Chasing That Paper

One unexpected benefit of my stint at Amazon has been the open conversations we’ve had as a family around money and finances. I remember paging through career guidance books in high school which featured Wikipedia-like summaries of various careers, one per page, in an effort to help students vector their career choices a bit. Back then, and even until a year after I started full-time work, annual salaries made little sense to me because I had no frame of reference. In my first year at Microsoft, I was paid a $42,000 salary. It was more money than I had seen up to that point in my life, but I still didn’t have any real sense for what that money would buy until months later, after paying rent, utilities, taxes, insurance, and frankly, buying groceries for the first time in my life. I think these career books, if they even exist anymore, should instead show, for each job, a few little icons representing the type of life you’d likely live on that salary: apartment, condo, house, McMansion; public transportation, single car shared amongst family, multiple cars; ease or relative difficulty of supporting what number of children; that sort of thing. It’d have made a huge difference to me at a time when all wages with three or more zeros after them seemed inexhaustibly large.

As an exercise for myself and for my family, I set my mind to pick one day in which I’d not only work a full shift, but spend every last penny I made on that shift before the day ended. This turns out not to be hard on an Amazon wage. I got off my shift at the standard 6 p.m. By 8:30, I had reached my goal and had to decline buying any other things the family wanted. This is how it all happened.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Chasing That Paper.

I’m not sure I agree with Rihanna and T.I. that, even after you’ve had fourteen number one hits and sold over 250 million records, you should continue “chasing that paper.” But there’s no question at $18.55 an hour that you absolutely need to be, if not just to keep the heat on. Ignoring overtime, a standard ten-hour workday at an Amazon warehouse in Seattle nets you $163 after federal taxes; thank goodness Washington State doesn’t have a state income tax yet. I chose the day that I would spend every last penny of it: Tanya’s birthday in early December.

As with Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and our anniversary, I also had to work a full overtime shift on Tanya’s birthday. It had become the expectation during my time at Amazon that there would be no special days, that all important dates on the calendar would start with eleven hours of warehouse work and one additional hour of commuting. This day was no different. I drove the minivan to and from work, which required $7.12 in gas. (You might wonder how I can be so precise. I filled the tank at the beginning and end of a week in which I only commuted with the minivan.) On any other day, I consume one drink per break, have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and take two snacks. In the spirit of this particular day, I instead bought everything I consumed at work directly from the break room. A twenty-ounce Orange Crush during morning break for $1.10. A Reuben sandwich and Coke at lunch totaling $6.05, which, if you cross-reference it with food prices these days, is actually a pretty good deal. Then a Snapple and SunChips in the afternoon break for $4.41. So all my food and drink at work came to $11.56, or forty-two minutes of labor. In that same vein, the first twenty-six minutes of every workday goes to pay off just the gasoline it took to get there.

An aside: I don’t know what type of people we’re talking about when you read all these news articles lamenting how Gen-Z post-millennials are eschewing driver’s licenses in droves, preferring instead to live in walkable neighborhoods and taking Ubers when necessary. An Uber to and from BFI4 would cost me $84.94, and that’s without rush-hour surge pricing — basically half my income. These journalists worrying about the future of government-issued identification must all be raising upper-middle-class children. I used to nod along when reading these articles, similarly worrying about the next generation, but I now feel that perspective is completely out of touch. Most Gen-Z’ers are not going to live in the happening hearts of elite cities taking their Ubers hither and yon, walking to artisanal bakeries where five ear-piercings are the minimum. Most are going to live with their parents, and if they’re lucky or have any sense of practicality, have an Amazon warehouse within walking distance. (This last comment isn’t facetious. Later in my employment, Seattle would experience a period of unusual snow and cold leading most associates to not be paid on days when roads were impassable. The only associates who could continue making the money they needed for the month were the ones who could walk to work.)

On the way home from work after my shift ended in the evening, I stopped by a bubble tea shop and bought a milk tea with boba, $6.61. My preferred drink at Starbucks these days, a tall chai, comes out to $6.66, so the bubble tea isn’t egregiously priced. But on typical workdays, I purchase neither; this was a bit of an exceptional moment of spontaneity.

