Paul Graham's articles always shoot immediately up to the top of HN, but I agree with you, they're generally cursory and pithy thoughts which don't convince my skeptical mind. I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular?
Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable, and we're worshipping these decent but not amazing blog posts?
There's a cycle with blogs. The author starts a blog and they have a distinct, somewhat original voice with distinct, somewhat original views. In PG's case, the startup advice about building stuff that doesn't scale, not worrying about competitors, Lisp, etc. were quite fresh, at least to me. The author's blog becomes successful and their ideas become well understood throughout a community. But a person's ideas don't evolve that quickly. They start repeating themselves. The posts become variations on a theme. Maybe the author goes outside their area of expertise (No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics). By the end people are wondering what you're wondering. Why are we listening to this person?
> No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics
That's the key bit for me. I've found his writing about startups, software, hacker culture, product development, etc. to be mostly great and informative. But whenever I see anything he writes about society as a whole, I tend to find the conclusions he draws to be pretty out of line with reality, or at least (in the cases where I don't have data) counter to my experience and opinion.
You liked his idea that for a startup to scale, you should be doing things that don't scale. That article has mostly anecdotal evidence, and yet nobody ever pushed back on it. How do we know PG was right back then? (He was.)
A few years later, that same guy writes an extensive essay with footnotes and data that must have taken days to compile (going all the way back to 1892). And yet, this one rubs you the wrong way.
I am not defending PG or attacking you, but just consider this explanation as a possibility: when it comes to how to build a startup, you don't really have skin in the game. Whatever he says, it's unlikely to impact your life. But the minute we start talking about the Gini coefficient, the stakes are higher - it's getting political. Suddenly, it's like listening to Rush Limbaugh make an argument - isn't it clear that no Democrat will ever agree with anything that Rush has ever said, no matter how factual or not it is?
I, for one, appreciate PG's ability to tie together global macro movements in a way that I've never heard anyone else summarize. You might agree or not with his take on the Gini coefficient (and especially his lack of acknowledgement or suggestions on how to deal with its consequences), and you might also get frustrated that PG is starting to dabble in politics, which is going to make him very polarized no matter how right or wrong he is. But there's still a ton of useful advice in this essay no matter which side of the political fence you stand on (eg: in 2021, if you're debating between entrepreneurship and finance/VC, choose entrepreneurship).
While pg has extensive foot notes for this essay, there is a vast amount of research with orders of magnitude more citations contradicting him on the gini coefficient.
There is no argument about his footnotes. Quite likely the very richest might not be inheriting it. This has no bearing on the gini coefficient. And his essay on wealth tax is downright stupid. Are his essays as meticulously researched as Pikketys? Why does pg fail to refer to the most famous recent book on the subject in his footnotes? What could be the reason?
I appreciate this argument, except for one detail:
> his essay on wealth tax is downright stupid
What's everyone's deal with that essay? It literally has no subjective opinion stated anywhere - all it does is calculate how much percent of your wealth you're left with after 60 years of wealth tax [0]. You definitionally cannot push back on anything stated in that article, or otherwise your problem is not with PG's views but with math in general.
I appreciate the thoughtful reference to Thomas Piketty's book, which I think everyone should read. But IMO attacking algebra takes away from your overall argument.
The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.
PGs attack on the wealth tax is how much a zero effort investor could lose in 60 years. 45% in one case. 40hr per week income tax rates are very often higher than that. PGs paen to the idle rich is absolutely ridiculous. Some one who works hard like Musk will be barely affected by such a tax. It only mildly hurts the idle rich.
> 40hr per week income tax rates are very often higher than that.
You do realize that the wealth tax is on top of the income tax, right?
> It only mildly hurts the idle rich.
And therefore there's no issue! Lol. I shared elsewhere that France tried the wealth tax and then killed it after 42k French millionaires left the country. Why would it work in the US when it didn't work in France and 8 other European countries?
You do realize that a wealth tax of 1% on 5% gain is basically a 20% tax on idle asset appreciation. American middle class pays 1% property tax on their primary asset without flinching.
It is not applying taxes on income. There is a separate tax for it - it is called income tax. A tax cut friendly premier repealing tax laws means nothing. France did not implode in the decades it had a wealth tax. Its not like the USA with a rapidly declining middle class is a fine counter example.
And why are you so hurt at the thought of a 20% tax on asset appreciation on the idle rich? No one really gives a shit.
