I often see people say, "[Rich person] has 2000x your wealth - are they 2000x times smarter, more driven, more talented than you? No! Then how could they deserve it?"
This seems like a really gross misconception of value.
Example:
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You invent a water pumping system for your friend. Your friend doesn't have to walk to the river anymore; you've given him 1 hour of time a day. Wonderful!
Your tribe finds out; 50 people use the system too. Now 50 hours saved per day. Wonderful!
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The local village, 2000 people, starts using the system. You've now contributed 2000 hours of value, *daily*, to the community. This is huge. Yes, you only made a water pump, but the value doesn't come from what you made, it comes from the benefit to the whole around you.
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Becoming rich has a lot less to do with innate intelligence than one might think. inc.com/jeff-haden/why
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Example connects neatly to the '2000x smarter' as well - if someone else had made a pump at the same time that was only a little bit worse, they wouldn't create just a little bit less value.
No one would use their pump at all, so while you've created 2000 hrs, they've created 0
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The problem is introduced when instead of that pump being of value to a community, and saving them 2000 hours, the solution is leveraged for personal benefit, and while you save them 2000 hours, you demand some amount of compensation <= 2000 hours worth of value.
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I think in this kind of discourse, a lot of arguments are taken as a starting point when they are actually a response to another (often overly simplistic,) argument. On its own, the argument you quoted seems to indicate a complete lack of understanding of what value is. 1/2
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The implied “they don’t deserve it” claim I see a lot is weird. Like.. deserve....? Who cares... that’s super deep moral philosophy we’re talking about now if you say “deserve”.
They provided a lot of value, and made a bunch of money. Awesome. I’m happy for them. The end.
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There are at least two errors here: firstly that wealth should be distributed by desert (by whom?) and secondly that people should be rewarded on the value of their inputs rather than their outputs.
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Also imagine playing poker with 5 friends. You are slightly better than everyone else. At the end of the night, you've won all of the stakes. Are you 5x better than any of your opponents? Not really. Was the game unfair? Not really.
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