I'm in general disagreeing with major points in the article, but it's too large topic to have a full discussion here. The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.
They don't have a PR budget, just trucks and sprayers. But they are absolutely the reason that there isn't endemic malaria in your county.
And yet, the F150 was built by capitalists, the sprayers are built with capitalists. The chemicals were built by capitalists.
so yes some problems are best solved by government, but innovation isnt one of them.
1. I've worked in gov labs, industry labs, and academic labs. Mostly industry labs. People and culture are the most important thing. The variability in innovation between companies is often WAY higher than the variability between the public and private sector. Gov labs can be insanely innovative or quagmires. Same for industry labs. It's all about the people and culture. Good people and good culture and possible in the public and private sectors. Bad people and bad culture are also possible in the public and private sectors. Anyone telling you otherwise is trolling and/or selling an idiology (sic).
2. The whole point of the above post was that there's ENORMOUS value in the "tried and true". Getting rid of endemic malaria has been possible for the better part of a century. It's a governance problem, not an innovation problem.
Please explain why winner-take-all competitive rewards are necessary for innovation.
I mean, they seem to work today in the US. But I don't see why that means they are the only possible way forward.
By spraying DDT over all the places mosquitoes live, which is now banned.
It's also a powerful bioaccumulative neurotoxin!"
What we’re saying when we say “limit their wealth” is that we should force them to lose control of the company they founded and led to success — almost entirely!
Eg, Jeff Bezos would go from ~10% of Amazon to ~0.01% if we wanted to reduce his “wealth” below a billion dollars.
Given that neither government nor Wall St seem to show greater wisdom than these business leaders with demonstrated success, I’m strongly against forcing corporate leaders to cede more power to those groups.
It seems supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company.
Personally I think affording that level of control to an individual is supremely irresponsible once a corporation has reached a size that it's failure would cause severe harm to society. Especially since the people responsible, more often than not, remain extremely well off while the rest of us get to pick up the pieces.
This is equally true of Wall St and the government, except that neither has shown they’re capable of managing the company — while the founder has.
I’m not seeing what the benefit is in removing control from someone successful to give it to people who are routinely not - eg, Wall St running Boeing into the ground, to the point their planes self-crash (737), can’t be certified because the doors blow off (777), or be manufactured to spec (787).
> supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company
Your only argument for really complicated legal structures, including having to constantly change the ownership structure, is that you don’t like people who are wildly successful can parlay that success into other efforts?
Okay — but I think that’s dumb.
Why is it a problem that Jeff Bezos can try his hand at rockets now that he’s demonstrated success at leading Amazon? — or that Elon Musk can try fixing Twitter now that helps demonstrated success at Tesla?
Those are the people who should be celebrated, not the guy who happens to own the organisation, and nudges it now and again like some tinkering monarch.
I hear this all the time and it’s a silly comparison. Some small homogenous country in Western Europe with citizens who subscribe to an empowering philosophy and share the same culture will obviously have a higher QoL.
It’s way easier to get the ship where you want it to go when most everyone is actually rowing and agrees on the direction.
Dedicating more budget and leaving more laws up to localities like States, municipalities, etc.
It should also be noted these changes would only practically be achieved with a time machine, because the social/economic/military cost of changing anything involving the foundation of the US nowadays would be apocalyptic
Also no matter how much money the government is given, it will never have enough.
It's not a large topic at all. There's a belief that there should be no upper limit to wealth accumulation for an individual. It's nonsensical in extreme cases.
In practice, even the ultra wealthy know to split the wealth over multiple individuals/companies, which provides stability and splits accountability[1]. The IRS failure to audit the wealthy is both a testament to how effective wealth hiding is (making most attempts to curtail it, futile in the short term), but how ingrained the idea of limitless capitalism is with the current US Government as anything but a net-negative.
While the poor eventually try to "eat" the rich, statistically, it's unlikely that any given wealthy individual will be the unlucky one over time. So the idea of uncapped wealth as a virtue persists.
[1] It also introduces wasteage and grifting, to a degree.
Stross anticipated your reply though,
> They can fund lobbying groups and politicians, rant about colonizing Mars, and buy midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station, but their scope for effecting real change is actually tiny on a global scale. Even Putin and Xi, who are at the state-level actor end of the scale (individually they're multi-billionaires: but they also control nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8-9 digits) have little global leverage. Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is.
Of course there are also arguments to the contrary - e.g. Apollo project was rather effective, large military operations like working during WW2 shows government can actually be quite efficient etc. That doesn't matter though, we only need to point to an example - let it be SpaceX - when a billionaire shows better results than the government.
Stross anticipated this too:
> Granting individuals enormous leverage can sometimes be socially useful. But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust). Meanwhile, billionaires can do immense damage: the Koch network has largely bankrolled climate change denial, Musk's Mars colony plan is fatally flawed, and so on.
You say "better" results than the government... but it's not obvious that a government can't make these marginal improvements... you just assert that "these words are basically wrong".
As I said, the article is very questionable - and not because billionaires couldn't use some healthy attention, just because too many statements in the article are doubtful.