The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's mission is to shelter most of Zuck's wealth from taxation while ensuring that he and his wife retain as much control over it as possible. Facebook's negative externalities are orthogonal to this mission.
When thinking about net worth in equity you have to consider how stocks are valued. He hasn't created the value of that many neurosurgeons, but the market believes that Facebook will create that value in all future earnings adjusted for risk/inflation.
When talking about the market we must also accept that the people involved in those decisions are ideologues not gods, manipulate their messaging for personal gain, and refuse to be held accountable
Kind of a trend in society
No stock traders opinions should mean all that much to a numerate and emotionally well adjusted person
They’re not in charge of anything but evangelism
Adam Smith only mentions markets in the context of a labor market. The whole idea is so far removed from what he defined initially, any concept of markets cannot be traced to him and is then just arbitrary rambling from a gut sense it will help one survive
Economics as an academic construct is internalized the same as a chase for piousness. It’s so abstracted away from real productivity so as to self sustain it’s mathematical correctness. It’s meaningless in that way to day to day folks
A better question is, did the other people who helped create Facebook receive total compensation anywhere close to proportional to the value they created for Facebook? Not a rhetorical question. I’m curious what the estimated value to Facebook a high level employee is, relative to the compensation they receive. Then compare that ratio to Zuckerberg’s ratio.
If it saves your live, it should be regulated, or the costs otherwise removed or hidden or not placed upon the consumer or end-user. How you do this is important but not to the context of this question. It’s a matter of humanity and morality as much as profits and benefits.
Your argument takes the form "the market price is the right price," which is basically just a statement of ideology.
Supply/demand schedules are as much a product of market structure as they are a function of market participant preferences. You see the HFT folks--who probably agree with your ideology--make this argument any time anyone proposes changes to financial market micro-structure.
So, the statement "the market price is the right price" implicitly assumes that the current structure of the market optimizes whatever objective you think markets exist to optimize.
If you think the market is giving a wrong price or structural issues are not optimizing the right thing, the correct action is to fix those structural issues, not to try and fix prices by fiat. The market will continue to operate around that and distort elsewhere, usually to the detriment of everyone involved.
It is not an ideology, it is a fact of how markets operate. If something is in great supply and low demand, the price will be low, and vice versa. This is an observable, objective statement about the nature of the world. Having an ideology that makes you wish the price were something else, doesn't change the reality of how prices of things are determined.
The "structural issues" are usually the result of artificial distortions on the supply or the demand that come from the result of well-meaning but misguided efforts to get the "right" price according to one side of the transaction.
> A better question is, did the other people who helped create Facebook receive total compensation anywhere close to proportional to the value they created for Facebook
I don't think that is possible to measure, and even if it was I don't think it is reasonable to say that is then deserved. People that work at FB feel they are fairly compensated, otherwise they can go work somewhere else.
It doesn't matter how much value you add to a thing if the thing you are adding value to is owned by someone else.
If you hire a contractor to fix up your house, and pay him $30k, and these improvements end up increasing the value of your home by $60k, are you going to call up the contractor and say "hey, the value of my home increased more by your work than I thought it would, here is an extra $30k"? I doubt it. And that is in a hypothetical situation where you know precisely how much value was added by that one individual. But as I said above, that is pretty much impossible to do anyway.
It’s possible to measure. Perhaps not to an extremely high confidence value, but it’s absurd to say an upper and lower bound of these ratios could not be determined. Just call Lloyd’s of London if you don’t believe me. If it can be insured, it can be analyzed sufficiently so these numbers exist and have some errors bars on them.
So now we know just now underpaid/overpaid Zuckerberg and our high level employee are. For a thought exercise, what do you think the employees would do with this information? HR departments? Boards of Directors? CEOs? Angel investors? Wealth management advisors? Loan risk quants? Four star generals? Party and national leaders?
Some of these may not care if they knew, or would be too busy to care. I think others already have an understanding of these kinds of numbers and relations due to specific domain knowledge or demographic knowledge; aptitudes which make one suited for a given job may also make one especially clever or capable. In any case, the effect of this knowledge varies.
I didn’t say that ratio had anything to do with fairness or equality. I think that was something you assumed or imputed into my statement.
