Comment by plainOldText | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plainOldText | Hacker News Reader

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> More and more, the types of jobs that add value are the types of jobs where really only the best add much value [...] In those jobs, the very best take the vast lion's share of income because what the best produce is valued so much more highly than everyone else.

Your perspective is in agreement with studies in network science, which have uncovered that in a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena, the network models follow a power law distribution, and as a result, you end up with situations such as, for example Kim Kardashian having 130M followers, while the average Instagram user probably has about 1-2k followers. Other similar distributions: income, research paper citations, world wide web, etc.

It appears that uneven distributions are inevitable in free human networks, or as Will & Ariel Durant once noted:

> Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Yup.

"in agreement with studies in network science"

Attention economy -> preferential attachment -> winner takes all.

It's just math.

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"power law distribution"

Every market will lead to a dominant first place, runner up second, distant third, and everyone else. (Roughly)

For a long while now, markets have been consolidating (local -> regional -> national -> global).

So now instead of multiple markets with their own champions, we have a handful of markets with respectively fewer champions.

It's just math.

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"freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies"

Nice quote. Thanks. Nicely compliments Kevin Phillip's formulation of wealth vs democracy.

Without deliberate, aggressive redistribution, accelerating inequity is inevitable.

It's just math.

Perhaps I’m wrong in my observation, but my overall sentiment of your comment is that you’re too eager to simplify things.

Unrelated to the above part of my comment, but:

> Without deliberate, aggressive redistribution, accelerating inequity is inevitable.

People are willing to embrace redistribution way too hastily, while ignoring higher order consequences. If we embrace more aggressive redistribution, to what extent, how effective, to what long term cost, etc?

Perhaps redistribution is so seductive because it promises some laudable social outcome while also being easier to understand than competing alternatives.

Top-down engineering solutions to complex human problems should cast doubts imho. That is not to say we shouldn't strive to solve the challenges of our society, but we ought to always be mindful of its complexity.

Tangentially related to our conversation, but I found this paper on politics + complexity [1] – albeit still a draft – helpful.

[1] https://www.academia.edu/38433249/Multiscale_Localism_Politi...

Absolutely. I've gotten great mileage out of simplification. I code the same way. My rule of thumb is that if you can't explain something, you probably did it wrong.

My approach offends most geeks and wonks. Oh well.

I'll give an example. After years of thrashing on election integrity, with vendors and admins dragging everyone through the weeds of policy and arcana, I finally figured out the whole argument comes down to "private voting, public counting". Period. Any deviance from that is capitulation. You can advocate for something else. But it's not democratic.

From my vantage, compared to me, most everyone else is bike shedding, being too clever by half, pushing rope. Or worse: obfuscation, obstruction. I can stomach it for a while, like when I'm getting up to speed on an issue. But once I figure out someone's just stalling, I lose interest in hearing any more.

Top-down has its place: designing market places, establishing inalienable human rights, the big stuff. But for implementation, like our current welfare regime, it's paternalistic and dehumanizing. I prefer bottom up distributed decision making solutions, like UBI, wherever feasible.

I am very interested in complexity vs governance. I believe (but cannot prove) that a lot of stuff is just too complicated to reason about. Like our health insurance system.

I'll read that paper, thanks.

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