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Comment by forestrywat | Hacker News Reader

This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards.

I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".

So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.

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There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to look at it is that self-control lifts people up, and the accumulation or dissipation of wealth is consequent upon self-control. Pro athletes and lottery winners who never learned to manage budgets growing up tend to run through their money quickly and end up poor again because they lack the self-control needed to maintain and accumulate wealth. Having or lacking money is a result, not a cause; changing the consequent without addressing what is antecedent to the consequent will not result in lasting change.

Ah yes the old "structural failing is actually a moral failing of the losers".

If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.

I'm not super interested in debating the specifics because I was trying to point out that people will disagree about what "better" means and prevent progress.

Thank you for so succinctly and promptly demonstrating that point, even knowing my post was an obviously simplified example for the purpose of brevity.

Ideally, it's less "redistribute billionaires' wealth" so much as "figure out what parts of the system allow some people to accumulate money orders of magnitude more than the effort they've put in, and tune them to allow anyone who works to afford a comfortable life".

As it is, money makes money, while effort alone makes barely enough to scrape by (or not even that much). There are many, many paths to fix it, and they don't need to simply move the money around. There are assumptions that deserve more consideration, and they can lead to better results.

We can do both, adding some additional upper tax brackets and clamping down on tax evasion can go hand in hand with other reforms.

It saddens me that these 2 simple things would go so far to fix so many problems. Knowing they are so far out of reach in current reality

> This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards.

Citation needed. Humans have never been richer in medicine, tech, social mobility, pick your measurement.

They've also never had stronger access to mass surveillance, had more militarized and capable police forces, dealt with a global climate catastrophe, or had more people in prison.

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