Wealth vs Societal Value

Yes, it's (approximately) true that the only way to make money is by providing something that people find valuable.It doesn't follow, however, that if you make money then you must be providing something that is valuable overall.Hypothetical example: I find a completely undetectable way to steal money from poor people and transfer it to rich people, except that 25% of it vanishes on the way. I offer my services to someone rich and unscrupulous. Although poor people don't have much mo

You need to consider what work and, more generally, what society is. Society is fundamentally a group of people working together to satisfy each others needs and wants. Work, or productivity, is making progress towards this goal and is something we tend to reward with money, though not always.I think a fair analogy for society's productivity is a grocery store. Imagine there was a grocery store, the only grocery store in existence that also happened to be the only way to get food. Everyb

It's only logical if the only value you put on people is someone's ability to pay for things, and assume that that is somehow linked to their ability to "produce" for the betterment of society. The argument really falls down at the extremes - is Jeff Bezos really worth millions of times more to society than one of his workers? Does being born rich automatically make you more valuable?

> Do you believe that everyone who becomes wealthy by definition must have created value? And that everyone who creates value by definition becomes wealthy?The latter, sadly, does not inherently hold true; many times people create value but do not manage to get any value for themselves. That situation has improved drastically, but I'd certainly love to see it improved even further.For the former: ignoring theft and fraud, by definition they created value for someone, or they wo

One can legitimately (within the set of rules we give ourselves as a society) possess and earn a lot of wealth without actually creating most of that value. If all the employees - en masse - could not go any more to work, would the company still be providing that huge amount of value? Probably not. At the end of the chain there is always a group of people creating the value through work. That doesn't mean that the wealth is not legitimately earned even if that person -alone- did not create

i'm tired of creating a disproportionate amount of value and reaping the same rewards and allowances as everyone else because anything more would be seen as unfair. no thanks. if the value i'm creating isn't directly correlated with my earnings, i'll go do something else.

No, but it's a decent approximation. Even in the case of "creating wealth", the person with more money usually gets a bigger share of the money simply because they had more money. This being Hacker News, I think we all are too close to the tech startup model, which is certainly far more equitable than others; but a lot of companies do not share fairly the value created between workers and owners.

I think you have misunderstood; what s/he said was "the evidence" that they produce something of value is their compensation". In other words: if what they were doing were useless, no one would pay them all that money to do it.I think this is wrong, though, at least when the question is value to society. Their compensation is very good evidence that they are doing something of value to someone, but that may be counterbalanced by negative consequences for o

Wealth isn't zero sum. Creating something of value doesn't take anything away from anyone else.

They're creating the value, not taking it from others.