I come here to learn and hopefully also share some insights with others. I thought you were genuinely trying to teach me something, which is why I engaged with you. But justifying sloppy arguments with "no one really gives a shit" doesn't really do it for me.
3. Pretending to be the only person who understands algebra
If so, I thought you must be made of thicker skin; able to take what you dish out. My adoption of your style might not do it for you, but no one really gives a shit.
No billionaire is hiding his cash under a mattress. Investment assets typically compound at 4% above inflation with zero effort by the investor.
Pg completely ignores the zero effort compounding of wealth and pretends that the investors wealth will be "reduced" by 45% and that too over 60 years!
He forgets to state by how much the zero effort investors assets inflate exponentially in 60 years! If he thought he was making a case against wealth tax, he failed hard!
Also, its really silly of you to assume I don't understand algebra! I thought that pgs article was obviously ridiculous on its face. Clearly, it wasn't obvious to everyone.
Nope, it wasn't. You do realize that the concept you're so stoked on was actually tested in Mr. Piketty's homeland and failed miserably? Oh, the irony!
From NPR [0]:
> Normally progressives like to point to Europe for policy success. Not this time. The experiment with the wealth tax in Europe was a failure in many countries. France's wealth tax contributed to the exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2012, among other problems. Only last year, French president Emmanuel Macron killed it.
Capital is like water - it flows in the direction of least resistance. That part should be obvious.
You do realize that using the phrase "you do realize" does not make your argument any stronger.
France did quite well in the decades it applied a wealth tax, irrespective of Macron's actions.
You seem to be obsessed with France. Have you considered Switzerland, one of the wealthiest countries with the highest standard of living and super high minimum wage.
Edit: seems like you added some more info to your comment. Ok, I'll bite. Nobody ever uses Switzerland in an apples to apples comparison with Western democracies because Switzerland employs bank secrecy laws that make it a crime to identify owners of bank accounts (which brings into question the legitimacy of much of the capital in those bank accounts). This is straight from Wikipedia [0]:
> Swiss banks have served as safe havens for the wealth of dictators, despots, mobsters, arms dealers, corrupt officials, and tax cheats of all kinds. In 2018, London-based Tax Justice Network ranks Switzerland's banking sector as the "most corrupt" in the world due to a large offshore banking industry and very strict secrecy laws. The ranking attempts to measure how much assistance the country's legal systems provide to money laundering, and to protecting corruptly obtained wealth.
Also, I mentioned elsewhere that a total of 9 countries in Europe implemented and then killed the wealth tax. This has nothing to do with just one politician in one country.
If you want to engage in cherry picking and rhetoric to insist on justifying your preconceived bias, allow me the same luxury.
High income inequality causes regulatory capture by a minority elite. Any financial discomfort to this tiny elite through popular movements that impose a very modest wealth tax, faces relentless attack by this tiny elite and their chattel, which includes the politicians they sponsor - ultimately resulting in the overturning of tax policies that benefit society as a whole.
High income inequality leads to regulatory capture by a tiny minority and results in a government primarily focused on the coddling of the idle rich. Hence, all examples of overturned wealth taxes you picked can be dismissed outright. Cherry picking is not a luxury available exclusively to you.
Your bias is obvious from the fact that you were fixated on France while completely ignoring their much more successful neighbor.
In other words there is a brand identity associated with the articles. And brand identity is a time/effort savings device employed by human minds when making a determination on what to consume.
You see this with consumer products all the time; for example the audiophile world may turn their nose up at Bose, but in the consumer space Bose is recognized as a known quantity (may be over priced for the quantity of quality you get but is recognized as not being extremely subpar generic).
My two cents on why his writings are popular:
- He uses anecdotal evidence which appears to be sound at first. Looking at the top 100 billionaires seems to give a good idea on how wealth is created and distributed, but really it is only a glimpse at a much bigger phenomenon (especially since the data only comes from two years).
- His style of writing is very accessible and natural. He wrote an article on his style (http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html), and it seems to strike a chord with technicians who prefer this over more complicated prose.
I feel these are the same reasons for why effective altruism is so popular among technicians. It offers clear cut answers, and avoids uncomfortable questions.
Also his conclusions are what some people want to hear, that confirms their worldview.
This is not at all unique to PG, you and I and everyone does the same thing, at least to some extent, in choosing what argument/opinion pieces (now the dominant form of textual media?) we are tickled by.
