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That's fine and all if you're talking about people in your immediate social circle. Why waste time worrying about what someone else has?

But then there's this overall trend of stagnating wages for everyone except owners of capital. Industries become more and more concentrated. Billionaires get richer. We have trillion dollar companies, while inflation is increasing.

We're told "Don't be a hater, let billionaires do their thing!" But then they don't pay taxes and they spend their money on space bullshit. The world they are trying to create is not a better one. They are a hog on resources and the human race is right to be sick of it.

Fuck them, they should pay taxes and everyone should stop worshipping them like some kind of golden calf. It's not about being a hater, it's about stopping an economic tumor from getting any bigger.

> stagnating wages for everyone except owners of capital

I don’t think this tells the full story. I know I have somewhat esoteric views about finance, but I believe that wages in terms of what they can buy have in fact been increasing faster than you’d expect just based off of the dollar amount of wages. Even though minimum and average wages have increased more slowly, the buying power hasn’t decreased (and maybe even increased).

This is based on the rate of technological progress causing massive deflation in prices of things that can be made more efficiently by said technology. Our lives have also become more convenient in the last 20-ish years, with a significant chunk of inflation being caused by people actually buying more expensive versions of things.

Think of a 2005 cell phone. Motorola Razr era. Those things cost a few hundred dollars. You could buy something with comparable (or likely even better) capability today for pennies, or even find one for free. Which means massive deflation of comparable goods. You can get full-blown smartphones now for $50 total (budget android phones). Same thing applies to lots of products.

But our lifestyles have also gotten much more expensive — it’s fairly normal to spend 2-3x what we would’ve spent on the fancy Razr phone, or even more, because we want the latest and best. If we lag behind the cutting-edge with our purchases, we’ll find that we are spending less each year on comparable products.

Look through some of these[0] inflation charts — I tried apparel and bananas for example, but it looks like inflation has been extremely low on some standard household items (trying to ignore things that people are buying more luxury versions of these days).

All this to say — yes, income inequality is worth keeping an eye on. And yes, our tax system needs to be massively simplified to prevent loopholes. But some level of wealth inequality isn’t necessarily bad, it seems to be a pretty natural behavior that some small number of people hyper-optimize for some successful path & win — in all sorts of activities, not just wealth-building.

And, even though wages haven’t gone up a ton recently, neither have prices. People spend so much more of their money on luxuries now that it seems that cost of living has gone up, though. (Housing is an exception here that definitely has gone up)

[0] https://www.in2013dollars.com/inflation-cpi-categories

You don't eat Razrs. Food prices have largely increased, following inflation, while wages have not.

You don't live in a Razr. Purchasing a house is outside of the realm of possibilities for most people under 30. Rent does keep growing too, and guess what, your wages don't follow.

I don't put a Razr in my gas tank, but the price keeps skyrocketing.

You're just not looking at what people _need_. Nobody gives a shit about having an Alexa in their homes, that's just a bonus.

> some level of wealth inequality isn’t necessarily bad,

If I was born in 0 BC, and worked every day of the year until today with my current salary, I would be 8% of the way to being a billionaire. This isn't "some level of inequality". It's theft and is actively damaging for society.

Shouldn't housing be the primary concern here?

It's gone up so much as to eat all those cost savings, where it's only the rich benefitting from the cheaper phone. They're just as unapproachable because people have less to spend after rent

I think the economic model that leads to widespread inequity is absolutely a problem, and a thorny one that will need to be solved for sure.

But while I'm happy to dedicate mental-space to that question, I see no advantage in dedicating that mental space on hating billionaires, nor in dedicating mental space to what the Kardashians are doing. This stuff is hero-vs-villains thinking, grounded in a comic-book like view of the universe.

> I think the economic model that leads to widespread inequity is absolutely a problem, and a thorny one that will need to be solved for sure.

For sure. Let's not kick the can down the road, let's solve it now.

> I see no advantage in dedicating that mental space on hating billionaires, nor in dedicating mental space to what the Kardashians are doing. This stuff is hero-vs-villains thinking, grounded in a comic-book like view of the universe.

See, you think this is a systems problem rather than a people problem and I am saying it is both. This system is created and supported by people, it makes sense to address those specific people. This is not a "comic book like view of the universe". Billionaires should pay more taxes and people shouldn't fall for their self congratulatory bullshit hogging a news cycle.

