The Dream Hoarders: How America's Top Percent Perpetuates Inequality
I&#x27;m really interested to see how this is received here on Hacker News where articles like &quot;Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company&quot; get a warm reception. I really think that &#x27;startup culture&#x27; and &#x27;dream hoarding&#x27; are way more integrally linked than anyone on this website would like to admit. The success of many a startup relies on investors whose capital comes entirely from the concentration of wealth and the lack of redistribution. Then their continued success as enterprises very often hinges on their own ability to hoard, concentrate, and &#x27;reinvest&#x27; their own wealth.<p>And whenever someone makes the point I&#x27;m making in this post, people rush in to point out that you can do so much good with lots of money. As if that somehow runs in opposition to hoarding it from being used by the broader population in the first place. It&#x27;s as if you caused the collapse of an entire economic structure and then said &#x27;but look what I&#x27;m going to do with all these resources!&#x27;.<p>Also: for me, the most interesting part is that I would have no problem with this system <i>if</i> there wasn&#x27;t such a miserable bottom rung beneath them, i.e. the poorest of poor in the USA. If we had actually reached some post-scarcity conditions and the poorest among us were still well off, then I would be much less concerned about the ethics of startups. But as it stands, I think the startup&#x2F;VC world needs to have a reckoning with their place in all of this... not that it will actually happen.<p>edit: it was downed off the front page in an hour.