After reaching home, Chloe and I bought a birthday balloon for Tanya and an orchid, one of her favorite flowers, both from the neighborhood QFC (a sort of Safeway or Albertson’s — just a regular grocery store), for $19.81. We then made the big splurge of the day: getting takeout Chinese food from a restaurant that’s become birthday tradition for Tanya, Szechuan Chef in Bellevue. The spicy, peppery chicken and the garlic eggplant are perennial favorites, to which we usually add one green vegetable like string beans as a conciliatory gesture towards the theory of good health. This, after tip, came out to $78.80. I had every bit of sticker shock as you’re probably experiencing right now. But I reluctantly paid after my initial my double-take, after checking the receipt carefully and feeling, as with the rest of my food purchases during COVID, that I shouldn’t shortchange restaurants on the 20% tip that had become standard for us in consideration of hardships undergone by every restaurant during the pandemic. Not to mention, you’ve probably noticed the skyrocketing prices across all food venues. I was speechless the other day when leaving McDonald’s, having purchased only one Quarter Pounder with cheese meal and three standalone sandwiches to feed the family, to be confronted with a bill of $31. So all things considered, Szechuan Chef was definitely a splurge, but not profligate in comparison to fast food, surprisingly.

And after dinner, a special event for the family: seeing Christmas lights at Bellevue Botanical Garden. Tanya loves Christmas lights, and we hadn’t done this in a few years, so it was a great way for the family to spend some time together in the season and do something we knew Tanya would enjoy. We walked together through various winding paths admiring the beauty and ingenuity of the artists who came up with each of the creative displays in the public park. Tickets were $5 a person, and parking was $5 a car. After sauntering past a few light displays while bundled against the brisk winter evening wind, we came upon a hot chocolate stand in the park. What a perfect idea! A little something warm to drink while appreciating the spirit of the season. I stopped us as we approached and instead hurried us on to the next display. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping track, but I certainly had been — we were completely out of money. By the time we chose to enter Bellevue Botanical Garden, our fate was sealed — every last penny I made from that day’s work had already been spent. There would be no hot chocolate for the Sus.

The mathematicians among you no doubt are wondering where $14 went. I said I made $163 after tax, so where’s the $14 I didn’t describe spending? Well, I actually spent $19 online, donated to the Amazon Labor Union Solidarity Fund, which supports a group of Staten Island Amazon workers who are trying to unionize for better protections. Tanya and I have always donated 10% of everything we make to charity. Nineteen dollars is 10% of my pre-tax earnings for the day, once you factor in that GoFundMe only accepts whole dollars. “Ah,” you’re now thinking, “so you’re basically $4.66 over budget. You’ve blown more than what you made.” And you’d be right. I went to work, ate and drank at work, bought a balloon and flower for Tanya, got takeout for the family, and went to see Christmas lights at a park. I concede that had I not gotten the bubble tea, everything would have worked. I would have had $1.95 left in my pocket. But it was the only thing I did purely for myself in the day with what I earned. I don’t regret any of the money we spent on Tanya’s birthday — and frankly, a grocery store orchid is not an overly generous gift — but if push came to shove and I had to live on the money I made, the clearly cuttable thing was my bubble tea, the item of personal enjoyment.

Then again, who am I kidding? I couldn’t live anywhere near the day that I described on my Amazon wage, since I didn’t amortize any costs I would have had to pay if we were truly trying to live within means. Sure, the minivan cost $7.12 of gas, but that’s only if you were gifted the van free and clear. Insurance on it costs $1.59 a day. A more accurate estimate would be to use US government reimbursement rates meant to account for gas, insurance, and wear and tear, which at $0.56 a mile would say my commute cost $20.16. What if I moved the family to live in the industrial part of Kent, Washington, within walking distance of the warehouse? In addition to saving more than an hour’s worth of labor every day in commuting costs, we’d also be able to get a much cheaper apartment given that area’s cheaper real estate. The cheapest two-bedroom apartment in Kent is $1,500 a month, 2.6 miles from the warehouse. The kids could share a room, and I could walk forty-five minutes each way. With the $2,800 I’d make a month after taxes, we’d have $1,300 left for everything else in life. My kids are old enough to not need childcare, so that saves a bundle; but realistically, any form of childcare beyond asking your neighbor or your parents to do you a solid is essentially going to bankrupt a person making $18.55 an hour. So let’s just pretend childcare is never an issue for any family so that we can at least get to the end of this exploration. Other than state Medicaid and coverage from Obamacare, the cheapest form of medical insurance you can get in Seattle is with an HMO — in our case, Kaiser. Health coverage for a family of four at Kaiser is more than $1,400 a month, so that right there would have doomed the whole endeavor; merely paying for Kent’s cheapest family apartment and the area’s cheapest medical insurance would have cost more than I make every month, before you even consider groceries, clothing, or heat in the winter.