Insurance companies in many jurisdictions are regulated to prevent excess profits. That’s why car insurance companies are sending refund checks; they’re legally obligated to pass on the savings if it costs them less to provide insurance to you. Why is it absurd then to ask for pay commensurate with profits? They call them points in Hollywood movie contracts[1]; they may have other names in other fields.
Perhaps companies over a certain value should be required by law or charter to give employees a choice to receive their regular pay as:
1) x% of value generation relative to other employees in the company as assessed by the people in the company and outside data;
2) y% of value generation relative to any other measure, such as company stock or inflation;
3) z, their inflation adjusted prior pay period payment; or
4) the same payment as they received last pay period;
whichever is greater, or whichever the employee chooses.
Would that be fair to the company? Why or why not? Would that be fair to workers? Seems hard to say how it would be unfair, unless you are a low value, replaceable worker. Is it ideal? Is it even workable? Would employees like having choice and knowledge better than the alternative? Would they like it better than the current status quo? In the interest of market transparency and maximal agency of market actors, which side is the hand of the market on?
Some of these questions can be analyzed by looking at worker-owned co-ops and companies.
I worked at a Computational Population biology lab where we studied social networks. I had the idea once of how to value the amount of money a social network is worth. I also quit Facebook this month and I don't intend anything below to support any of their actions and also below is some quick calculations. The easy answer would be to say that the social network is worth whatever its net revenue is.
A lot of ways people can value social networks in general would be to first to value the network effect Facebook has.
"Metcalfe's law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). "[1]
The next issue would be to attempt to price the individual user. Applying Metcalf's law could give you some kind of metric.
One way to do that would be to look at Facebook's S-1 and see how much revenue they get per user. Their net income from the first quarter of 2020 is $4.9 Billion dollars. Also they had 2.6 monthly active users.
So doing the math is (2.6 billion) ^2 people / $4.9 billion dollars which is $1.38 per user[2] . Assuming everyone is connected to each other (which is unrealistic) we have an upper bound of $3.5 billion dollars.
Every single question of that form is impossible to answer with mere words. Luckily, people CAN answer it through aggregate choice, so we don't have to worry about it.
...but since I feel like taking the bait, something like 9 trillion people use Facebook for at least 36 hours a day, while at MOST 4 people ever even need to consult a neurosurgeon per YEAR. So he's clearly the winner there.
I think there is a different way of looking at it: how replaceable is he and what he has built?
The truth is -- most of Facebook's value comes from network effects, not the actual technology itself. If Mark Zuckerberg never existed, it is highly likely some other platform would have been created -- the knowledge and skillset he has is not that rare. many other platforms existed before Facebook to let you post pictures and chat with friends.
What are you talking about. He decides where the money goes even when it’s in the foundation. He gets tax benefits for giving it to things considered charitable by the government.
"Grants are awarded via three funding entities: the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, a 501(c)3 private foundation; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and Chan Zuckerberg Advocacy, a 501(c)4 organization."
Now please do check how money needs to be spent by 501(c)3:
He does not need to buy a Lamborghini or a yacht with that money: there are plenty of other ways to use money to secure power or influence that do not involve the purchase of physical things.
I'm a scientist that benefits from this money. I'm not a Zuck fan, but I don't like strict policing of speech so I'm alright Zuck's move here. Moderate scientists keep quiet in academia for their own good.
The problem doesn't have anything to do with policing speech. The problem is the intentional propagation and promotion of inflammatory speech. It is one thing to allow hate speech, it is another to increase it's prominence because it is "more engaging." Facebook does just that.
The newspaper + money + printing costs system has done that for generations. If you want engaging information to stop being spread more than less-engaging information, then you're going to have to come up with a way to stop more engaging newspapers from printing more copies than less-engaging ones.
Yes, newspapers have been printing/selling the equivalent of clickbait and "fake news" for as long as newspapers have been around. People like this and it gets a lot of eyeballs. Newspapers like USA Today/New York Post/Daily Mail etc. do this to at least some degree and do pretty well for it.