Same reason Malcolm Gladwell is popular — it's pop science/economics/whatever, made to be readable and digestible, but over simplifies (and sometimes falsifies) in the process.
Could you expand on the last sentence a bit more regarding effective altruism? Are the uncomfortable questions related to the utilitarian nature of how the movement racks and stacks the causes they choose to support or not?
I was more referring to the fact that EA promotes philanthropy instead of asking why we have inequalities in the first place. So it evades questions of redistribution or fairness in a similar fashion as PG.
I'm not quite sure how strong the analogy is though.
We listen to him because he founded the website? Do Facebook users listen to Zuckerberg because he founded Facebook? I doubt that many do.
Or do we listen to PG because the kind of people who find his writings to be interesting have some overlap the kind of people who are attracted to the website that he founded?
I understand the comparison, but the FSF can exist without RMS. PG on the other hand solely supports HN, I doubt he would continue to pay for a site that vilified him.
This site is mainly supported by its volunteer moderators. I doubt it cost more than a few thousand a year at most to run.
So the fact that PG pays for it doesn't mean much. If the community decided to no longer be under his care, they could easily find a replacement model or benefactor and they're more than capable to arrange such an uprising/migration.
What matters far more than dollars paid is having his name attached to it. I recall Scott Alexander getting the forum started around his community to remove any associations to him because of things people were saying were happening “under his watch.”
I love RMS but unfortunately his skepticism doesn't get treated well by the vocal mass. These days people like to view things in a very black and white manner and if you dare to express your skepticism in a topic that is considered clear cut by the mass you get ostracized.
I liked it better when people were religious towards philosophy and universal metaphysics rather than towards technology and science. Now that traditional religion has been in decline for some time now, people have transitioned the concept of orthodoxy towards systems that are antithetical to it. This is nothing new, as there's long been a level of orthodoxy within technology groups, academia, and so forth, but now it's actual heresy to be skeptical towards anything authoritative, especially if that skepticism stems from one's own intuition.
Inversely, the "skeptics" behave so skeptically towards anything contrary their views that it has the effect of making them hardly skeptical in the first place. I'm not even talking about Stallman's form of skepticism, but what I deem "pop skepticism" that's permeated the mainstream narrative. If one is so skeptical that they are potentially missing out on critical new information, that's not actual skepticism. It's a stroke of the ego for someone too insecure to be wrong about anything. This is especially true when the evidence in front of them is sound and they refuse to consider it.
We are living in an intellectual decline. A true skeptic can't have any sort of controversial opinion without being socially burned at the stake.
PG is apropos for this forum, but beyond that he is plainly a good writer. I don't know who you consider 'amazing writers across our civilization' -- but whether it is Gracian or Scott Alexander, PG shares one thing with them, namely that his works will be quoted beyond the lifespan of his contemporary readers.
Alexander is a good writer, and I appreciate how he is able to tackle assumptions and challenge mainstream opinions, and does so systematically.
But he's writing 10 pages of what could be summed up in 10 bullet points.
The intellectual collateral is nice, but he's not really breaking new ground, and I'm not sure what he's going to share with the next generation of readers
It's impossible to know for certain, of course, but it seems highly unlikely that any of those writers will be quoted beyond the lifespan of contemporary readers (except potentially in scholarly books about rationalism/startups/etc). How many authors from the 1940s are still widely read, especially for essays/non-fiction?
Excepting the WWII memoirs (because I'm not sure how I want to count either Anne Frank, Elie Weisel or Winston Churchill in terms of "authors from the 1940s"), among authors whose nonfiction works are still read, there are a few names that do occur to me:
George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, John Maynard Keynes, Jean-Paul Sartre
For fiction there are obviously many more whose works have come through to frequent readership: Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Albert Camus, C.S. Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ayn Rand to name a few.
Lewis would be my example for nonfiction. Narnia is fun and all, but it's stuff like "The Inner Ring" (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) where he really shines.
I agree (Planet Narnia also blew my mind), but I tried to make a judgement call over whether his non-fiction was "widely read" (I know very few people who have read any of it, relative to the number who have read the Narnia books).
Normally I wouldn't comment just to say the equivalent of +1, but I hadn't encountered "The Inner Ring" before, and it's great! Thanks for the recommendation.
He’s a good writer in that he’s able to convince people who know next to nothing about the subject matter that he is making good points. Neither history nor economics agree with his hand waving statements.