There’s at least some good news. If you’re lucky enough to be hired as a permanent employee by Amazon, what they call a “blue badge” instead of the seasonal “white badge” associates used to bolster the workforce during Peak, you get medical insurance from day one. In the American healthcare system, that fact in and of itself makes the Amazon job so much more attractive than the $19 an hour advertised at my local Potbelly Sandwich. Insurance is essentially worth half of my take-home pay. This sort of calculus has surely not been missed by the millions of Americans currently looking for jobs. And as if our twisted medical system isn’t frustrating enough, there are many full-time hourly jobs for which you need to work months before employers start paying medical benefits — this really is how our American system works.

We’ve established Amazon wages aren’t enough for a family to live on, but it’d be unfair to say that it’s entirely ridiculous, if viewed through a certain lens. First, $18.55 is a bit over two bucks above our county’s minimum wage — so all the math we covered above isn’t even as bad as it gets for many people. Second, there’s the fact that there are plenty of other job openings in the area, to the point that many restaurateurs and small-business owners lament that they can’t hire all the people they need. So people are definitely choosing Amazon from amongst presumably worse choices. Lastly, if you lived with your parents and paid no rent, perhaps even getting to eat their food without contributing, and you were single without children or other obligations, the money’s more than enough to buy a little something here and there whilst saving up a bit. For the right person under the right conditions, the pay could definitely be sufficient. But you can’t veer from those conditions much before it becomes untenable.

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Vagaries of the employment market are weird that way. In a time when many people struggle, there are yet highly profitable lines of work that no one seems to know about. I remember being surprised, back when I started at Microsoft making $42,000 a year, that a friend’s brother had started learning how to paint cars at a body shop. That job, requiring not even a GED, was paying $60,000 at the time.

Or consider the most I ever earned in a night during college, which was making $19 an hour with a line service. If you haven’t heard of a line service, the existence of such a thing might just blow your mind. It did mine then. Growing up near Washington, DC, I had always known there were many jobs ultimately born from the needs of the federal government. Line services are one such case. Basically, the government holds all sorts of hearings that are open to the public, meetings that well-paid lobbyists want to attend. Seats for these hearings are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, quite egalitarian. But lobbyists, with their silk suits and designer heels, don’t want to stand in line to get these seats, especially since the most important hearings often have lines that begin queuing the day before. Here’s where the line service comes in. Two guys in DC thought of this idea in the ’90s and got filthy rich: you hire college students to stand in line for public hearings so that lobbyists can show up minutes before the hearing starts to take their place in line. This job, paying $19 an hour at a time when my software programming job at the university paid $8, was an amazing sinecure. It required no education at all — really, absolutely no qualifications at all other than the ability to hold your place in line and to stay awake. The latter’s important, because the particular line I stood in started outside the government building the night before the hearing around 7 p.m. There were only two rules to the job. First, you must hold your place in line. No disappearing off to places. Second, you may stand or sit, but you may not lie down. At any time. This latter rule was not the company’s, but the District of Columbia’s. No lying down on government property at any time because, you know, homeless people lie down. I got into line along with a few other friends; we spent the night outdoors, sitting on marble paving stones outside some important government building, making more money than we had ever made up to that point in our lives. It was like an outdoor sleepover. There were perhaps ninety other people, all college-aged. Someone nearby had brought a guitar, so there was even a bit of singing. It’s the type of thing that some nostalgic coming-of-age movie might make into a montage. The real excitement, however, came the next morning at 8:55 a.m. when the doors to the building were about to open. Leaders of the group became suddenly serious and started to instruct us. The doors are about to open. We can’t be sure this is the first door in the building they’ll open; there are many others. So when this opens, you have to run to the room where the hearing’s held. They repeated navigational directions from our door to the critical room multiple times, and emphasized the mission one last time. “You have to run. Keep your place in line, but run.” After nearly fourteen hours of sitting, I was more than ready to earn my keep. A security guard unlocked the door right at 9 a.m., and we broke through, running down the marble halls of the federal government with a joy of novelty that could only be channeled by the innocence of youth, our laughter reverberating off the twenty-foot columns that flanked the building’s grand hallway. Upon arriving at the double doors leading into the room of the hearing, we exchanged places one by one with lobbyists who, Starbucks in hand, some even wearing fur coats at a time when fur had already fallen out of favor, slid into line without even a glance at the breathlessly giggling college students they replaced. It was the easiest money I had made by that point in my life. I’d only find out twenty years later when reading an article about the founders of the line service that they had paid us only half of what they themselves made — that is, lobbyists paid $38 an hour for the service, of which the founders kept $19 from every one of us for every hour we worked that night.

