill gates
A typical YC example. Why not take Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson or Brian Kernighan as an example?
>you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else
I think this is where most people are and it can be common for all effort to amount to nothing more than "survival activities", with fewer options than normal occurring under increasing macro economic challenges.
In that case I would think it's good to never completely stop doing what you love most that is realistically within reach. Even if you can not give it very much of the full dedication it might deserve.
If you can't be fully "in the game" due to insufficient resources or something like that, maybe you can function somewhat adjacent in an even more sustainable way, maintaining better readiness through time for some rare opportunities that are almost never attainable, or for very long.
And keep it in perspective for opportunities to up the priority or focus, even as less-elusive things might come more easily within reach along the way.
Probably the culture of where I live is very different from the other side of the ocean, but... why is money such a big point in this article? I love my work and I'm decently paid and... I don't really want to be rich. With the given title, I would advocate for/stress on contentment rather than monetary richness.
> why is money such a big point in this article?
There’s no such thing as a reasonable quality of life on an average income anymore. People who don’t prioritize money will live like poor students for the rest of their lives renting with roommates. They will never have a family, healthcare, hobbies, or respect from their community.
Stop pretending that not prioritizing money is an option. It’s incredibly condescending. In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
> In most parts of most developed countries you need at least a top 20% income just to live with dignity.
In America, you really do not (I don't know about other parts of the world). We have lots of really sweet towns and things where you can live on a totally average income. Just visited my cousin in the rural midwest (town of like 1000 people) and she and her husband live a great life, with their own plot of land, their eight kids, and a normal income (single income -- only husband works). And before I get the 'oh well that's only for white people' response, we're brown-skinned; she's an immigrant; and she's not only accepted but embraced and actually holds elected office.
In my experience, the people making these kinds of claims have some innate bias against these places. But they're like a dime a dozen. We passed by dozens of similar towns on our four hour drive from the nearest airport.
Granted: If you live in America, depending on your situation, you may need wealth or a good job to have access to decent healthcare.
But, "They will never have a family... hobbies, or respect from their community." This is completely out of touch. Plenty of Americans in flyover country accomplish all of these on an average salary. Source: They're my neighbors.
In the culture where you live there are good chances you don't finish college with a couple hundred thousands dollars in debt, and getting a reasonable home near the place where you want to work doesn't cost a million dollars.
On top of that, bad luck in America can be very expensive. the wrong illness can make living a low stress life difficult
Therefore an American that sees a pile of debt in their future, the kind of career that can pay for that kind of debt, and therefore lead to just being reasonably content and independent, is not all that far from one where you end up in the neighborhood of being rich. It's definitely what happened to me: The difference between not having a lot of economic stress and 'oops, I could retire tomorrow' was about 5 years.
Same. I think PG and the bay area has been such a goldmine the last few decades most people in tech and VC driven by the rewards. Most people in American are somewhat more money driven than Europeans, but most are relatively content than the Bay Area population.
Consider who the author is: a wealthy investor for whom money is obviously very important.
Because America has such a poor social safety net that it is very easy to go from well paid to homeless in just a few years.
Accordingly, everyone is fighting to make enough money to not get fucked over during each of our cyclical "economic recessions". During each recession more and more people permanently fall into poverty and everyone who is left fights even harder to not be a victim the next time the economy goes south.
I don’t want to lead with the mean retort that people who say they don’t care about money often don’t have any, so let me give you the kinder version - I think you come from a place of immense privilege. Either born in a first world country, or born to well off parents or in a rich society.
otoh, Where I come from , we have a proverb that’s hard to translate but describes our misery quite accurately - “we don’t even have enough water to wipe our anus after we poop”.
So that’s why I seek wealth. Not because I’m not content, or stressed out or whatever. Because the people I was born with, my cousins, brothers, relatives - they are still digging ditches. I am no smarter than them perhaps, but because I chose to pay a little extra attention at academics, atleast I have some money to buy some water so I can wash my butt after I poop.
Don’t hate on people who want money. The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
I understand most of the world population is very poor.
> Don’t hate on people who want money.
Why would I?
> The world outside your tiny bubble is very, very poor.
I have a hard time understanding this tiny bubble part. Both my parents came from poor farmer families. My father was a carpenter who maintained a tiny farm before and after his daytime job. My mother helped with that and took care of the children. My father saw the sea for the first time aged 65, though it is only 200km.