That being said, many of the top-circulating newspapers[1] don't trade on simply reporting the "most-engaging" information. People read the WSJ or NYTimes because they're trustworthy and tend to have a high standard of journalistic integrity, deeply investigate issues and challenge powerful interests. (If you don't believe that's true you probably don't read the WSJ or NYTimes, which makes my point for me...)
Facebook and social media in general does the former, not the latter. And then combines it with algorithms that target content at those most likely to be engaged by it, leading to a cesspool of polarization, echo chambers, and inflammatory arguments.
As long as you never click on a comments button or scroll down on any page, which is basically what Facebook is in reverse.
The comment sections on NYT (apparently the "good" paper) is one of the worst places on the internet. Yet I'm totally okay with it existing because I understand stupid people exist, no matter how much (highly selective) censorship we allow to exist.
Not to mention the serious decline in quality of actual NYT content which seems to select heavily for this commenting audience. I've been reading them for well over a decade and the decline is obvious and full of misinformation daily. There's no winning this fight through letting some random minimum wage moderator FB or Twitter hires, with zero appeals process, or any transparency, and obvious biases, deleting a few articles or comments that offend the type of people who live in the bay area or whatever American city they hire in.
"“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” one slide from the presentation read. The group found that if this core element of its recommendation engine were left unchecked, it would continue to serve Facebook users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” A separate internal report, crafted in 2016, said 64 percent of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook only did so because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them, the WSJ reports."
The Verge cites WSJ. WSJ mentions "a presentation" but doesn't include it. What little they cite is not very substantive. "more and more divisive content" this is vague and omnious, and not even very likely. These algorithms will reach an equilibrium.
WSJ further mentions that "some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers"
To me this is a sign that the presentation was made by a partisan inside of Facebook. All in all, I don't think this is very confidence inspiring.
We would really need some third party to do a better job of investigating this.
You gotta be kidding me. You know as well as I do that we're never going to get comprehensive third party access to Facebook data.
When even internal research suggests that their platform drives division your conclusion is they're overstating their case, people who are on facebooks payroll?
That's like Enron publishing internal research about corruption and someone going "well I guess these guys are partisan"
I've worked in ranking myself and seen how the debates go from the inside. I would not take a conclusion like this at face value, no. If they had included some data, maybe.
What you would likely have to do to determine this as an outsider is sample a number of people, ask them for opinions on stuff, look at their feeds. See if certain opinions are overrepresented. Look at correlation between opinions they have and opinions they see while you are at it.
It would be nice to know the answer to these sort of questions. When using online services, and especially enormous ones like Facebook, it's always good to ask yourself "why am I seeing this?" or "how did I get here?".
Every one knows it's either trump saying fake tough guy stuff; or it was an actual order for the military to shoot looters. In which case people need to know so they can stay safe.
There are also a lot of people who think the way media companies are acting (in terms of censoring/suppressing speech they don't agree with) is horrifying but are afraid to speak out against it because they fear the social or economic consequences of doing so.
Can you use your money as speech to short their stock? How else can you meaningfully joust with a multinational megacorp on an individual level?
Why do you feel that it’s censorship or speech suppression as opposed to exercising their own right as a company to set and enforce their own Terms of Service? How would you change the current system? How would you enforce your changes? How would your changes apply to overseas firms, if that is even technically or legally possible?
> Can you use your money as speech to short their stock?
I don't think that would have any effect.
> Why do you feel that it’s censorship or speech suppression
Because they are removing or not allowing speech that doesn't fit certain criteria. That is basically the definition of censorship or suppression. Of course, it's not illegal, but a definition of right and wrong based on legality is fairly impoverished in my opinion.
As for how I would change the current system, I'm not really sure. The problem could be solved by a change in culture, which I think is preferable to a legal solution, but the solution will have to be legal since I don't see our culture changing anytime soon. The most straightforward thing to do would be to treat sites like twitter/facebook as public spaces and so allow any sort of speech that isn't illegal.
Uh, in order: live in a society bottlenecked through a trashy parasitic exploitative dump of a communications tool, be subjected to psychological experimentation, be in a market where technology is constantly locked away and consuned by behemoth new megalodons whose sole purpose it to appreciate 400% every 10 years, live in a society malleable enough to be purchased, still haven't woken up from the nightmare.