Job markets are funny that way. The employer most often has the upper hand. The only higher-paying job in college held by someone I personally knew was that of cleaning fish in Alaska. It paid $6,000 for something like four weeks’ worth of work, which was a whole lot. But it had a few catches. First, it was smelly and dangerous — you could cut off a finger if you weren’t careful, and I’m told the smell becomes nauseatingly putrid. Second, it was something like twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Third — and here’s the insidious part — you only get paid if you make it through the last day. Rumor had it that more than half the students quit partway through because the job was just so unbearably unpleasant. Much of the labor in the early weeks comes essentially free of charge to the owners.

Or take the element of luck. Most tech workers you meet who’ve gotten rich attribute it to their talent and hard work, and perhaps even their acumen in picking up-and-coming companies to work for. I wholly discount the latter, because if you’re truly good enough to pick winners from a field of startups simply by interviewing for jobs with them, you would be ridiculously wealthy as an angel investor. But I’ve also come to somewhat discount the former reason — talent and hard work — through the journey of my own life. Between the time I joined Microsoft in 1998 and left it in 2010, the stock had gone up something like $0.15 in twelve years, or basically not at all. I remember selling the bulk of my initial stock grant, when leaving, for $1,600 pre-tax and heading straight to the company store with that money to buy an Xbox 360, two gaming wheels, and Forza Horizon 3, a racing game. A month later, I started at Facebook, and within a year my Facebook stock was worth a million dollars. I’m under no illusion that I somehow, over the period of a month, became much more talented as a software developer. I was the same man when I joined Facebook as when I left Microsoft the month prior. But in one year I was paid nearly a thousand times more in stock than in all twelve years of my previous work. This is the type of luck that I mean. I don’t want to employ false humility or discount the great work of many people in the tech industry by mistakenly suggesting that stock awards are any sort of lottery system completely divorced from an employee’s productivity or contributions. But I would say that, at least clearly in my own example, there’s only the loosest of correlations between one’s contributions to a company and the outsized financial rewards that one might reap.

Then there are lucrative jobs where friends disagree with my point of view about their relative viability for the average person. I once went on a cruise with the family to Alaska on Norwegian Cruise Lines. At the time, I was quite obsessed with poker, Texas No-Limit Hold’em. Thankfully, many others on the ship were as well. In the week-long cruise, I ended up playing two poker tournaments and a few hours per night at a poker table in the ship’s casino. The beauty of playing poker on cruises is that people are there to have a good time, and they’re too wealthy for their own good. I had a guy lose $600 to me one night and come back the next night just as happy to see me at the table. By the end of the seven-day cruise, I had made $3,600 at poker, far more than our family’s cruise tickets had cost. Playing poker on cruises does not require even a high school degree; in fact, it has no prerequisites. I was just a lay poker player, having read all of two books on poker before the cruise. So in theory, at least at that time, anyone could make thousands a week cruising around the world working only two to three hours a night. The entire setup befuddled me. When I tell friends this, and wonder aloud why more people who need money aren’t doing this, they always protest as if I’m some sort of professional poker master, some sort of trained card shark. I assure you I am not. At the time of the cruise, I was a lay player who had mostly played social games, not in casinos, and was barely profitable even at casual workplace events. But I won’t say it was dumb luck either: I made money every night on that cruise, and I placed high in both tournaments. My theory is that it’s all about choosing the right place to play. People on cruises play poker because there’s nothing else to do at sea, they don’t mind losing the money, and they watched some poker on TV featuring tense music underscoring dramatic all-in moves.

