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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

And I don't think anyone is arguing that the poor should all go out and try to start businesses once they're automated out of their current job, that would be a very naive viewpoint. PGs essay is saying that society should be discussing how to solve poverty, rather than how to solve economic inequality.

I'm strongly in favor of things like basic income, extensive free retraining programs, and a lot of social support to make sure that every citizen can be free of the desperation of true poverty, and we can maintain social and economic mobility, but there are a lot of ways that attempting to stamp out economic inequality could go really horribly wrong.

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Out of curiosity, what could go wrong by attempting to stamp out economic inequality. The argument that the top job creators and innovators would leave because they don't have massive income incentives is an extreme in case that is an example.

Becoming an unattractive place to come for ambitious people. Becoming an unattractive place for ambitious/wealthy people to stay. Causing inequality to take subtler forms, like power, political influence, personal connections. Civil unrest, as the social contract between people and between government and the people to be radically altered. There are a lot of potentially very severe problems, and it's dangerously naive to think that true equality between all people is something actually achievable unless humanity and human nature undergoes some fundamental changes.

We should be trying to fix poverty, and giving more people an opportunity to be ambitious and take risks without risking ruin, we shouldn't be making it unattractive to be ambitious.

I am not advocating for true equality. I am saying that we can distribute wealth to better represent how people contribute to the system. No one is at the top without the support of the millions who pushed them there. Everyone is not ambitious in the business sense. Everyone can't be Michael Jordan, but Michael Jordan wouldn't be with everyone.

I would go even further and say that skill crash is the real and unavoidable problem rather than poverty. Poverty can be curbed by giving out food and shelter which is getting cheaper. But skill migration is not so painless.

Yeah, I think we need very extensive federally-funded retraining programs. Just being kept alive by welfare isn't going to give people a sense of purpose - people need to feel useful.

But I think a social safety net is very helpful in helping people feel comfortable taking risks - I probably would not have started a company if the cost of failure was homelessness, rather than just swallowing my pride and moving into my parents' basement.

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