alt Hacker NewsHe very explicitly engaged with her claim that the system is unfair/unethical, and whether you agree with him or not, he argued against it:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
In other words, he's saying that rapid wealth creation can (and often does) come from creating and selling things of value to willing buyers, at scale, and that that's not unethical to do.
I do agree with you that AOC's point is not particularly strong, though :)
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But his N=1 anecdote doesn’t prove anything. He shares a feel-good story about an early stage company with very high growth on a small base. This person is not a billionaire yet.
The actual comparison would be to look at all the startups with billionaire founders (so likely $10B companies) and then analyze the market dynamics that enable them to keep growing so fast.
I wonder why he didn't argue against the point by using an actual billionaire to illustrate. Instead he chose someone who is not a billionaire, and imagined them becoming one with nine and a half months of constant 93% growth. Couldn't his counterargument become stronger without the underpants gnome logic?
How often does this actually happen? People have been studying capitalism for more than a 100 years and this argument has been rehashed for a long time. Free market capitalism will only allow a startup to gain ground via innovation and offering of a superior product or service if the market is not totally free and monopolies are not allowed to form. Monopoly is the natural end state for capitalism.
Furthermore, the company motivated by profit that does not have to pay for polluting the environment will also pollute the environment. Regulation is also necessary to pay for long term externalities and other boom and bust cycles. There is nothing new in PG take except COPE and blame shifting about the increasing inequality and other societal and environmental issues.
He only really addresses the fact that the system can be nasty. It can be and regularly is, but he only argues that a company doesn't have to be nasty, so he can conveniently ignore specific examples. But the system is not just nasty (and AOC mentions this). It also disproportionately rewards good fortune. That's not cheating, since anyone can have good fortune, but it is unfair, since fortune is not a consequence of hard work or ethical behaviour.