I try to put things in perspective... I read the average water consumption per person per year in USA is on average 90000 litres. That is our yearly household consumption.
I can confirm that more or less. A month ago I visited a village where a new groundwater well was just completed. Some of the people there have to walk miles to get to that well to fetch water. Every day. And if they had to pay for the water, they would struggle.
Last week I took my kids and a friend to dinner. We spent about 50$. Not much for us for 4 people. But for quite a lot of locals we just blew a months earning or more in one evening. This income difference baffles me every time.
Myself I am out of work for a year, and while I saved some money, if I don't find some remote work soon I'll have to pack my bags and move my whole family back to Europe to file for unemployment. But I am not complaining because at least I do have that option. The people here around me don't. So despite my situation I am still privileged.
In place of money, you can equally substitute status, prestige, or power.
When it comes to young people choosing careers in the US the money choice is more prominent.
Besides removing distractions, having more money raises the limits on what you can build before it needs to become self-sustaining. Retirement should be a consolation prize but not the entire goal.
honestly, I want to be rich. I do make a decent living, but not enough to quit my job. At this rate I'll have to work until I'm 50 or 60, which is same as everyone else, so cry me a river, but even so, it would be nice to dedicate more time to hobby which at this rate I can at most dedicate a weekend to, but in practice it's a bit less because I have to go out with the wife and I have visit my family, etc. Most weeks I have a full day at most to pursue anything.
From what i understand my life is very similar as yours. One out of 7 seems not too shabby though.
Maybe a cliché but... my advice would be to try to get most out of each simple experience. Today my spouse and kid went for a long walk together with me... while I could have been doing woodworking. I _tried_ to teach the kid the joy of walking without having too much on his mind. I also started conversations with strangers while waiting in the ice cream queue. There's always something to learn from that. I guess you by now understand my advocating for contentment.
this afternoon i couldn't have been doing woodworking because i don't have woodworking tools. that's not just because i can't afford them; my apartment is not really big enough for a woodworking shop, and i worry that the wiring might catch fire if i tried to plug in a high-powered saw. i'm having a hard time being content, despite going on a walk with my wife this morning and having lots of lovely conversations with strangers over the last three days, because the rent is due in two weeks and i'm nervous about whether i'll have enough. ever since i got covid for the third time in april, at which point i couldn't get paxlovid, i don't remember things like i used to. (i suspect that with enough money i could have gotten paxlovid.) also, my aunt is going to die soon, and i don't have the money to visit her before that
i really wish i'd spent more effort on making, and saving, money 20 years ago. i wouldn't want to spend my life on it, and no amount of money will keep me from dying, but right now i'm spending a lot of my life coping with the consequences of not having it
Sorry to hear that, hope things work out for you! I've enjoyed and appreciated your work!
thanks! i hope you continue to do so
Passion is too generic of a word and that gets confusing when it comes to advice like this. It could be someone is passionate about the activity itself, passionate about the idea of being successful, obsessed intellectually with a question, passionate about wanting to prove something…
If you aren’t young, you aren’t worth Paul taking a moment to write a sentence about you, though, so go to hell.
Apparently.
He's targeting a particular audience in this essay. Doesn't mean he hates everyone else. In fact, in other essays he says that being an older founder can actually be an advantage in some ways.
I gladens me to see that the sentiment here on HN is getting increasingly critical of PG and other VCs and Silicon Valley figures. Let's just hope that PG doesn't decide to pull the plug on HN some day.
Aren't we the court jesters who entertain them with our wit, or the court scientists who provide them with early insights into which technologies will be worth investing in?
Too accurate.
I love his point about following your passion if your passion is in a narrow niche (especially if it involves technology). Trying to be the best at something popular will probably lead to failure, but I think people would be surprised how easy it is to become top 100 at something niche.
I used to work for someone who won all the races in his age group because he was the only entrant in that age group.
When your goal is to make a modest or steady income, you often have to focus on what the market values. It's like a big luck when your interests align with market demand
Yeah. I feel like I've already used up all my luck getting a job where I can work on a computer indoors in air conditioning as a woman wearing jeans, and not have to dress up, present myself, hurt myself, risk my life, like so many other jobs
Sometimes I wonder what retirement looks like when you're able to do this for a career while WFH - can we push a little further than many people because the work is less physically demanding, or is being still for this long every day it's own type of wear? I can't imagine just stopping one day, I'd really prefer to switch to part time work at a slower pace.