I don't think that merely being a good writer will allow him to be "quoted beyond the lifespan of his contemporary readers." I agree with OP that I really don't see anything special about his writings, compared even with contemporary writers on technology like RMS.
He's good at rhetoric. The writing is simple with one point per paragraph and requires a low reading age.
It has a single and consistently repeated/implied message without any deviations or uncertainties.
All of that makes it persuasive.
But factually it's mostly wrong.
I'm not going to through it point by point to pick all the inaccuracies about the continuing influence of inherited wealth on success, or the unrealistically rosy implication of small business riches.
I'll just suggest everyone should research for themselves the real survival rates for small businesses, the small business sectors with the best long-term viability, the age group most active in creating new businesses, and the number of tech startups that makes any return at all to investors.
Of all the things posted on this site, this is the comment that is the most wrong. If his writings are ever quoted again after his death, it will be meant as sarcasm.
Because he's famous (especially among the HN crowd), he's certainly smart, and it appeals to the bubble of internet startuppers that lurk in HN.
Paul, and to a similar or even larger extent Sam Altman, and others, seem detached from reality, in the sense of the common man.
Perhaps each one of us lives in a bubble of sort. His is immediately apparent to me, despite I kind of belong to the same crowd he preaches to.
I don't think his intent is evil nor bad. I think he genuinely enjoys writing and thinking about deep stuff, and I am grateful that he shares his thoughts with the world.
Its the same reason any tweet by Elon Musk saying stupid stuff get 300k likes instantly.. Its about who say and not about what is being said.
If you don't hack your mind from a philosophical perspective you wont stop this tribal hard-coded neural trigger of this automatic authority following.
This is the only thing that can save us from being that person in the 30's Germany photos raising their hands and chanting 'Sieg Heil'.
Remember that this is hardwired, but it worked somehow because we used to be packed in small communities where everyone knew each other.
Now the same "wiring" is being used the same way, but now with a virtual global tribe, where we actually don't really know the people that is being granted authority or why we are supposed to follow them, because we simply follow them giving everybody is also doing it.
Just observe yourself more often and question even the things you take for granted before doing it. You will see a lot of these things are actually unreasonable giving their actual context.
He's an important person to our field, and he's contributed quite a lot to it (including, for example, this forum). That does count for something.
However, to me if anything it really just confirms yet again that even great people can become thoroughly warped by wealth and fame.
His wealth tax piece was quintessentially unconvincing and self-serving, and many of his recent tweets and posts have done much more to pat himself and his peers on the back than to contribute convincing or useful analysis.
> I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular?
It's a prosperity gospel for nerds: you are the special chosen ones, therefore you deserve every blessing. Anyone who says otherwise is sinful and blind to the holy truth.
PG's recent articles have changed from what they used to be. Recently (last few years) there is a dramatic change towards defending riches, logical fallacies to explain why being rich is okay, a lot of focus on wealth and how to get it and why it's okay.
A lot less technically interesting than he used to post. I used to send Startup=Growth to everyone I knew. I think people are used to high-quality content from PG and so the upvotes fly - but honestly, recently, the quality isn't there. And often the content of his posts I now find quite offensive and wrong.
Not very interesting any more. Mostly wealth defenses and fallacies.
The political messaging has also changed from “people in poverty have specific material needs that we need money to fix” (war on poverty) to “actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality).
The war on poverty can be waged with a modest tax on the PGs of the world. The war on inequality is different. Venture capital always seeks to create wealth that will flow to some more than others; a very efficient way to fight inequality is to simply abolish venture capital. Along with anything else that facilitates creation of personal (rather than societal) wealth.
> actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality).
This is a misrepresentation though. There isn't anything inherently wrong with people having or making different amounts of money. The complaint, as I see it usually, is that the degree of inequality is unacceptable. That is, millionares aren't inherently unethical, heck people who make millions annually aren't inherently unethical. But people who make billions a week, might be.
That is, I can comfortably and easily donate enough each year to support a few working families. Bezos could match the Child Poverty Tax Credit to every child in poverty in the US each year and still turn a profit.
(For the math here, its ~$3000 * 11 million children, which comes out to ~35 billion, or half his income this year). And remember: he could do that every year and his wealth would increase.
The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society, so why should society encourage it? That, again, doesn't mean that no one should have any personal wealth, just that the ROI, after a point, should lessen.
How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?
> The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society ... How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?
