{"id":469,"date":"2006-11-13T14:51:31","date_gmt":"2006-11-13T22:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=469"},"modified":"2006-11-13T14:51:31","modified_gmt":"2006-11-13T22:51:31","slug":"paul-graham-on-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2006\/11\/13\/paul-graham-on-wealth\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Graham on Wealth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoy almost every essay that Paul Graham writes, and his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulgraham.com\/gap.html\">recent one on wealth<\/a> was no exception.  He sounds quite libertarian&#8230; the speech is reminiscent of Francisco D&#8217;Anconia&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=108\">money speech<\/a> in <em>Atlas Shrugged<\/em>.  A few highlights:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero-sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn&#8217;t have to make us poor to make themselves rich. Quite the opposite: they created things that made our lives materially richer. They had to, or we wouldn&#8217;t have paid for them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the section titled &#8220;The Lever of Technology&#8221; he uses a number of examples to make an interesting point.  When people talk about &#8220;the gap&#8221; between the &#8220;middle class&#8221; and the rich, they&#8217;re usually talking about income.  However, there are other gaps that are much smaller than they used to be, especially general lifestyle attributes (cars are cheap\/available, etc).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoy almost every essay that Paul Graham writes, and his recent one on wealth was no exception. He sounds quite libertarian&#8230; the speech is reminiscent of Francisco D&#8217;Anconia&#8217;s money speech in Atlas Shrugged. A few highlights: People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libertarian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TCqO-7z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}