Posts Tagged ‘The Merchant of Venice’
“Always create more value than you capture”*…
There are, of course, myriad ways to rank people. Increasingly these days, the preferred scale seems to be one’s wealth. The Forbes 400, which ranks the richest Americans by their wealth, has become the scorecard of our zeitgeist. But one of its denizens (currently #4), Jeff Bezos, suggested in 2024, “somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they’ve created for other people.”
Sakshyam Patro has obliged…
… this is that list: [It ranks] founders by Wealth Created For Others (WCFO): the dollar value their companies generated for shareholders other than themselves…. every number traceable to an SEC filing, an academic dataset, or a named data source — refreshed every fifteen minutes while markets are open. Each figure is the shareholder wealth a founder’s company created, now held by index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, minus what the founder kept. It’s not a claim that one person built the company alone…
See the list here. (Teaser: as of this writing, Bezos moves up one slot, from #4 to #3); the current Forbes #1, Elon Musk, drops to #28 (his wealth is $798B; his investors have lost $243B). And see the details of the methodology here.
Patro adds some important context– the first point especially:
- It is the Forbes billionaires list, re-sorted — not a ranking of humanity’s benefactors. The universe is living billionaires with a trackable public company. Norman Borlaug, Linus Torvalds, vaccine developers, and public-sector reformers created enormous value and belong at the top of a different list; they are absent here because they are not billionaires with public equity, not because the metric judges them small. This list answers exactly one question Bezos posed: among the people Forbes already ranks by personal wealth, who created the most for others versus kept for themselves?
- Not a measure of consumer surplus, wages, or societal value beyond shareholders (those are larger still — Nordhaus [see here] estimates innovators capture only ~2.2% of the social surplus they create — but they are not reliably measurable per person, so we do not headline them).
- Not a moral scoreboard. It measures one thing: dollars of shareholder wealth created beyond a risk-free benchmark, minus dollars kept.
- Not affiliated with Forbes or with any prior ranking site.
Ranked by the wealth they built for other investors: “The Anti‑Forbes List.”
To observe the obvious, the numbers at play here are big… so big as to be hard to understand. Amanda Shendruk urges us to make the effort and offers some helpful tips: “Understanding large values: It’s our ethical duty.”
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As we re-evaluate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1598 that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationers’ Register. By decree of Queen Elizabeth, the Stationers’ Register licensed printed works, giving the Crown tight control over all published material. In those days, “copyright” mainly meant “the right to make copies”; secondarily, it conferred intellectual property rights (though in those days, mainly to the guild printers who got the permissions).
In some cases, the companies of actors appear to have registered plays through co-operative stationers, with the express purpose of forestalling the publication of a play when publication was not in their interest. This seems to have been the case with The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men: the copyright was granted to James Roberts, who printed the company’s playbills and held copyrights on five of their plays (two by Shakespeare). But Roberts transferred the copyright to fellow stationer Thomas Heyes in 1600, and Hayes published first quarto edition of the play before the end of the year.
“It takes no compromise to give people their rights…it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom.”*…
ONE, Inc., was one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1952 with money and leadership from U.S. groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, as well as Swiss magazine Der Kreis. That same year, a 7.2 earthquake shook Southern California along the White Wolf Fault, and the Emmys were awarded to shows made across the U.S. for the first time (before that, the awards just went to L.A. studios). Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz hosted the show from the Cocoanut Grove Lounge. The following year Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which said gays and lesbians were perverts, criminals, mentally ill, and must be blocked from any kind of federal employment. So much was hopeful, but at times everything felt broken and hopeless too. The digital archive of ONE, the monthly magazine published by ONE, Inc., reflects the contradictions of the time. It’s a record of endurance, legal and emotional labor, new and inherited trauma, tenderness, and joy.
The magazine was mailed internationally in unmarked brown envelopes. For safety and longevity, ONE’s all-gender board of editors often used pen names, and always depended on other jobs for food and rent. Even so, within a few months of the first ONE, the FBI identified everyone and wrote their employers, calling all staff “deviants” and “security risks” in a middle-school-style attempt to destroy health and security. Luckily, the employers largely ignored the notices, which surprised the FBI so much they shifted public attention elsewhere, for a while…
More at “ONE: The First Gay Magazine in the United States.”
Shortly after the organization’s founding, in January of 1953, the first issue of ONE Magazine was produced. ONE Magazine remained a staple of ONE, Inc., published every month and read across the nation. ONE, Inc., was the “first national, legally sanctioned organization dedicated to the promulgation of information on homosexuality,” and ONE Magazine was core to that mission. The subscriber count of the magazine peaked at around 5000, although as with many homosexual publications in that era, copies moving from person to person made up a great deal of their readership that went uncounted…
From the introduction to ONE Archives at USC Libraries, where one can browse the publication.
Remembering that Playboy debuted in the same year (1953) as ONE, your correspondent will give Somerset Maugham the last word:
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror…
* Harvey Milk
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As we love and let love, we might recall that it was on this this date in 1598 that The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationer’s Register. The copyright regimen was strict in Elizabeth’s time, as is now. But back then, copyright was literally that, the right to make a (first) copy: the Queen, concerned with sedition and determined to keep a tight rein on any and all published material in her realm, had decreed that no work could be printed in England without a license from the Stationer.
Shakespeare had written the play sometime between 1596 and 1598 (when a performance is mentioned by Francis Meres). It wasn’t actually printed until 1600– in the First Quarto– by which time (the title page suggests) it had been performed “divers times.”
If you prick us, do we not bleed? – The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1
Title page from the First Quarto (source)
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