What do you think the billionaires' billions are doing? Sitting in a bank account? I think the majority of their wealth is invested, i.e. it is funding industry, which is a good thing. If we assume for illustration that billionaires will spend $1B on things like private jets and invest the rest, then if we have $1T divided among 10 billionaires, we'll have $10B spent on jets and $990B invested, while if we have $1T divided among 1000 billionaires, we'll have $1T spent on jets and $0 invested. Given that, at least for the concern of "how it's being spent", it's actually best to have the megawealth concentrated among a relative few.
"Its invested" can mean a lot of things. And in general (as another user notes) the velocity of "invested" money is lower than the velocity of money spent. In other words, the 1T spent on jets is actually better for the economy.
Invested money is usually in things like the stock market, which doesn't directly support a company (buying a share of AMZN doesn't put money in Amazon's pocket, although it does, amusingly, make Bezos wealthier on paper). Angel investing might actually be better here from a velocity perspective, I don't actually know for sure.
So, let's take Jeff Bezos. Googling a bit, an article allegedly updated Mar 13 says he has 55.5M shares, which at AMZN's price of $3379 is $187 billion; I'm sure both multiplicands have changed but that's probably not far off from the truth. What bank accounts is the $187 billion sitting in? If he sold all his stock, where would that money come from? If he then spent it all on a fleet of private jets, how would that impact the economy?
And if we split Jeff Bezos into 1000 individuals, each of which had about $200 million, and each of which spent half of it on mansions and yachts and invested the rest... would that be an improvement?
Those few would, however, have proportionally much more power and are not going to use that power to threaten the structures which made them their money. I don't think it's by any measure a good idea to have a few billionaires set the course of society; deciding what gets invented and produced, what kinds of ventures get supported, what programs enabled. That is just autocracy with extra steps.
PG's articles are like a modern day Siddhartha. He illustrates the glories of growth and change initially, but by the end he illustrates the glories of stability and security.
This isn’t a surprise. The religion that formed here hanging off his every word subscribed to it to get rich, just like he started YC to get rich. Now he’s happily rich, barely even looks in the mirror at these adherents that he left behind, and is writing for his new friends who are also rich. It was always pointless snake oil but the Sand Hill Greed here made everyone overlook that because maybe, just maybe, the key to get into YC and skip the bread line was buried in the ninth paragraph of some polemic from a guy who figured out retail in Lisp and somehow convinced a greed-seeking generation of hackers that he had all the answers.
I’ll take my -4 for hitting close to home. The grayer I get — silencing unpopular ideas by making them grayer was his idea too — the more confident I’m right. We stopped telling you folks you were following someone who only cared about your impact on his RoI because that sort of unwashed heathen isn’t welcome here. Paul Graham, YC, and this creation of his on which we speak now has done more to distort and destroy any foundation of computing remotely paying attention to making the world better than almost anything before it, and while I’m happy to see people finally figuring out that it just might be bullshit, it’s a bit too late.
Whether you believe that or not is up to you, but back then there was no guarantee it would work. To look with hindsight and say it was just greed is easy for you to hurl, but not at all what it looked like at the beginning.
More generally, I know many many people (maybe literally tons by weight?) who continue to work long after they don't need to, usually because they're just deeply interested in the domain. I've seen this up close with my father, who continues to farm at 70, and with some founders who keep founding despite having more money than they will ever need. So when someone in that situation says they work on a thing because it is interesting to them, I generally believe them.
How does one get to make more than three comments a day? Maybe that's why some people create new accounts, because they've filled their daily quota on the other ones.
I appreciate your well-defended and reasoned argument. I learned a lot from your countless examples of what I got wrong and given that I’ve missed the mark on earning your vote, I’ll be sure to factor your feedback into my future comments.
They come definitely from a privileged niche point of view although they usually have some really interesting insights. For instance this one article about how suburbs are created and that kids in the past were at their parents' workplaces and learned how they work. [1] Or another article about quality of discussion, ranging from collaboration to ad hominem. Still I hesitate to share them outside of the typical startup crowd because parts of them might offend people. [2]
Sure being rich is ok. As long as they make mortals better off which is not what is happening now. Rather majority of the people are getting worse for wear in the process.
It is funny to read pg's take on wealth tax, given that Piketty has produced massive scholarly literature suggesting the exact opposite of what pg writes.
If the pg's wealth tax blog was supposed to counter Piketty's work, it is comically pedestrian.
Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable, and we're worshipping these decent but not amazing blog posts?