Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

Don't most of them have prepper level bunkers on large parcels of property, a private jet flight away in case things go truly south?

Velocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people.

Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.

They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.

As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.

Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.

If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.

Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.

Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.

This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.

Bill gates owns over 250,000 acres of land spread across like 15+ states, idk what to call that if not hoarding.

Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.

how are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.

Statistically speaking, I'd take the worst of any hundred government bureaucrats over any single billionaire as far as "terrible humans" go.

You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).

Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.

So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.

UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.

Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.

> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.

If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.

This is some good black mirror material here

Technically sure, in some places, for a limited period of time measured in weeks.. with many caveats.

In practice not really, and certainly not 6-18+ months after March 2020

Don't we have social media? </sarcasm>

Exactly.

Here's Orwell speaking on the whole thing:

> "An argument that Socialists ought to be prepared to meet, since it is brought up constantly both by Christian apologists and by neo-pessimists such as James Burnham, is the alleged immutability of ‘human nature’. Socialists are accused—I think without justification—of assuming that Man is perfectible, and it is then pointed out that human history is in fact one long tale of greed, robbery and oppression. Man, it is said, will always try to get the better of his neighbour, he will always hog as much property as possible for himself and his family. Man is of his nature sinful, and cannot be made virtuous by Act of Parliament. Therefore, though economic exploitation can be controlled to some extent, the classless society is for ever impossible.

> "The proper answer, it seems to me, is that this argument belongs to the Stone Age. It presupposes that material goods will always be desperately scarce. The power hunger of human beings does indeed present a serious problem, but there is no reason for thinking that the greed for mere wealth is a permanent human characteristic. We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty. But when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe. Or, again, water. In this country we are not troubled by lack of water. If anything we have too much of it, especially on Bank Holidays. As a result water hardly enters into our consciousness. Yet in dried-up countries like North Africa, what jealousies, what hatreds, what appalling crimes the lack of water can cause! So also with any other kind of goods. If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. And after all, if human nature never changes, why is it that we not only don’t practise cannibalism any longer, but don’t even want to?"

Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether.

When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play.

The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources.

The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.

We live in a world that is largely still pre-cloning and pre-surrogacy. It will take a couple generations for these new sexual strategies to propagate (for example https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire...).

I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects.

In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.