It’s weird to me that opportunities like this exist. Auto-body painting paying more than software engineering back then. Line services requiring no skills and almost no actual work. Cruises where you make money being on them. Am I just cherry-picking these opportunities, or is the world actually full of these types of things, yet the average person has no way of hearing about them? The number one reason Amazon warehouse associates gave me for how they chose to work at Amazon is that a relative worked there. The number two reason was that a good friend did. Could it be that we could get many people into better-paying jobs suited to their talents and interests simply by being better at advertising what’s available? I would never have learned about the concept of a line service if a friend hadn’t introduced me. It was a different friend’s brother who worked as the auto painter. The inability to discover amazing job opportunities is a great disservice to us all.

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The real unfairness comes from the fact that once you have a certain amount of money, additional money comes more and more easily, to the point where eventually the money starts making more of itself and you stop laboring.

I’ve already mentioned the phenomenon where I make as much renting out our condo in suburban Seattle as I do at my Amazon job. A far weirder example where having enough money suddenly lets you generate even more comes from a former coworker of mine at Microsoft, Ian, who, in his free time, somehow became self-taught, through much research on the web, at fixing watches. Not just any watches: Ian fixed only high-end watches, so-called “timepieces” costing tens of thousands of dollars each. It all started when he nicked or dented the outer ring with little nubs that circumscribed the glass face of his very expensive watch. That ring, which I’m sure has a very fancy name, probably sounding vaguely Latinate or French, apparently costs $15,000 — just a machined ring made of some rare material, no moving parts, no utility other than to look notable on the rim of a watch. He decided to fix it himself. He, in fact, liked the experience so much that it became a hobby for him, fixing expensive watches. Before you knew it, Ian became a bit of a known entity amongst people who own watches that cost five or six figures. I don’t know how, but I assume there are online forums for wealthy people to debate tradeoffs between various timepieces. The point is, people started to send him their watches from around the world. He’d fix them as time allowed; after all, it was only a hobby, and he had his day job at Microsoft to tend to. The biggest source of profit, however, was buying broken watches and fixing them to resell. Ian became a sort of timepiece flipper. What at first started as a hobby that allowed him to wear all sorts of extremely expensive watches for free eventually culminated in the day when Hublot, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, wrote to ask whether Ian would become one of their official repairmen. He turned them down, with the either highly perceptive or incredibly privileged response, depending on your perspective, that he didn’t want to turn a hobby into a job. Here’s a job that requires no experience or education, and can demonstrably be self-taught, that can make you six figures a year easily even whilst you wear timepieces worth several Amazon associates’ annual salaries, if only you had, say, $100,000 of working capital to buy a watch along with the parts and tools it’d take to repair it.

But there are even more egregious variations on this theme of enjoying luxury while being paid to do so. And I don’t mean the phenomenon of celebrity “gifting suites” where movie stars are invited to choose free jewelry, iPads, watches, and various other things to wear, use, and keep, just as a, you know, thank you for being who they are. I mean things that anyone could do, if they only had the money. About ten years ago, McLaren, a luxury sports car manufacturer, announced its limited-edition halo car, the McLaren P1, classed in a category christened by the auto industry as “hypercar” because the term “supercar” just wasn’t enough. Only 375 of these sleek 903 horsepower street-legal race cars would ever be produced, each retailing for $1.15M. Rabid car fanatic and general crazy guy that I am, I plunked down the $300,000 deposit and secured a coveted build slot before all the units were spoken for after its announcement at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I was then treated, along with my Facebook London coworker Adam Lazur, to an exclusive tour of McLaren’s facilities in Woking, outside London, tailored for just the two of us — me, the customer about to choose his colors and materials, and Adam, my certified race-instructor guest who knew far more about cars than I did. After touring the impeccably clean manufacturing facilities and watching engineers work on McLaren’s upcoming Formula 1 engines, we were treated to a fancy lunch followed by the event the entire morning was building towards: visiting the P1 suite. Our host led Adam and me into a large, dark room, dramatically lit in the style of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and invited us to sit on the leather couches. When we were ready, thundering music filled the suite as the lights dimmed further, its beats rising and rising in intensity until suddenly, at the very climax, all the lights shone bright as the stage in front of us rotated to reveal, that’s right, a P1 in the flesh. All this theater was designed for a grand total of not even 375 owners, but whatever subset of them who’d be willing to fly out to Woking in the UK just to take a look around. It’s the type of capitalistic excess I wouldn’t have believed if I encountered it in a movie, but there you have it, all true. The real kicker, of course, isn’t the custom tour that no member of the public would ever get to see, but the fact that the P1, launched at $1.15M, would sell for $2.39M two years later. That’s making more than half a million dollars a year while doing nothing other than driving an elite hypercar that most people might not see even once in their lifetime. If you but had $1.15M in 2012, you could have made $1.24M in two years just for watching paint dry — and that $1.24M represents thirty-three-and-a-half years of working at BFI4. If this doesn’t strike you as at least bizarre, if not unfair or infuriating, I’m not sure what will. As it stands, I got cold feet before taking delivery because the purchase price was over double our house in Seattle, so I gave up my build slot and ended up in an Amazon warehouse.

