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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.

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Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?

That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.

I can’t deny that, but I can certainly point out that billionaires coinciding with the rise in quality does not mean that they were even produced by the same system, or that the presence of the billionaires was in any way necessary.

To reframe your point: maybe we should be careful to identify where the baby is and spend a little less attention on what billionaires want.

It seems pretty clear that capitalism tends to produce concentrations of wealth. Billionaires are created by capitalism because of this tendency. The question is if you can stop the tendency of capitalism without killing the system altogether. We just have to keep in mind, for all its faults, it has a track record of provably doing more for the well-being and prosperity of masses of average people more than any other system.

Billionaires are a byproduct of the market mechanisms that produces that wealth. They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)

> They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)

What percentage does that equal on the lower end? You say it does not justify messing with the system, but what is that based on? What would you feel is an equitable distribution of wealth within a country?

Or did they accelerate it AND profit disproportionately from it? There are more than two possibilities here.

That question isn't very useful. A better question would be: “does there exist a more effective system?” (“Does that system have billionaires?” is an interesting question, too.)

Did Jeff Bezos accelerate or slow progress for online shopping?

Show me what that math looks like where there is a positive number to the left of the equal sign.

Here it is in graph form:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...

Comparing eras doesn't seem very useful. 90 years ago my grandma got one orange as a present once a year. Today people buy bags of oranges every day.

Day-by-day the world is zero sum.

In order to get from "one orange as a present once a year" to "bags of oranges every day" each day has to (on average) see a small amount of growth.

Richer if you put more value on having an addictive piece of electronics in your back pocket rather than a few acres of land to be self sufficient on.

There are definite improvements (a fair amount of medical science), but I'm not sure on balance that the planetary destruction/extinctions/etc outweigh them. So, using made up GDP/capita numbers for justification that the world is "improving" is tenuous.

I do, as do most people. When you hear talk about subsistence farmers who live on less than a dollar a day and don't have running water, that's what the "few acres of land to be self sufficient on" lifestyle looks like in the absence of a strong market economy.

Have you looked at the homeless in your city? Sure they might be fed with cheap food, but they are living under bridges. So, that is what a "strong market economy" gets you too.

So don't compare the worse case subsistence farmer, with what was middle class in the US a few decades ago, where suburban houses on a couple acres were affordable my the top 70% of the population. We have more trinkets, but the price of basic necessities are becoming more "expensive" every day.

These are the average case subsistence farmers. The worst case ones live even harder lives than an homeless person, very often dying of starvation after a bad harvest.

The middle class in the US a few decades ago lived pretty good lives, but were very much dependent on market economies and innovation for their standard of living.

You can easily have "a few acres of land to be self-sufficent on". Clearly you don't value that, so you don't have it. If you actually value it, go get it.

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