> But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created.
I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him.
Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others.
Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit.
> If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.
Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.
> His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees.
It's all in the realm of "numbers to big for our primate brains to comprehend" anyway, but Amazon as a whole only pulls in as much _revenue_ as 13 million warehouse workers, 14 thousand times less than you're implying.
Beyond that, Amazon has over a million employees. Using a simplistic model of their contributions that Bezos is irreplaceable and each worker is fungible, you'd get Shapley values for the whole organization along the lines of Bezos getting half and the workers splitting the rest. In terms of profits before wages the workers are getting far more than half, and even in terms of revenue before expenses they're only getting a few times less than half. As a crude ballpark, compensation doesn't seem to be disproportionate.
Valid counter-arguments include Shapley values not being an appropriate way to allocate payment (which necessitates choosing which one (or more) of their payout properties you'd like violated, e.g. symmetry among equivalent workers or that payment should depend on value added), my model being so simplistic that it can't possibly be right even to an order of magnitude, declaring that even a factor of 2 is actually important in examining Bezos's income, etc. Appealing to a gut reaction based on numbers that are "obviously" too big is misleading at best.
One is that I don't think it's anywhere close to true that Bezos is completely irreplaceable while all of his workers are not. I have little experience on the differences between a good warehouse worker or manager and a bad one, but I know that at least for software, the difference between a good software engineer and a bad one; or between a good software manager and a bad one; can make or break a business. I'm sure the same is true in many others domains of Amazon's activity (B2B sales is another obvious ones, as are marketing and market research; but I'm sure there are many less obvious ones).
The other point where I think your analysis is flawed is basing the "fair" compensation only on replace-ability. Even if 2 warehouse workers are perfectly replaceable, as long as they are doing the job and their work is absolutely required for the business to function, they should also be getting a large proportion of that business's success. This is where Unions can really improve things - by allowing collective bargaining, they help people who are interchangeable but whose jobs are crucial to get their fair share of the pie they are contributing massively to.
Oh definitely, the argument could be fleshed out a lot more, and I'm not even certain I agree with the conclusion. The main thing I wanted to get across was that appealing to gigantic numbers is a terrible argument, so I demonstrated that the opposite conclusion was plausible without a more in depth analysis and explicitly called out the gigantic number fallacy.
To your first point about Bezos' irreplaceability, that's definitely a potential sticking point, and one we don't have much data on. You'll find one side pointing to how there's only one Amazon (or one Tesla, etc) and to how all other attempts before and after have failed, but that confounds enough variables to not really be useful on its own. I would _love_ to see some good data on how much the choice of founder/ceo matters.
To your second point about how fair compensation is treated, replaceability mattering at all is an artifact of simpler premises. Shapley values are fun in their own right, and if you have time you should definitely read up on them. In any case though, here's a brief overview of the most pertinent characteristics to your replaceability point:
The Shapley values are the unique distribution of funds satisfying all of the following:
(1) All the gains are distributed.
(2) If two people have identical contributions they get an identical pay.
(3) If you mix and match activities you get the same answer (e.g. if you just analyzed contributions to Prime Video or just to AWS and combined the payouts relating to those two divisions you'd get the same value as if you treated them both together).
(4) The payout to people not in the group being analyzed is 0.
(5) For a specific mathematical formalism of the idea, if the whole venture profits then each contributor profits, and if the whole venture takes a loss then each contributor takes a loss.
(6) There is no dependence on the names of workers (similar to 2, but just different enough to need to be explicitly stated in the underlying mathematical formalism).
(7) The result can be expressed in terms of marginal contributions.
They aren't perfect for describing salaries (see #5 for example in the event that a business is losing money), but they're not a bad starting point, especially when we're talking about fairness of large salaries, because other frameworks like examining employee needs or market rates will determine that everything is sufficiently fair if some kind of minimum threshold is being hit (an open question in itself, but seemingly not the point of criticizing Bezos' large income) and because in a profitable business #5 isn't out-of-line with how salaries work -- everyone gets paid something.
Anywho, onto how all of that pertains to replaceability: Shapley values for large organizations are horrendously painful to calculate even with perfect data. They're much easier when you can invoke the symmetry properties, and in the context of a HN comment it seemed prudent to use as few distinct classes of people as possible to consider the problem at hand (Bezos vs workers).
Assuming Bezos is _irreplaceable_ is an easy way to estimate his marginal value -- without him the business makes 0 and with him it makes what it does. If his role is important then that's not actually such a bad estimate because if an alternative founder only created, e.g., a fifth of Amazon then the rest of the calculation works out that the other workers would split a twidge more than half the profits rather than half exactly. I.e., rounding most alternatives down to 0 is a good enough ballpark estimate.
Anyway, _replaceability_ doesn't play into the workers' values at all. The word I used was _fungibility_, and all that means is that I can treat them as having the same value with respect to each other (not with respect to an outside world ready to replace them). It's really not that important in the calculations though and just served as a concrete example. If you assume the rest of the workers have literally any other distribution of value contributions then Bezos' payout remains the same, and the only thing that changes is how the other half is allocated amongst the workers.
Sorry, missed the edit window. Shapley values don't care about whether Bezos is irreplaceable either. They look at the value of Amazon with or without him, not with him or a replacement. The broader point still stands, but the details might warrant further scrutiny.
I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him.
Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others.
Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit.
> If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.
Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.