The issue is the distribution of the wealth. Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much. So then why is a disproportionate amount of wealth given to people who are not the movers and shakers? Society doesn’t cease to be pump blood when leeches are peeled off.
> Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much.
Except that is one of the root causes for wealth/income disparity. A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.
The reason tech companies have such high profits per employee is because they deliver even more value per employee, far more than previous companies have ever delivered on a per employee measure at their scale. That’s the power of the infinitely scalable solutions and near zero marginal costs of software.
>A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.
Imagine what it would have been like if the million+ were uplifted instead by the same amount of developer effort.
Now I expect most tech creatives will never know how much more you can get done when you have an above-average secretary compared to just another average engineer.
Apple and their kind have such high profits per employee because all the outsourced workers don't count as Apple employees.
> A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.
Your point isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth pointing out how that came to be. Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so. This probably calls for a reframing of how we think about individual economic value, at least in a distributive sense.
> they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence.
any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society. its just that only some chose to take it early on, and reaped the proportionate reward to having taken it on early (not knowing that it would lead to this end result). Now that it is known that tech is high pay, people now naively claim that it's unfair, and that the tech jobs should "pay" for this inequality of outcome.
i meant by "everyone" as in there's no special privileged class of people that were allowed to become techies. Of course, not everyone can afford a college education, but in general, back in 2004, right after the big crash, the openings were available, the opportunities existed then. It just looks risky back then, because tech just crashed. However, if you weren't willing to take on risk, you cannot blame that the outcome for those who take on risk gets more.
> Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so
I’m not really sure how this fits with the discussion. Literally everything builds on something that came before, software isn’t particularly unique that regard. This also doesn’t change the fact that one person can provide far more value than another.
