Reddit reviews Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn

I work in tech in the Bay Area so yes, my context is dramatically different. A friend of mine who was Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard recently wrote this a book about the dramatic difference between the kind of wealth you're talking about and the kind of wealth he has amassed. His premise is that we live in a world where a piece of blind luck (meeting Zuckerberg) plus a couple years of hard work turned him into a billionaire, and no one should think that is "fair" or "justified".

And he's not at all the exception. I got incredibly lucky too and would generally say I've worked less hard than the vast majority of people who work two shitty jobs to support their families.

The issue isn't whether or not anyone is ever "self made". The issue is that the amount which society rewards certain things and not others isn't necessarily tied to fairness or hard work. If we lived in a world where everyone's basic needs were taken care of, then this debate would be pretty different, but so long as people are hungry and sick and money could solve those things, allowing billionaires to hoard resources is amoral.

Imagine money didn't exist, and the rich were hoarding grain - more grain than they or their families could ever eat in a hundred lifetimes - while millions of people died of hunger right outside their walled-off homes. We would call them monsters, right?