That's a reasonable point, but I think in many ways it's a reflection of bimodal distributions which pervade modern life.

"then there's this overall trend of stagnating wages for everyone except owners of capital."

So people should better buy some capital!

Also the lament about stagnating wages glosses over the amount of people that have been added to the workforce. The average wage per person may have stagnated, but the sum of wages that are being paid out has increased a lot.

I think it is not a small achievement to provide jobs for so many more people.

I believe it's a result of social media that has (falsely) taught us that anger and resentment are valuable contributions to society.

Anger and resentment are highly charged emotions, and so they make people click, like, retweet and subscribe. So it's unsurprising that those takes are highlighted and encouraged by the social networks.

Not to say that we shouldn't fight for a better world, but we lost our way when we started attempting to do so through anger.

I've started to think the most dangerous parts of social media are the things which we agree with the most, whatever side of politics you're on.

In the case of Bezos, Musk and Branson, I think it's a case of hate the game, not the player. There are plenty more low-profile billionaires exploiting workers and using their gains for worse things than going to space (like lobbying), but we rarely talk about them because they're not in the news. Instead of hating on specific people as if their disappearance would solve the problem, we could be channeling that energy into changing the system to be fairer for all.

The billionaire class are destroying our planet and exploiting us. If people spent as much time hating them as others do brown-nosing them we’d live in a better world.

While I disagree with the article, I think your comment is a bit of an exaggeration and there is some merit for criticism.

Castigating people for negative thoughts and how they "ruin" ingenuity is ultimately a self-defeating argument.

> average persons dedicating 2 or 3h of their 16h/day budget on negative thoughts about other people's lives, poisoning their mood and ruining the 13 to 14 other hours they have left awake in those days

Does that happen? I think most people that criticize a billionaire don't dwell on it and are onto something else five minutes later. Voicing your opinion is quick and easy, and even if it changes nothing, it's too little to ruin your day.

Only a psychopath would devote that much brainpower to issues out of their control.

It's just that this is a very public reminder that we've all paid for this (as Bezos said), and people don't like being reminded of that.

Billionaires became billionaires by collecting economic rent from the actual wealth-producers - their employees, i.e., the rest of us. When they turn around and spend it on what's basically the tech equivalent of bling, the resentment is fully justified.

I can totally see a justification for feeling resentment. However, deciding to indulge into resentment is a choice, probably not a conscious one most of the time, but a choice. That's what "irks" me, if you will. Arguably, my "irk" boils down to the same thing I criticize: discontent with how other people spend their energy. =P

I'm sure negative thoughts about Jeff Bezos are the sole reason why a tired Amazon warehouse worker with no other employment opportunities in their decaying town might be unhappy.

This graph is a good summary of why that positive thinking mindset doesn't pay off like it used to, and most people are rationally pessimistic: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads...

Also, there's a lot of context missing from your analysis. Many people find Elon Musk annoying, even a dick, but his space company has done genuinely innovative stuff and is reliably doing commercial deliveries. Bezos is an even more successful businessman, but he's also almost cartoonishly self-absorbed and increasingly looks like a guy with more money than sense. You could see everyone around him cringing today when he was 'thanking' Amazon customers and employees for paying for his Very Big Adventure.

millions of average persons dedicating 2 or 3h of their 16h/day budget on negative thoughts about other people's lives

Calling bullshit on bullshit isn't dedicating hours to negative thoughts. People dislike Jeff Bezos because his company does things like putting anti-union posters on the insides of employee toilet stalls so people can't have even a moment of privacy at work.

> But I think their puerile vanity hobbies are also not bad for technological advancements. The engineers working on this are going to develop more skills and knowledge, and that will not be lost.

Maybe they made some useful advancements (any examples?), but overall this feels like saying a complicated tax code shouldn't be hated on, because it keeps accountants sharp and full of new knowledge.

I would guess that people "waste this time" because the riches gained by the greed and immorality of these obscenely rich folk is directly proportional to the misery that people experience in their daily lives from the impact of the income inequality. The Bozos of this world are the most visible targets in a cruel system that is not functional, that is destroying people and this planet.