Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee?
A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. So a better question would be "Has Zuckerberg made a significant contribution to ad sales and market intelligence data gathering?", in which case the answer would be an obvious yes.
Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.
A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari.
This analogy is ridiculous. But to follow through with it it should be rewritten like this:
- Tim Berners-Lee invented the wheel, the tires, the diesel engine, the windshield and the electronic that allow to roll the window down by pressing a button, the airbag and the car charger, etc. He made the car safe and usable by anyone. For free. Then he designed how those cars should behave when on the same highway.
- Mark Zuckerberg built a car a century or two after Tim introduced the world to the wonders of high speed travel, painted it blue and charged[0] people for riding it.
[0] That was the plan but in the end he went with social graph thingie to try to be the next advertisement agency.
Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.
If you are a highly intelligent and motivated person, you have many choices about what to do. This suggests that doing the kind of basic R&D work that might lead to the invention of the WWW is a sucker's game. You shouldn't invent wheels. Instead you should invent Ferrari's using other peoples' wheels.
This over time will lead to brain drain from the realms of basic research and invention. I'd posit this as a possible explanation for the decline of fundamental innovation since roughly 1970, which coincidentally is the era when the groundwork for this shift in wealth distribution really got laid with the emergence of the "new left" and the "new right." (What I call the reactionary left and the reactionary right -- note that in both cases the naturalistic fallacy is a cornerstone of these belief systems.)
I'd count myself among the drained. I decided not to do a Ph.D partly because I didn't want to take a vow of poverty to do work to make other people rich.
Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. The person who puts the icing on the cake is rewarded exponentially more than the person who baked it, who in turn is rewarded exponentially more than the person who made the flour, and so on. The folks rewarded exponentially most of all are the financiers who simply move money around to fund these activities.
This seems unfair in virtually every case, but it's incredibly unfair in the realm of ideas, invention, science, and technology. In ordinary manual labor the difficulty of each step tends to be similar, while in intellectual realms the fundamental steps of invention and discovery are often exponentially harder than the ones closer to the end of the line. So for intellectual work, the relationship between difficulty and importance and compensation is really pathologically skewed.
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Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee?
A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. So a better question would be "Has Zuckerberg made a significant contribution to ad sales and market intelligence data gathering?", in which case the answer would be an obvious yes.
Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.
This analogy is ridiculous. But to follow through with it it should be rewritten like this:
- Tim Berners-Lee invented the wheel, the tires, the diesel engine, the windshield and the electronic that allow to roll the window down by pressing a button, the airbag and the car charger, etc. He made the car safe and usable by anyone. For free. Then he designed how those cars should behave when on the same highway.
- Mark Zuckerberg built a car a century or two after Tim introduced the world to the wonders of high speed travel, painted it blue and charged[0] people for riding it.
[0] That was the plan but in the end he went with social graph thingie to try to be the next advertisement agency.
Society ? More like wall-street gamblers.
This creates a problem though:
If you are a highly intelligent and motivated person, you have many choices about what to do. This suggests that doing the kind of basic R&D work that might lead to the invention of the WWW is a sucker's game. You shouldn't invent wheels. Instead you should invent Ferrari's using other peoples' wheels.
This over time will lead to brain drain from the realms of basic research and invention. I'd posit this as a possible explanation for the decline of fundamental innovation since roughly 1970, which coincidentally is the era when the groundwork for this shift in wealth distribution really got laid with the emergence of the "new left" and the "new right." (What I call the reactionary left and the reactionary right -- note that in both cases the naturalistic fallacy is a cornerstone of these belief systems.)
I'd count myself among the drained. I decided not to do a Ph.D partly because I didn't want to take a vow of poverty to do work to make other people rich.
Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. The person who puts the icing on the cake is rewarded exponentially more than the person who baked it, who in turn is rewarded exponentially more than the person who made the flour, and so on. The folks rewarded exponentially most of all are the financiers who simply move money around to fund these activities.
This seems unfair in virtually every case, but it's incredibly unfair in the realm of ideas, invention, science, and technology. In ordinary manual labor the difficulty of each step tends to be similar, while in intellectual realms the fundamental steps of invention and discovery are often exponentially harder than the ones closer to the end of the line. So for intellectual work, the relationship between difficulty and importance and compensation is really pathologically skewed.
Right. That explains why there's so much more money in gas stations than oil wells. And why HP is so much bigger than Intel.
Gas stations are consumers of the products of oil refineries and oil wells. HP is a consumer of Intel's chips.
Free markets reward business to business sales very well.