Item — HN Reader

That's a fair response. (And I apologize if I came across mean.) But I can mathematically prove you wrong. (I'm sure you'll prefer that, right? :-) If you look at average incomes and median incomes, the former are higher than the latter. Therefore it's the super rich throwing off the average -- not the super poor.

America has a venture culture that no one else in the world has, and I have to say as an entrepreneur myself that I deeply appreciate America for imparting that on me. But its handful of successes are rouge on a doll. If you're not looking at averages, you're essentially fooling yourself. How many people here are working on the next MySpace, desperate to get lucky and rich, and ignoring the odds and the fact that they're not adding value to anyone, anywhere? Like lottery ticket buyers, they're all fooling themselves that they will join that rich elite, when they never will (despite that, yes, sometimes someone wins).

2 comments

PG mentioned productivity and you mentioned income, so you aren't addressing the example criticism.

Also, I've heard that France has higher productivity per hour worked, though the average worker spends fewer hours working.

My guess is that people cheat the limits on working to get more done and push up the hourly productivity numbers.

... which is OK if the example criticism has no valid measurement parameters. There's a reason Forbes doesn't list the 100 most productive people.

The most productive people aren't the top 100 people. They are the top ~10,000 at the top ~1000 companies and startups.

A magazine should make a list of the top 500 companies...

What statement of mine did you just mathematically prove wrong?

If the super-rich are throwing off the average, then unless they're getting the money by stealing it, that supports curi's and my claim that the most productive people are in the US.

This one:

> European countries don't have so many super poor people as the US, which makes their average numbers look better

Your statement that the most productive people are in the US, is another way to say that wealth in unevenly distributed in the US. In this case, the most "productive" people would actually be in Saudi Arabia.