Also worth thinking about whether you want to be in the bridge of a ship with lots of other people on board, prefer working in a different deck like Engineering, or flying your own light shuttle craft about!
From a commencement speech by a young person called Grant Sanderson:
> Influence is not distributed uniformly in the population and I for one would feel a lot more comfortable if it was you who were at the helm guiding this crazy ship that we're all riding.
> If you step into the next chapter of life with an implacable focus on adding values to others, you're more likely to be the ones at the helm.
> If you recognize that action precedes motivation, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you ask what's possible now that wasn't 10 years ago, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> If you appreciate just how much power you have to shape the lives of the generation that follows you, you're more likely to be at the helm.
> And if you remain adaptable to a changing world, treating passion not as a destination but as a fuel, following not dreams but opportunities, you're more likely to be at the helm.
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3I3kAg2J7w
— https://www.3blue1brown.com/about
new twist on capitalist pitch: "There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them."
the older Paul gets, he sounds just like rest of his club mates!
I'm someone who is not rich but is interested in capital markets. My net worth is less than USD 100,000 and I spend hours each week downloading market data, looking for trade ideas, writing scripts, running statistical tests, implementing trading strategies, and analyzing the results.
I expect to be quite well off someday as a result of this hobby, but for now it's just an interest.
The mask is coming off
Better that way than usual startup bullshit about changing the world to a better place.
it’s dangerous to take advice from those with superlative ability if you are only slightly above average
often times it’s not for you
be honest of your place in this world
enjoy the luck you have it’s better than most
> you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them
A very succinct explanation of complex emotional challenge.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself.
What silly advice. I didn’t even know my “what to work on” existed until I was near the end of my junior year of college. XD
I took that phrase to mean "don't be blocked by any institution, person, or societal expectation to pursue what's interesting to you". Could be casual research, a cursory glance, or a deep internal investigation of yourself.
Which is always good to start as soon as you're aware of it. It's fine if you figure it out near the end of your junior year, your first job, or a midlife crisis. "Best time to start was yesterday, 2nd best is now" type of thing.
Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.
He's no longer writing from practical experience.
Also sometimes when adults try to pull kids towards something, they may be trying to validate their own life choices and pathway. Just like a parent getting his kid into football, always remembering that he lost the playoff game.
> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home
This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making.
[0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.
> If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible
Do you really believe this?
Farmers tend to have very high net worths and very low disposable income until they get old. You need several million dollars worth of land just to make the payments on that land/equipment and have enough left over to live on. And of course there are years where you will lose money and so you need to figure out how to ride that out. Then in 30 years you make the last payment on the land and suddenly what was just barely enough money to live on is a massive income and you are extremely wealthy.
I work in flyover country. I'm not a farmer my self, but several of my co workers are - they farm 100 acres of land after work, and it generates just enough money to make the payments land payments. They are looking to buy more land as soon as they can finance it (often leasing it to a neighbor to farm as they don't have time and so they lose money on the land). Their plan is in 15-20 years inflation will have made crops more valuable while the land payments are the same and so they can afford to quit the day job and farm all their land.
Getting started is the hard part. Getting two million dollar loan for 100 acres of prime farmland when you are not already a farmer is hard. Many farmers thus start with livestock, you can start on 10 acres of non-prime farmland which is affordable and then over a few years build enough credibility with the bank to get that first large field which is where the money is.
Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
I have family that does this in WI. It's viable, but hard work.
I actually know this. I personally know a few people who do accept major financial restraint in exchange for pursuing their passion.
To be fair, I'm from Europe, so I can't personally verify whether this still works in the US or if the stories I've heard were false, but this does at least provide a counterpoint to this not being possible in western countries.
The food supply chain is still dependent on the fact that many people actually do this; so presumably it is possible.
I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.
Forget the PG essay. Doesn't it seem like there's something wrong here, something you're missing, some way in which your own feelings about your own life are too negative, perhaps like you're emotionally harder on yourself than you deserve?
Would love to know the details of their situation. I'm guessing this is a case of hedonic treadmill and keeping up with the Joneses, or just generally extremely high expectations. And even if you have a high income that doesn't mean you can have everything you want right away.
