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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:45AM
> What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
Or more simply, dumb luck. All those other risk-takers who thought they could see the future, they are broke, maybe even living in a ditch. You won the lotto dude.
At least he's half-way to figuring that out. Better than most lotto winners.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by keplr on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:12AM
There is a baseline level of competence and the often overlooked social intuition that is required. The latter is why you see so few brilliant-but-socially-awkward-nerd billionaires. You can be eccentric, as long as you've got enough charm, charisma, style, and/or sex-appeal to balance it out. If you're weird and off-putting, few people will do business with you no matter how good your ideas are.
But after you clear that bar, it's basically luck.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:16AM
He started in a fortunate position (a family with some space capital), had the luck of knowing someone with a good idea (Jeff Bezos) who needed investors. He deserves credit for looking at the Amazon business model and thinking it could be a success, but he acknowledges that this isn't enough.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:41PM
> He deserves credit for looking at the Amazon business model and thinking it could be a success,
I dunno about that. How many other places did he invest in that went nowhere?
IIRC, the typical venture capitalist model is that 9 out of 10 investments are failures (return less than or equal to the original investment), so they rely on that 10th investment to hit it out of the park to cover for all the others. But a 90% failure rate sounds like dumb luck to me.
To give him credit for picking Amazon is reminiscent of the 'perfect prediction' scam. [skepdic.com]