Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games, rather than zero-sum status games.
Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.
I would argue trying to enforce equity to chase equality is your actual recipe for ushering in the next Dark Age.
Look at your Scandinavian societies for a model of what happens when you allow men and women the choice to live their lives as see fit without interference from the state, in the form of 'quotas' - you get some very interesting distributions. Something like 90% of all engineers in those societies are male, and something like 90% of women are nurses. Would anyone have the gall - to border on sheer stupidity - to claim that Scandinavian nations are holding back their women and oppressing them? Or is that equity isn't a very good goal... and that when you maximum equality, you'll also get massive differences in occupation because different occupations appeal to different personality traits and men and women do not have the exact same traits in the exact same quantities?
Grouping Jeff Bezos in with Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO), as both evil because they are both rich, is an extremely simplistic view of the world, but seems common, even on HN.
Bezos has his faults, but he is still responsible in an insane reduction in prices for many items for consumers. Plus he created 400,000 jobs in the pandemic.
Jamie Dimon takes huge financial risks with all sorts of opaque financial tools, an when he fucks up gets bailouts from government.
One creates wealth, the other basically rearranges it into his own pocket.
(and don't get me started about people complaining about Elon Musk being a billionaire, that is just a sad state of jealous resentment that should not be given a voice in society)
For example, if your business is based around an ad model, you are not creating value because that value already existed (people's attention / purchasing power). You are merely redirecting value.
If you take facebook as an example, they are creating value for people by letting them communicate / etc. But they are not capturing a portion of the value they are creating, they are taking value that already existed (the value of your attention) and selling it to someone else.
Or take an investment bank that purely speculates on existing assets. Any time they win, it is not because they created value and captured a fraction of it, it is because someone else lost.
I of course like fb better than the ib in this example, because they are at least creating some value. But I think any business where you're capturing value in a different area from where you're creating it is one that is very likely to end up with lots of conflicts of interesting and exploitation to a certain extent, so best avoided entirely.
For example, at least all developed societies have 'chased equality' by providing free, decent-quality public education for people at least until adulthood. Does anyone think dropping that and just leaving poor families to their own devices would actually increase total economic output?
As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.
Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.
The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?
When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?
I don't know about you, but as someone that played a lot of basketball in my youth, I did not have equal opportunity to play basketball the same way Michael Jordan did. Could I go out to a hoop at a park and play around? Sure. But at 5'-8", my opportunity to play at any real competitive level was limited by genetics long before things like drive and skill.
I'm confused why you would think this is a good analogy at all, unless you were trying to link it to intelligence (which is its own can of worms), which doesn't seem to be where you were going. Using competitive sports, which are extremely cutthroat when viewed through the lens of careers and those that make a living doing it, is almost never a good way to equate equality and regular access for the masses.
So, fairy tales?
Yes there are externalities.
But value is being added in continually more ethereal ways.
Only ignoring the externalities (including a very real possibility of wiping out billions via climate change).
We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.
Improvements and growth to what? I'd say only quantity and quality of life counts.
And if the increments of quantity and quality of life are offset by biblical sized climate destruction and the death/life cut short of millions and impact (in worsening life conditions) to billions (which might last for centuries), it might very well not be worth it.
>We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.
"Not all going to die" is a pretty low bar though...