A "high income" is relative. They might actually have a well-calibrated expectation for what "high" means based on being close to people who don't have high incomes---that is, being in the top 25% should be high by any measure, but in plenty of US cities, even being in the top 25% is no guarantee that you'll be able to afford a mortgage as well as other very important expenses like childcare, paying off student loan debt, caring for extended family, etc, etc. You could look at a situation like this and tell someone to "just change something" or be patient, but the reality is simply much more complicated. People who are struggling to deal with these scenarios are the ones who are best equipped to assess them, not people looking in from the outside.
This is because you chose to live an expensive life. Most of the world gets by on less.
Most of the world also gets by on much more affordable housing too, though.
I spend around 25% of my income
So you can retire in 7 years, right? https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
How much time do you spend following someone else's dream?
Wealth is inconsequential if you spend 80 hours a week at a FAANG and have no time left for yourself, to plan a different life. The famous golden handcuffs.
That's not quite true though, you can get a pretty well paid job in FAANG adjacent that leaves you with enough free time too.
Living in expensive areas has a lot of cons too, a social life for instance, which you don't really have in a rural area. If that's not important to you, great, seems like you have it all figured it out, live on a small income in the middle of nowhere, but not everybody's dream looks like this
That's just cope. With that savings rate he can save for 10 years and spend the next 40 years doing his own thing. As long as you keep your standard of living the same.
Most of the world doesn't get the opportunity to pursue their passions.
> How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home.
Many things in life are surprisingly optional. There are people out there, in the developed world, who do not consider themselves poor, spending scarcely more money than the cost of food (mostly homemade from basic ingredients), rent and utilities.
Speaking of rent: in a functioning market, it's cheaper than a mortgage + property tax, not to mention you have much more flexibility to pay for more or less living space. The money that you don't put towards home equity could go into... equity (i.e. stocks and bonds) instead.
I can't tell if this is a serious comment or a joke. Tons of people make "a little bit of money" and mange to get by and are even happy.
It's not a bad article, and right now there's a lot of hand-wringing in the comments by people who in all frankness probably just don't have the balls to pursue their passion.
Pretty early in my career I decided that the future of a tech bro at a FAANG was not for me so I quit. For one thing I saw that the men who were 10-20 years ahead of me on that track didn't actually have great personal lives. For another Big Tech was rapidly morphing into a net negative for humanity and I was sick of enabling it.
I knew I wanted to work with open source because it was ethically superior but didn't know exactly what or how.
It led initially to several years of wandering the world as a digital nomad and freelancing to pay the bills.
In the long run I started a bootstrapped open source company, now have about 12 people on payroll, and am 15 years expatriated and living in a country that I'm way way happier in with plenty of money and the markers of what people consider "success."
It also required me to do many many things that I didn't want to do or never thought I would do, a great example is learning how to sell things effectively, because initially if I didn't, I wouldn't eat. Then later, because it was the difference between just getting by and becoming rich.
It is completely possible to live your passion while being successful. To do it you have to temper your passion with realism. You cannot lie to yourself about what the world wants from you nor can you ever use it as an excuse for inaction.
Passion requires sacrifice, it's choosing A over B repeatedly, this is its definition. It certainly does mean that you might have to move, or make compromises in other areas of your life.
But if you're at the stage where you're still single and childless, and you're light years away from your passion because of money - frankly I think you're just a pussy. You have more freedom at that stage of life than any other. If you're doing something you don't care for, you have nothing to lose by blowing it to smithereens.
Or you can go on bitching about it on social media, like 95% of people do, and getting deeply involved in reasons that your dissatisfaction is someone else's fault. Look at older people who stayed in a situation they hated because that was where inertia and a lack of balls kept them. Get to know them. If you want their life to be yours soon enough then keep on doing what you're doing.
I think it's great that you had the conviction and risk taking appetite to find success and in retrospect be able to say it was the "right" choice for you. I also think there's some great advice in there about benchmarking the road that you're headed down and asking yourself if it is the right road for you.
However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end.
Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.
That's a very patient and balanced response, which I appreciate!
I think that in the last few years Hacker News and Reddit have made me super jaded and that's why I communicated like this - I responded to a comment that was brief and amounted to a rich guy bitching that he can't afford a house.
