Revisiting Dan Price’s Social Experiment

A couple of years ago, I read an article about Dan Price who cut his salary to zero so that he could raise the wages of his employees to at least $70,000. His actions caused quite a stir and of course, there was talk that this socialism would fail. Last week or so, I decided to revisit this topic so I googled Dan Price to see what has happened in the years following.

Well, it’s good news. Instead of failing, his business now has 80% more customers than when he started his “experiment”. The average salary is about $103,000 and everyone earns more than the Dan’s living wage of $70K. Even though at least two of his employees quit, one of whom was his chief financial officer (of course, it would be the CFO), everyone else stayed around instead of moving to bigger firms.

Dan Price has a philosophy that I, of course, relate to. Here’s a couple of choice statements:

“If you look at the type of returns investors are expecting, the values we’re placing on companies, it’s really out of whack; 80 percent of all wealth created last year went to the top 1 percent primarily through corporate ownership and asset appreciating, and in the meantime the actual workers’ share of income gains is shrinking every year. If we keep taking away from the basic needs of the vast majority human beings on earth so that we can glorify a very tiny percentage with wealth and power and outsize political influence, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to remember that really ends very poorly for everyone.”

Then there was a stab at Amazon with their threat to take jobs away from Seattle during the tax battle:

“I just think it’s a very aggressive display of unbridled capitalism, of basically saying, we don’t actually care about anything but money.”

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