George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
Once again, lopsided allocation - George benefited from and is directly responsible for keeping the cost of labor low: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100...
Would he have been a billionaire without that? Who knows? But it definitely helped him get there.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?
The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.
Jk Rowling and LeBron James are additional examples.
Now I'm not saying that the employer is necessarily morally culpable here — I'm sure most employers would like nothing more than to not have to worry about their employees' healthcare, and certainly I doubt many people enjoy having the ability to take it away. But it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to have a real negotiation when inelastic demands are (potentially) unmet. Someone under threat of losing health insurance or housing is negotiating under duress, contrary to the comment I replied to.
This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.
I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.
But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.
It's especially insufficient to generalize the working of the entire system from an example of a market in which employees currently have enough power to not really have to worry about the prospect of physical harm because it would be disadvantageous to the employers to cause it. Even if we take the current state of the SaaS startup market as reliable (which it isn't) the original argument was not limited to SaaS startup employees, and in other industries (including ones that are a bit down the pyramid from the SaaS companies) things are a lot less rosy for employees.
They don't hold me down and force me to hand money to a landlord, mind, they just lock me in a cell if I don't, so maybe it doesn't meet your standard of proof.
My argument is this: the core disagreement here is about the allocation of resources between labor and capital.
I’m right. It is.
That doesn’t mean I have settled the argument about what those allocations should be which nobody has, it’s a core organizational element of politics.
But I think his argument is bullshit. It’s a purposeful misdirection because it refuses to recognize the terms of the discussion at all.
> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.
The other thing that we're often ignoring is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.
For the most part only capital gets to roll the dice, but even before that it's a sign of the times that we take it seriously at all when people talk about "earning" a billion dollars. We could all do with a bit more humility.
No it's not, it's actually extremely easy to prove wrong: J.K. Rowling.
Which is, as I pointed out, inarguable. No one is spawned alone in the woods to start their adventure independently of the society they are in.