It feels like these forums are filled with an endless stream of people who either don't work that hard or don't know how to manage their money, complaining about how the system is rigged against them.
That complaint is fucking dumb. I'm sorry, but "I'm rich but I can't afford to buy a house or take a risk pursuing my passion," is just a dumb take and not a real problem. For those of us who started out life on food stamps, and yet did also grow up in a house, it's kind of an offensive take, in fact. I can't imagine a worse possible excuse for not taking some risks in life -- like this is not someone who has a fire under their ass because they've realized they need to get out of the ghetto, that's for sure. Their problems don't sound serious yet here they are bitching.
Are you really sure the soft and considerate communication style is what people like this need? Maybe there are some out there who are a little too comfortable and just need to get whacked on the head.
I think it depends on the audience. I have some closer friends that I would be comfortable taking a more aggressive communication style because they know my intent is to help them and sometimes people do need someone to shock them into making a change.
For internet strangers, at least in my experience, I think putting people on defensive footing through more aggressive language makes it more difficult to get your point across to most folks. Your goal, however, might be to talk to a group out there that does respond to a more "tough love" angle.
I do find it can make productive discussion with those who are going to perceive the language as insulting more difficult if not impossible. Just something to keep in mind depending on your communication goals.
While I'm at it, if I could use my free will to be less of a "pussy" why do you use yours to continue being a huge dick?
In my case it's not balls, it's probably autism. I hate traveling because I'm very picky about food
> frankly I think you're just a pussy
Go to hell and ask yourself how free will exists if someone freely chooses to not exercise their free will. something is inconsistent in your thinking
I had Tourette's symptoms as a kid - motor and vocal tics. They were relatively mild, but serious enough that I had the shit kicked out of me on more than one occasion because I was that weird little kid who kept on twitching and grunting. They got better as I aged but to this day if I'm under stress or sleep deprived they start to creep back in. Sometimes, people still notice.
After being beaten up multiple times I devised a way to lessen them: when they started I would tap my tongue rhythmically against the back of my teeth in a clockwise pattern. This satisfied the compulsion to perform the other tics, at least somewhat. Enough to stop me getting knocked down by other kids.
What I did not ever do, at any point, was use this as an excuse for any failure of any kind. It was my problem and I dealt with it and I moved on to the next 10,000 problems.
I figured out how to get on with my life. Sounds like what you have done is medicalized your problem and used it as an excuse for your failures. I could not care less whether you love or hate me and I will forget this conversation even happened in a day or two. But I will tell you now as a statement of fact that your life will be better if you solve your problems instead of finding excuses for living with them. Weakness is detestable and it brings with it only misery.
This is probably one of the most dickish comments I've read in a while. I have tourettes too. I would never use it as a weapon to diminish other people's difficulties. Just because my problems are manageable doesn't mean other people's are.
Work is what you do to keep society and your place in it going.
Hence it's an intersection of what society needs and what you are capable of.
The issue with modern degenerate society is that nobody'll tell you what society needs - you're supposed to figure it out through gossip.
This is extremely stupid.
People who write articles attempting to solve collective problems at an individual level are blaming the victim and giving terrible advice without realizing it. So it goes.
Well the reason is that nobody knows what society needs… or stated differently, what ends up being useful is non-obvious. So you can’t plan it outside of some general parameters.
More self-serving feel-good from pg
The way to make billions, or even millions, is OWNERSHIP.
Own the profits or some of the profits of other people's hard work and creativity in some way, either directly or indirectly (eg property), or the promise of such profits (stocks), and trade that.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard or create, yourself. Just that hard work, creativity, etc, in and of itself, doesn't pay. It pays off when you work harder (or smarter, or just luckier) than other people, in order to win or create ownership, that other people will then contribute to. Just like pg did.
If you make studio pottery you likely own everything, and still dont make money.
Many FAANG employees are clearly in it for the money or status and have no real ownership. (Inb4 RSUs. They are treated as cash.)
The Marxist analysis makes most sense in the context it came from - the Industrial Revolution where most economic value was concentrated in expensive machinery.
Their comment said to own other people's profit. And that is true: the only way to get really rich is to own results of work of millions other people. Like Musk, Zuckerberg or Mohammed bin Salman.
