1,300 karma · joined April 19, 2020
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon
You are living in fantasy land my guy. Put down the FoxNews and learn actual statistics before posting
Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.
Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.
Remember, the top 1% of households have $12M+ in assets. That's over a million households for whom work is somewhat or completely optional for them and their children. They can live a good quality life off capital returns without any hardship.
This logic still holds down the wealth gradient. Households at the 95th percentile still have to work, but the need is more flexible. The buffer of need could be years long.
So you have millions of people who genuinely don't need to worry about getting paid that much.
Unfortunately many countries like the US are very under-developed, and have trained it's citizenry to approach education as job training. This is obviously an abject failure, and probably a contribution to our anemically slow and pathetic growth rate.
For the upper crust of our society, work is entirely optional. Presumably people therefore continue to work for the process or the reward of the doing.
The point is that we can do it if we want to.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
It’s not wishful thinking it’s just a fact. Zoning exists because landowners want it. As soon as they don’t want it, it’s gone.
The tech industry has spent the last 20 years (and really in earnest the last 15, accelerating over time) making their tech as addictive as possible.
Current tech is egregiously addictive. It’s worse than most drugs.
The big tech companies are now the most successful drug dealers in history.
Purely an accounting artifact. We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Net worth is real money, and is usually a very accurate measure of what people can realize. There are a few outliers who own so much that they’d move the market if they sold it all. Selling 2% to cover taxes? Not going to move the market very much.
You don’t seem to understand how it works or what it does.
Simple as that
Unfortunately these things are never so clean as in the theoretical model. As a monopoly, there are likely many situations where interaction with said monopoly is unavoidable.
Something being useful doesn’t mean people like it. Burning Coal is useful. Anybody who’s read anything about coal as a power source doesn’t like it.
Like coal, AI has a bunch of problems that collectively make it undesirable as a technology
As we dismantle those components via xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, funding cuts, and so on, trends will change. Already I see a substantial uptick in my PhD/Academic friends moving to Europe as we cede our historic advantages.
If, in say 15 years, China provides better schools, or better economic returns, or (perhaps unlikely) better independence, or all 3, then scientists will go there.
By this logic, there’s no point in wondering if you are sentient, because your brain runs on the same biological substrate as a fruit fly.
Not a convincing argument
Now an even better outcome would be that rich people didn't get rich in the first place. This would mean lower inequality, which in the data correlates with higher growth. This is demonstrated convincingly in Piketty's work.
Overall, if youw ant to maximize growth for the poor (or really, growth for all of society at an equal pace, say), then you would want to dramatically raise taxes on rich people and eliminate the class entirely (IE, no more rich people). That would massively stimulate growth and of course skyrocket the wealth of currently poor people.
It's a bit sad that the solution is so simple and has no downsides.
Yes, though it requires some intelligent accounting. For instance, the ability for tax payers to defer certain obligations. However, the principle of "all income should be treated equal" is a necessary prerequisite to having a fair society. As it currently stands, the richest people don't pay much tax at all. Effective taxes on the billionaire class are like 8%-24%, less to way way less than the median tax payer.
IMO it's helpful to think this through to the post-wealth-tax equilibrium. In such a world, financial services will adapt and develop mechanisms for handling these seemingly tricky tax situations. IMO focusing on the minutia of how this is going to work is not useful in evaluating the macro effects of the policy.
Yes it matters very significantly. Rising income/wealth inequality causes all sorts of social problems. It's corrosive to society. This has been studied pretty significantly. The kicker is that it even slows economic growth! So all the classic libertarian arguments about incentives to work and marginal utility of labor turn out to just.. not be supported by the data at all.
Which means there are no good reasons to promote income inequality whatsoever (that are supported by data). It persists purely for cultural reasons and presumably very effective propaganda.