Then there’s the classic form of “livin’ off the fatta the lan’” — investments. If you park $378,000 in the S&P 500, you’ll collect an Amazon warehouse associate’s annual wages every year for the rest of your life based on the index’s ninety-year historic return of 9.8% per year. Not only would you not be doing any constructive work, your money wouldn’t either. When you invest in a startup, your money enables a founder to create something that improves the world, like inventing a way for us all to find a specific web page in the great haystack that is the internet. When you invest in the S&P 500, you’re instead buying from people who aren’t creating or improving those companies — that is, you’re not funding the founders or the companies themselves, but instead buying from other investors — to one day sell when those companies have been improved through the hard work and ingenuity of those companies’ employees.

As with the game of Monopoly, there’s a certain amount of money below which you will never recover and are almost assuredly going to go bankrupt. But once you get a little ahead of everyone else, you can build a little house here, a little hotel there, and pretty soon you’re not even building houses based on having collected lots of $200 payments from passing Go but instead building them based on the rents collected from previous houses you built. Houses and hotels, in a way, start building themselves. And once that flywheel starts turning, it accelerates: even if we land on each other’s properties the same number of times, as long as my properties have hotels when yours only have houses, I’m destined to win. Life in America is like this. You’re either in quicksand, running up on a down escalator barely fast enough to keep from receding, or you’re looking around on the up escalator wondering which Hublot watch you might wear for a few months before selling at a profit. We should aspire to get everyone onto the up escalator, because once you have a certain chunk of money, it becomes easier and easier to create more. Anything below that, and you’re bailing sand into a sieve.

People smarter than me have had ideas around this for a while. Sam Altman, cofounder of Y Combinator and now CEO of OpenAI, argued five years ago for what he called American Equity — a dividend paid to every American reflecting the growth in the national GDP. Andrew Yang, best known for making universal basic income the center of his platform when running for president in 2020, is now shaping the conversation in similar terms, calling it a Freedom Dividend. (Universal basic income, or UBI, polls well with both Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans get even more interested when the word “freedom” is used.) The premise is this: if we know that people struggle when they have less than a certain amount of money, but they become more and more wealthy once they reach a different threshold, why don’t we try to bring more people up to that threshold? The most basic example of this is home ownership. Below a certain level of wealth, you’ll never put a down payment together, so you’re destined to pay rent your whole life and never build equity in a house. But if you had a down payment, you’d pay roughly the same amount over the years — in general, rents track well with mortgages — but you end up with a huge chunk of equity by the end of it. For most Americans, the equity in their house is by far the largest source of their assets, and the difference to get that ball rolling is merely the possession of a down payment. Can we aspire, figuratively, to make sure all Americans have that down payment, the initial chunk of change that gets the ball rolling? This lies at the core of the debate about the “bounty” and the “spread,” as the authors of a book called The Second Machine Age argue: can we ensure that investments in technology continue to produce ever-increasing bounty, which they certainly appear to be, and make sure we spread that bounty around enough such that everyone benefits?