And my comment argues why that’s not true:
- many people prioritizing money are workers
- many (most?) owners are not making money
So in the context of this essay “choosing ownership” is not the key career choice facing young people.
Sport stars and top actors, musicians etc. are really rich too and they don't own other people's profit (or, at least, they made majority of their wealth off their own work, and then added extra money on top via investing their earnings).
They indeed have a better claim to earn directly from their work, but don't forget the army of producers, stage-hands, runners, security guards, marketers, even ghostwriters, etc, etc, who support them, and who typically don't get a cut of profits.
From an investors perspective looking at a group of people with randomly distributed interests, it seems like great advice to motivate each and every one of them to pursue their interest with all their energy and waste their lives on it. Some might get lucky and make the world a better place.
From the perspective of an individual who only gets assigned one or a few subjects to be interested in, not knowing whether these will bring fortune or not, not so useful advice. Chances are that you will fail, lose money and friends, and forget to spend time with your loved ones.
the question is when
I didn't find any new terms here, but it was a great synthesis of a lot of his work. I also really enjoy the shorter length of the recent essays.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.loom.com/embed/9ac3f3b85fd...
> if you're young and good at technology...
> ... but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
It's sad to me that the wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism, that people like Graham full throatily endorse, creates this mentality.
"If you're young" is a euphemism for "if you are free from the necessities of responsibility, and so are able to forego the lack of consistent income (and if you're in the states, a lack of employer provided health care".
pg, encourage the companies you give money to pay an equal portion of profits to their employees, and maybe even the "olds" can be free do what they love; rather than the fear induced indentured servitude currently so predominant.
May even give us better products and solutions, or as you say, allow people to do actual "great work".
> wealth inequality manifested and upheld by the current structure of capitalism
I've been having this conversation over dinner with my wife for the last few years. What else is there? Here are the broadly categorized economic systems that I'm aware of (I sincerely request correction if I'm incomplete or mistaken):
- Subsistence (hunter/gatherer, limited farming... etc.)
- Despotism, feudalism, and other ruler-based economies that mix governance with economy by fiat
- Marxism (and it's entanglements into governance: socialism and communism)
- Capitalism, though it eventually captures governance as a failure mode
Of these systems, with the possible exception of subsistence, only capitalism really works. All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing. Even with a benevolent dictator for life, that life ends and the system degenerates at most in two generations of hereditary leadership.
How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)? How do you turn back the clock on regulatory capture, and monopolized consolidation where firms move to become parasitic instead of exchanging value?
Is there something else?
And no, Marxism and collectivism is not it. Drowning the individual is not it. Marxism hasn't lost its appeal precisely because it's one of the few models that addresses dramatic pay disparity. But it was created in Britain thinking about the factory workers of the time. We know now that it includes errors and misunderstandings of fundamental human behavior that make it turn into tyranny every time. We also know that it necessarily leads to central planning which is fragile and collapses. So that's not it.
If not Marxism, and not capitalism, then what?
In my opinion, a good first step is to stop looking at socialism and capitalism in absolute terms. I think its a mistake to idealistically cling to one archetype as the best of all possible archetypes. When you go the idealistic route, you are doomed to repeat the failings of the past.
I would argue that the most successful economies are blended economies that have achieved success by blending elements of both systems and perhaps other systems as well.
For example, the USA once had working conditions as described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle .” Those working conditions are no longer legal thanks to regulations. But regulations are an element of command-economy, not of free markets.
An example from the other side is the rise of China’s economy. I don’t believe China could have become “the world’s factory” without introducing elements of free market capitalism.
During the cold war, propaganda made socialism the bogeyman to the west, and capitalism the bogeyman to the east. I don’t think this fear is rational. To me they are just two economic archetypes of many. Each has its own merits and faults. The key is to apply them where they make sense.
To me the real enemies are: authoritarianism and corruption.
I see regulatory capture as a form of corruption. The regulators are corrupted by those who would like to externalize their costs onto society. How do we fight corruption? It’s a tough battle, but remember it has been done before. Tammany hall, etc.
> All forms of Marxism ever practiced lead to despotism, which most of us can agree is a bad thing.
What you call a Marxist system is something that Marx said could only work in the most advanced country if it was ready for it, which in that time was Germany. He said such a system would not work elsewhere.
