A Response to Paul Graham's “How to Make Wealth” (2012)
<i>&quot;There are so many problems with Graham’s thinking that it is difficult to organize a focused response.&quot;</i><p>Statements like these are pointless theatrics. The more wrong someone is, the easier, not harder it is to point out where and how. What&#x27;s the argument?<p>You have to wait until section 2 to find one:<p><i>&quot;...there are actually several critical errors in the above reasoning which render Graham’s conclusions baseless. The first is the idea that measurement of things like quality and success can be objective, perfect and fair. These are not objective facts, they are highly contextual and can be manipulated by power struggles, charisma, clever marketing, or outright fraud. Value is a social construct...&quot;</i><p>After about eight paragraphs about how &quot;pedestrian&quot; PG is, his point (finally) is basically that value is subjective and immeasurable. I don&#x27;t know how true this is philosophically, but for all intents and purposes, if it were true, it would mean that nothing could be better than anything else. [1] It&#x27;s also a conflation of ideas. Marketing doesn&#x27;t create value; it distributes and sells it. Value as defined in the original essay is the meaty stuff people want: a home computer, for example, or an affordable spaceship.<p><i>&quot;Graham identifies that “Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff.” So what exactly do they contribute to the wealth generation process? Does Graham imply that without these others working at “one remove”, the programmers could still create the wealth they do? Without the human resources team to coordinate their medical benefits, would the programmers be as productive? Without the legal team to fend off frivolous lawsuits brought by patent trolls [...]?&quot;</i> (And so on.)<p>All Graham is saying is that programmers are directly involved in the creation of the product itself — its design, engineering, and maintenance. Other people create the social environment that makes it possible for this product to be distributed and not be killed, but don&#x27;t make stuff in the artisanal sense.<p>I can understand why it would be insulting if someone claimed that anyone who isn&#x27;t a maker were somehow useless, but Graham never did.<p>I&#x27;m ten minutes in, and everything I&#x27;ve read is basically a verbose form of &quot;it&#x27;s all relative&quot; and &quot;things are more complicated than that.&quot; Philosophy has a standard refutation to this: we deal with complex phenomena by isolating principles. For example, the abstract idea of value, the distinction between creation and distribution, and so on. It&#x27;s the most boring thing in the world to hear, &quot;the universe is more complex than that idea captures.&quot; All abstractions are reductions.<p>This sort of argument based on moral outrage and authority about how the real world works holds back truthseeking discourse.<p>[1] I also have a hard time understanding how someone who has earnestly tried to make good things could want this to be true.