We’re not on track for that, unless we collectively act quickly and decisively. In fact, we’re going the other way. In the smallest of examples, Amazon used to give even warehouse associates shares of Amazon stock — which has grown 16x in the past decade. But when people started applying pressure for Amazon to pay its workers more, specifically focusing not on the holistic package of pay, benefits, stock, and even performance incentives they used to offer, but instead on base pay alone, Amazon stopped issuing equity to its associates and instead raised their base pay. This goes opposite the direction we need to. We need to be giving Americans more of a stake in the things that will grow in our nation, not locking them more and more into the unscalable, unit-by-unit, box-by-box work that their bodies can perform. As argued in the New York Times bestseller Winners Take All, our economy is increasingly driven by ideas and innovation, the universal distribution of which is getting cheaper with every passing year, leading to a dynamic where smaller numbers of creators and owners will increasingly monopolize larger shares of the economy. You can already see this in the S&P 500, which is meant to represent the 500 largest companies in America. Instead, in 2021, just five tech stocks — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft — represented nearly a quarter of the entire S&P 500’s value. The “bounty” in tech is increasing faster and faster because technology itself is a flywheel: you invent the tool, which helps you build the machine, which then, together with other machines, builds an even better machine, until one day the entire engine of creativity nearly fuels itself as software begins at first fixing itself, which it already does in various forms within the largest tech companies using the latest tools, and eventually begins writing itself. The problem is the “spread.” We’re not getting more of that; we’re getting less, concentrating the fruits of growth in fewer hands, headed in the wrong direction.

The mistake often made in public debate is the fallacy that wealth is a pie that we’re simply fighting to divide. This leads to sentiments like the world not being fair if there are billionaires. Truth is, it matters how that billion arose. It certainly could have been taken out of the mouths of others, like in many cases of rent collection (both the normal sense of the word and also “economic rent,” where someone acts like a troll under the bridge of another’s hard work). But sometimes you make a billion because you’ve created something, essentially added a humongous chunk to the pie we all share.

Say we’re both stuck on a desert island. We spend every waking moment completely busy, subsistence fishing by day, and building makeshift shelters to survive each night. But we’re only so busy because I’m terrible at fishing and you’re terrible at building shelters. I spend most of my time trying to catch one fish to eat, like the world’s worst Gollum, but I’m L. L. Bean incarnate when it comes to tent-making. You’re the opposite. You step into water and fish jump straight for your mouth like they’re trying to win a game of sushi cornhole. But you can’t at all thread a needle for sewing shelters, even if its eye were as big as Sauron’s. If we simply agree to have you fish for both of us and me build our tents, we’d both be done with our day’s work before lunch and have the rest of the day to relax. We’re both better off. No one has stolen from anybody. Where did all this magic relaxation time come from? It’s the “bounty” of innovation and trade, “spread” equitably. If we discover one day that we’re actually in the Blue Lagoon and that Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins are great at harvesting bananas, we can all broaden our diets and sleep safely sheltered, all become richer, and yet no one has taken anything from anyone. The pie just got bigger. Our world is, or more accurately, can be, like that. We just have to make it so.

The next time you see someone with a lot of pie, the central question is, “Where did they get that pie?” Did they extract it from someone else, or worse yet, coerce or steal it? Or are they busy baking pies? If the latter, let’s make sure they don’t keep 100% of the pies they’re baking, because many of us are hungry and haven’t found a way to bake pies as quickly. But if that talented pie baker can, by keeping some of the pie, bake even more pies for all of us to share, then we should actually want them to have some of that pie, for all our sakes.

This is the idea behind shares of equity given to employees, especially in the tech world. Let’s bake this pie together and all benefit. We can broaden the power and reach of this idea by seeing our nation as, in a way, a company of sorts, which, if all continues to go well, will continue growing and prospering as different citizens work hard and invent better ways to do things. This is the idea of American Equity, of the Freedom Dividend. “A chicken for every pot” is not a pipe dream — and we don’t get there by killing and eating all the hens we currently have, but instead by distributing the eggs they lay in an equitable way. There’s enough for everyone.

Well, nearly. Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, loves playing basketball on his yachts. The trouble with yacht-based basketball, I’m told — because I certainly have no firsthand knowledge — is that occasionally a basketball will go overboard. Not to worry if you’re Larry, though. He has a man drive a separate powerboat behind his yachts to fetch errant basketballs, because, you know, let’s not be wasteful. No amount of bounty is ever going to justify that; we should spread that one completely out so that the rest of us can get on with life. But, excepting Larry, this whole thing can work. We can all prosper.

Coming next week: Rise of the robots, and how the nature of all our jobs will change as technical progress accelerates. And the skinny on Amazon Fresh, if you happen to order from there.