Paul Graham Explains His Recent Sensational Article On Economic Inequality



    Paul Graham’s blog post has an abridged version of an article he published this week entitled Economic Inequality. In his brief essay, the founder of Y Combinator tries to clarify some of the points that caused a storm of comments on the network.

    The author himself noted that many interpretations of his opinions appeared on the network, which, according to Paul Graham, is an integral part of controversial issues that cause controversy among readers. Therefore, he decided to briefly outline the very essence of the article, explaining his point of view as accessible as possible - in order to exclude any points that could be misinterpreted this time.

    An abridged version of Paul Graham's article talks about how many people talk about economic inequality. Almost everyone claims that the growth of economic inequality is extremely undesirable, and the decrease is the opposite. But Graham believes that economic inequality, in fact, is not such a bad thing. He has many reasons. Many are more likely negative, while some can be assessed as quite good and desirable factors.

    For example, the high ratio of prisoners among the population and loopholes in tax legislation are negative factors that cause an increase in economic inequality. But startups also increase economic inequality. The founder of a successful startup will eventually become the owner of considerable capital. And in contrast to the high rate of prisoners among the population and loopholes in tax legislation, startups are a completely positive phenomenon.

    And since economic inequality is not bad in its very essence, we, as Graham argues, should not come out with hostile criticism of this phenomenon. Instead, we must deal with negative factors, which are often its cause.

    For example, instead of fighting economic inequality, we need to fight poverty. Fighting economic inequality would be a double oversight. It would harm both the good and bad factors that are causing this inequality. And even worse - such a policy would be an extremely ineffective method of dealing with the negative phenomena underlying it.

    According to Paul Graham, we will improve the situation with negative factors causing economic inequality, only if we fight directly with them. But if we eliminate all the negative causes of economic inequality, then its level will still grow due to the increasing power of technology.

    A translation of the full version of Paul Graham's original full post on economic inequality is currently under preparation. Stay tuned for new posts.

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