So what form of Marxism failed? Even Lenin, who many Marxists did not consider Marxist, was a Marxist enough to say that Russia would not establish communism. That the Russian self-described Marxists had the chance to take power in Russia and they took it. That Lenin wanted to take power in early 1917 came as a surprise to Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev etc., in fact Trotsky was not even with Lenin then. It surprised them because it was not a Marxist idea. Then Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, i.e. capitalism. Then he died.
Marx clearly spelled out what not to do, and some did what he said not to do, then people attribute the failures of those who did what Marx said not to do, to Marx.
"Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.
There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it. If you say that none of them have actually implemented it, you should consider that strong evidence that it cannot actually be implemented. These attempts have clearly universally led to great harm, which is evidence that the attempt inevitably leads in that direction.
If you expect to defend Marxism this way from the accusation of having "failed", then at best you are kicking the ideological can down the road, and at worst engaging in No True Scotsman fallacy.
> Marxism (or any other such system) has never been tried" is such a tired and pointless argument.
> There have clearly been repeated attempts to implement it.
To implement what? People at the time of Marx asked him what system they should eventually implement. Marx replied he was not August Comte and did not write recipes for the cookshops of the future.
You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.
Also, China by some measures has the largest economy in the world. Hanging over party conferences and Five Year Plan meetings are pictures of Marx and Mao. How has that failed. "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond. Speaking of no true Scotsman cope.
>You have conjured up some non-existent system Marx supposedly wanted to put in place, then you say it was a failure, then you admonish people for not seeing Marx's system did not fail. What system? He explicitly said he had none.
No, I have not. I have pointed at every national-scale real-world system which its proponents argued to be intended as Marxist.
> How has that failed.... "Well, Marx's picture is there, but it's not real Marxist" people respond.
Now who is conjuring non-existent things?
Or are you seriously arguing that China is an example of "the most advanced country" which "[is] ready for [Marxism]" in the modern age, and that Maoism is an example of Marxism which you wish to claim as a success (while denying any Russian regime such status), and that "by some measures the largest economy in the world" (with several times the population of the USA) is ipso facto a success?
I don't think your argument merits a serious response, but there's a passing attempt anyway.
This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.
There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.
No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.
Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.
Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.
> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.
What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.
Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.
There are far more than 17 capitalist countries which meet every criteria you've listed as an evil of Communism.
It's far too late in the history of discourse to try and change this perception, but 'Marxism' is not really so much of a system in-of-itself more than it is a grouping of influential ideas that were propagated by Marx and disseminated throughout history. Marx at no point ever attempts to describe an ideal economic system - Communism as an idea is far more intagible to him, and many 'modern Marxists' have long since re-oriented their ideological critique away from 'the establishment of Communism' and towards 'survival under Capitalism' as modern society is inexorably more alien than Marx could have ever known.
I think your bulleted list is a bit wonky.
The one that jumps out at me is implying “socialism is a form of Marxism” when it’s the opposite that is true.
There are thriving socialist governments right now. What benefit does your argument get from ignoring those?
Why do you have “capitalism” and “despotism, feudalism, and other ruler based economies” separate? Are you unable to see the oligarchy of the US?
> Drowning the individual is not it.
Spreading ownership across those necessary for a thing to exist is drowning them? Or is it drowning the Csuites?
If your online bookstore turned imitation product megastore requires the people boxing the goods and driving the trucks then they should own a piece of what their work creates; that means ownership in the company and a share in the wealth it creates.
Is it because a CEO is golfing with war criminals that they deserve to capture the economic production from the labor of so many?
The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
> What else is there?
What indeed.
> The fact that a company can create one of the three riches men on the planet and have its employees who are the ones making that person’s wealth be on government assistance is absolute bullshit.
I agree here. Even during the feudal era, if you happened to be employed in the envoy of one of the world's richest trading fleets, you would be treated with far greater respect than an Amazon worker.
> How do you reset capitalism so that we refresh to healthy markets (a prerequisite for capitalism to act as a force for societal welfare)?
Do you know about Sisyphus?
I just want capitalism where the capitalists pay the same tax rate as labor.
That sounds fairly awful. The top 1% of earners pay 45% of income tax (US figure). Why would you want laborers to pay so much more tax?
In what country is that?
Average tax rate paid by billionaires in the US is close to 8%
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2021/09/23/new-...
