The American dream didn't die.
That makes it sound like a natural event.
Like it was inevitable.
Here's the truth:
It was fucking murdered.
By greedy, unchecked corporations, bought and paid for politicians, and every coked-up asshole on Wall Street.
Inventions and creative work don't spontaneously turn into money. You have to either sell the rights for a lot of money or set up production and distribution channels.
Either way it takes a lot of pre-existing wealth and a partner in the position to exploit others.
Okay. If you'd like to share the details then i'll be willing to concede that invention and creative work can make one wealthy without exploitation.
@Pineywoozle The way this sounds to me is you could have chosen to become wealthy by exploiting people, but you chose to be an artist and forgo wealth.
As for your cousin—i have no idea how a VPN really works, but i understand it's not just some software. It requires significant physical infrastructure for transmitting data, the sort that could in principle get built and run without exploitation but in practice is not.
Good for you and your cousin, but i don't consider this much of a disproof.
Why would another person, making a jewelry item that is very valuable, consent to receive a wage from you rather than the full value of the jewelry item they made by their labor?
But once you’ve shared the design, that design is not longer exclusive to you. Ideas are nonrivalrous. They can be copied, shared, and distributed to every human being on earth without depriving anyone else their use.
I’m getting the impression that I wasn’t clear with my initial question, which was about why people would accept wages—a fraction of the value they generate—rather than the full value of the work they produce—which you noted is worth thousands (if you can provide enough product to satisfy jewelry store orders.
The whole “Picasso original vs copy” discussion is super interesting but doesn’t seem germane to a situation where you would be literally asking people to copy your design and then sell the resulting jewelry for lots of money.
Why is it that people accept wages rather than the full value of their labor?
Maybe the problem is with how vague I am being. Of course there is tremendous value to the creative labor you have performed in developing your techniques, creating your designs, etc.
But the monetary value of your hypothetical employees’ contribution is “all of that additional revenue” because, without them, you cannot access that additional revenue.
Employees don’t accept a fraction of the monetary value of their labor because it’s fun to get paid a fraction of the revenue they generate; they do it for some other reason.
If workers don’t create or source materials or pay to distribute the product, then who does?
It was a serious question! I’m sorry you’re done. If it’s true that you’re creating materials—presumably metals, maybe precious or semi-precious gems?—it sounds like you’re doing the sort of productive labor that a worker might do for wages, rather than for ownership of the entire collaborative effort.
In fact, it seems to me that no act of labor intrinsically confers ownership of someone else’s labor.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.
But the monetary value of that labor, of making copies, is “all of the additional revenue you’re currently forgoing in their absence.” Your creative labor absolutely deserves compensation too! It just doesn’t intrinsically confer ownership of the entire collaborative effort of you and all of the people working alongside you to generate that revenue together.
If one of your employees created an innovation in one of your designs that improved upon it and proved popular enough to generate even higher sales, would you hand over ownership to them? Or does it stay yours forever?
How would you calculate the relative value of their contribution?
How do you calculate their contribution, and how do you calculate the value of finding buyers, sourcing materials, etc?
What’s your formula for calculating the dollar value of your creativity and theirs?
Maybe I wasn’t being specific enough again. You said you would value their time the same as yours, their creativity the same as yours—does this mean you would share ownership with them and divide profits evenly between your collaborators, or only that you’d pay equivalent wages if you judged their contribution to be equal to yours?
I was trying to pin you down to a specific formula—how you’d calculate what percentage of all that additional revenue you’d consider yours by virtue of your past labor—precisely there is no objective process for determining wages. Wages are the product of bargaining between unequal parties; it’s an inherently political process.
You’re not exploitive—you don’t, as I understand it, have employees.
Earlier, you wrote
> “I explained how many decades of study creativity takes”
Surely, any worker you employ has also spent time and effort developing into a person capable of performing the tasks you assign; do those years generate some sort of bonus for the employer or does the past only assign value to you?
> “that creativity time doesn’t stop when you own the company you still do 80 to a hundred hours to their 40, week in week out even on vacation”
Sounds like good reasons for someone to earn higher wages commensurate to their larger contribution, but not to own the whole effort.
My age and accomplishments are both going to remain mysteries, because I’m not particularly interested in personalizing a conversation about ideas. Sorry!
The owner owns the right to collect someone else’s revenue and keep most of it. The owner owns the right to stop someone else from working productively.
I don’t know whether to be surprised or not that you’d depict your employees as nothing more than trainable animals or maybe automata.
Racism is indeed quite bad and, in most places, is inextricably entangled with the broader issue of capitalist exploitation.
But if this conversation is upsetting you, I’m content to disengage and leave you in peace.
I’m probably older than you, and I never once suggested there’s no value in creating a collaborative effort that produces value. I simply deny that any act of labor could intrinsically confer any one individual ownership over the entire effort.
Also, “jingoism” refers to a kind of hyper-nationalist excess, which I deny I’ve engaged in here.
JA Westenberg
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote
Fabio G.
HeavenlyPossum