Because being good at business is unrelated, if not opposed to, being good at society.
And because awards in general are dumb too, for pretty much similar reasons out of anyone’s control other than the effort.
I think there are great people, of course. I also believe people should be compensated for their achievements (what’s enough or just compensation is a different discussion).
What I don’t think there’s a lot of historical evidence to support it is the notion that specific great people do fundamentally change historical, economic or scientific progress. Might accelerate something a little here and there, but you’d be at the rougher same place with a different set of important actors. In the current argument, we would be at roughly a similar place re. online commerce right now without Bezos and Amazon. Other companies would have taken the empty slot.
Again, there are historians that disagree with this, and see individual output as defining trends long term, must most of them died last century. Hard to find many nowadays.
Banzai
3224
I agree. There are some ideas that are pretty intuitive and some that aren’t. Those that are intuitive, like delivering things efficiently to people at home and saving the brick and mortat costs, or having a better interface with a computer than DOS, or having a way to stay in touch with your friends and family through the internet, were going to happen regardless of bezos, gates, or zuckerberg. Might have taken just a touch longer, but all of those were being actively pursued when the current juggernauts grabbed the critical mass of market share to become de facto monopolies.
Other things like using a bacteria that likes high temperature to amplify production of DNA fragments come from a less obvious place and might have gone a long time without that initial spark of an idea from left field. Still, the guy who came up with PCR earned a 10k bonus for it while his company sold the patent for 300 million, and we know where gates, bezos, and zuck ended up. Guess the company was full of the smart people who were titans of industry and the serf who did the inventing was obviously inferior. Or something like that, so I have been told.
I’m reminded of nothing so much as the patent trolls who, early on, took fairly common commercial practices and wrote them up as new ideas, adding the words online to make them ‘unique’, and who still plague businesses large and small with their infringement claims.
Timex
3226
If all these ideas that change the world are so intuitive and obvious, why aren’t you doing them? Surely the future will continue to be full of these “intuitive” world changing technologies, so what are they going to be? How are they going to work?
Or is it that the intuitive technologies all just happen to be the ones that were already done in the past?
Banzai
3227
I have about 10 ideas that would change the world. I don’t have the time, inclination, or financial backing to do any of them while raising my family and working. But the ideas aren’t hard to figure out, and I fully expect someone to do all of them in the next decade and possible get very rich doing so. So, yeah. I’ll bet you have some great ideas too.
The point is that they are going to happen, maybe it’ll take a decade, but they’ll happen. And it’ll be someone else, not me doing them. Cause there are a lot of people in the world and some of them will think of it and have the time, inclination, and financial backing to do so.
I wonder, which is your view:
- people in different places all around the world developed agriculture
- a single great man devised the idea of agriculture and created it and it spread all around the world because people copied him
I recall reading a book on this topic many years ago, and it very much does not land on Timex’s Ayn Rand fever dream about great men:
Timex
3230
What are they? Why but tell them to us, and then we can do them.
But yeah, the fact that you don’t want to exert the effort to actually realize those ideas is part of what separates those who do, from those who don’t
Thanks for sharing this! I’m adding it to my reading list after I finish A People’s History of the United States.
CraigM
3233
I’ll second the recommendation. And if you feel like driving over to the center of satans asshole, you can borrow my copy.
If the book doesn’t instantaneously combust when exposed to outside air.
His book Collapse is also quite good.
To be clear, people have disputed some of the things he says in both books, but the synthesis he describes seems generally on the mark.
Like I’m going outside in the next ten days either.
I’ll add both!
All history has some element of incompleteness, but I will happily devour any text that provides a new angle on traditional narratives. There was a book I read in college that basically attributed Europe’s rise on the world stage to the existence of salt.
CraigM
3238
Oh there’s plenty to discuss in Diamond’s hypothesis about the development of society, it it is also where he seems aware of these limits and makes his case based on a holistic understanding of the environments.
His great amount of effort expended on the Polynesian culture is also quite interesting.
His view of events on Easter Island is as good an analogy to our own failure to grapple with climate change as you can find. We aren’t going to change direction until there are, figuratively, no more trees.
Timex
3240
That’s the thing, when it comes to monetary value, it doesn’t matter what I personally think. That’s not how money works.
But the point at this stage in the conversation, is that those men’s contributions actually DID have immense value, at least in my view. I’m not the one making the absurd argument that their contributions lack value because of some imagined fantasy universe where someone else made their contributions instead of them.
The idea that someone could have some vague notion of an idea, and that’s equivalent to actually successfully executing a plan, is nonsense. A vague idea and $5 will get you a cup of coffee. The idea that someone like Bezos started Amazon only by virtue of a $300k loan from his parents, is equally absurd. Does anyone here actually think that constituted the majority of capital investment that Bezos had to secure? Because that’s obviously false, right? That’s merely the first angel investment that’s in the public storybook of the company.
The idea of, “well, I could have done that, if I had the financial backing,” demonstrates a ridiculously naive understanding of how entrepreneurial activities take place. Getting financial backing is part of the freaking job! That’s work! Saying you could have done it, except for the financial backing (besides being untrue anyway) is like saying, “I could have done that, I just didn’t feel like doing the work.”
Can we have a list of the great men who changed the world, along with their accomplishment and their financial reward?
Look, if we don’t make sure to reward Great Men with unfathomable wealth and a promise to never ever meaningfully tax it, nobody will change the world.
Just ask Marie Curie and Jonas Salk.