The US of course, I specifically said that.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
> The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.9 percent average rate, nearly eight times higher than the 3.3 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers
> The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.
The post I was replying to suggested that everyone pay the same tax rate. I'm opposed to this. Progressive taxes are more fair, due to the marginal value of money.
I'm not sure the best way to change minds is using a facetious tone and quoting meticulously-crafted numbers from a right-wing think tank.
Billionaires get richer through asset appreciation, not income. The White House report is focusing on how fast the rich are getting richer and that's how they arrived at 8%.
A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Our current system (in which long term capital gains tax is much lower than income tax) rewards the owner class and punishes the workers.
The figures are misleading because if you have low income, your effective tax rate is indeed lower than the wealthy. But then you're barely surviving anyway. So if you're poor, you're screwed because you're poor. If you have a livable income, you're screwed because of high taxes. But if you're wealthy, the system exists to serve you.
The IRS is not a right wing think tank, the source is quoted immediately and you can find it here: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...
You will discover that the numbers are reported correctly.
> A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%
The bottom 50% are taxed at 3.35% of income. That's the IRS' number, not something "meticulously crafted by a right-wing think tank". Or completely made up.
> their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Good. It would be an absolute disaster to tax unrealized gains because, well: they're unrealized. I'm sure the numerous serious problems with doing that will occur to anyone thinking about the question honestly for a little while. The most obvious would be the total destruction of what social mobility we do have.
> a wealthy [sic] person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%
This is insufficiently general. Anyone's gains from assets are taxed at a 15% rate for long-term gains. 60% of American families are homeowners, so it isn't correct to gloss receiving capital gains as exclusively the province of the wealthy.
As I said before, I support progressive taxation, and a higher rate for people who own (not earn) in the top 0.1%, say 20%, is something I would support.
But 15% is 4.5x of 3.35%, so in no world are the very wealthy paying a lower rate of tax than workers. It just isn't true. Therefore, if the OG poster got their wish, the 'capitalists' would pay much less tax, and the workers would pay a great deal more.
I clearly wrote tax rate, not total taxes.
And the top 1% gets a lot of wealth that isn't classified as income.
Income tax is an effective strawman. The only reason it's the predominant form of government tax income for the government is because of how taxes worked. Pre 1900, almost all tax came from trade, labour licenses and wealth/death taxes.
There are people in the US who increase their wealth by $1 million each year and pay no income tax because their increase in wealth was tied to assets, not increased income that year. By loss offsetting, or other evasion/avoidance measures, they can even end up paying little or no capital gains/asset taxes (which are already significantly lower than income taxes). And they aren't included in your figure.
These are the same people mentioned in the other comment reply to you, quote "A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all."
If assets and capital gains were taxed in the same way (no intermingling, no loss offsetting) as income taxes, then tax would be far more equally distributed - which according to you, would be better right?
You think it's unfair to ask "laborers" pay more tax, since the top 1% already pay 45% of income tax
Let's adjust the law then and have the top 5% by wealth pay 45% of all wealth+income increase via tax, this must be fairer to you?
Basically I would agree with your argument if the practical effects were that the people in practice with the most money and secure income(from any form, be it employment or wealth/asset gain) were paying 45% of all the taxes, however that's not the case. And you are ignoring massively the unrealized gains and ability to offset losses which is available only to those with wealth, but not income. (e.g. I can't set aside my gross salary as a net loss and then use an instrument to gift it to my children a few years later with no effective tax)
The current system is designed to A) Easily extract taxes (do it before the commoners get the net money B) Keep assets with those who already own them C) Shift the tax burden on to the top 20-30% of earners by income, but not wealth.
The effective tax rates you quote for the US are both influenced by this system in a way we can't remove from the data, and show anyway that your belief is weaker than the facts you originally presented (ca. the 45% figure which ignored wealth/assets).
Capital gains tax is lower to offset the risk of taking a capital risk, which labor does not do in receiving a wage.
Much of “labor” participates in capital risk through retirement accounts and homes, blurring this 19th century distinction.
The “capitalists” are likely to sidestep taxation through politicians, lawyers and accountants (See the often quoted 1960s era “tax rate”) which is a phenomenon of power, that exists pre-capitalism.
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tldr: be young.
why the hell arent you young!
it's cool.
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