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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

That's a straightforward proposal. Making wealth non-path dependent means seizing and redistributing it periodically or continuously. That would tend toward economic equality, but since it has the side effect of suppressing the incentive to create wealth, it's an equality of poverty.

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I mean, all you'd need is a damping factor via a wealth tax, above some threshold that's still motivating enough. I doubt anyone would call everyone having 1 million dollars "equality of poverty", and you can make it so that if you are really good at business, you can outrun the wealth tax up to say 100 million $. Oh, and 100% inheritance tax on estates above 1 million, with a buyback right for familiy businesses that allows you to buy back the business at it's current market value over X years (so you actually benefit from inflation).

IFF implemented globally, would you truly argue this disincentivizes creation of wealth? Add inflation and exchange rate adjustments and I honestly don't buy that argument anymore.

NOW, will you have selfish actors trying to game the system and evade these taxes through all means possible? Yes, but that's why I think anyone who supports the protection of private property through state violence and democracy at the same time needs to do some heavy gymnastics to justify tax evasion and dynasty enabling tax policies (i.e., anything that doesn't at least do the 100% inheritance/gift tax bit). And of course you'd need to implement it either globally or at least in economic powerhouse blocks like EU+US+Canada.

I wonder if that’s not necessarily a negative thing. Much of the beauty of the open-source ecosystem comes from its (typical but not guaranteed) lack of explicit wealth incentives. It feels to me like the idea that wealth redistribution necessitates widespread poverty is almost purely speculative, though I’m happy to be corrected.

I think open source is an example of how any set of incentives cuts both ways, it is just prioritizing different things. Incentives are offsetting; things like wealth incentives are often valuable to encourage people to do important things they otherwise would have no incentivize to do in open source.

For example, a well-known issue with open source data infrastructure is that it often has much lower performance and efficiency than equivalent proprietary software. There are many dis-incentives in the open source ecosystem to producing software that is highly performant and efficient, not the least of which is development complexity and sophistication level required to contribute. Open source developers do not pay the operational cost of wasteful data infrastructure but they do pay the cost of their time, and prioritize accordingly. Proprietary data infrastructure is explicitly motivated by wealth incentives to be highly efficient, which is why companies invest in it even though open source equivalents exists.

The relative wastefulness of open source in terms of computing resources is increasingly perceived as bad for the environment, so it isn't just a money motivation. Incentives are a powerful thing and it is evident that open source lacks incentives to produce some important outcomes.

This sounds like a just-so story about incentives and open-source software, and seems to ignore some of the significant motivations actually at play, as well as some fairly glaringly obvious historical examples. What are the specific examples you have in mind here?

We could also say that much of the beauty of the open-source ecosystem comes from top 1% earners (software developers) having cushy jobs and some free time to invest in common good.

Not necessarily, society could decide what a value of “I win“ income is.

Maybe it’s $1 billion, after which you hit a ceiling function or wealth becomes ergodic, and you earn a badge that says “you won” (in the context of this society).

If you earn such a badge, society would call on you for advise (if you are a non-inheritor).

I love this idea of giving people a badge or even better a sticker if they hit some particular level above which we take their excess. It's hilarious.

The value should be low enough as to make capture of the political system at the national level by small groups of wealthy individuals impractical.

> That's a straightforward proposal. Making wealth non-path dependent means seizing and redistributing it periodically or continuously. That would tend toward economic equality, but since it has the side effect of suppressing the incentive to create wealth, it's an equality of poverty.

Did you consider the case where A works twice as hard as B and ends up with twice the wealth of B?

People might be happier with an equalitity of poverty (but has to be on a world scale).

I get the Maslow argument, but after reading https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-... it sounds like one can explain one's intuitive sense of the world's happiness in both absolute and relative terms.

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