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Great read. > “We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund..” I could be in favor of something like this. However, I’d be curious to hear Sam’s thoughts on what kind of vehicle do we use to ensure that this equity actually reaches end-us…
I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare, childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much? There are definitely too many over-educated people out there already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up disappointment than the bots.
If anybody is interested in reading more about Henry George and a land-value tax, Radical Markets[1] has an in-depth chapter on it. [1]: http://radicalmarkets.com
Bad medical or legal advice is completely possible. It exists now.
Giving good medical or legal advice requires, at a minimum, being able to carry out a full conversation to investigate the problem, including understanding things not directly related to the field. There's no sign of getting that any time soon.
Efficiency improvements in an area like the law may also result in people imposing new burdens, eroding the efficiency gains. Laws that once would have seemed too burdensome will no longer be seen as such.
Imagine: 1) I'm the owner of a single family home 2) My income drops to roughly zero because of AI 3) My property values go through the roof 4) I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year, to be paid from my non-existent income Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted" shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal…
Even without the hypothetical AI effect on income, this is a proposal which will tax you 100% of the value of your property over a 40 year period whilst over the same period YC's LPs and founders will have paid just 2.5% of the [much higher] value of their companies. Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or their investors too heavily, b…
If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it. Property tax and land tax are very different things with very different effects.
There are some really smart ideas in here, and some really smart assessments of existing policies. The thing I was most taken aback by was Sam's suggestion to tax privately held land, and capital (as opposed to labor tax). I would love to have Sam and PG go toe to toe and discuss how Sam's proposal is different from the wealth tax post PG made. I don't immediately see how Sam's idea avoids the "wealth tax compounds"…
That's exactly the "problem" with wealth (from the perspective of society's growing wealth inequality). Wealth compounds much, much faster than income grows. Someone who inherits $3 million (not much from the point of view of the wealthy) can live comfortably on the growth alone while still compounding their wealth further every year.
The only way a wealth tax would compound faster than the wealth itself is if it is larger than the growth rate of the wealth. And since that's averaged at ~8-10% over the past few decades, a 1% tax is not going to eat into a person's wealth over time. It's simply going to slightly slow that growth down.
Great read. > “We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund..” I could be in favor of something like this. However, I’d be curious to hear Sam’s thoughts on what kind of vehicle do we use to ensure that this equity actually reaches end-us…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that people buy today is specifically intended to impel more buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets what they need" society. Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10 thousand cubic meters of material every day, we realistically would have universal material abundance. Even if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two dedicated to making more would result in runaway exponential growth that would speed up m…
I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal poverty line in the US. I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And…
I’ve been watching videos about tribes in Papa New Guniea and it makes you realize you don’t need very much for clothes or shelter. Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.
I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare, childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much? There are definitely too many over-educated people out there already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up disappointment than the bots.
Phrasing things as an optimization problem can result in better, more efficient arrangements than how things are presently, but only within the limits that people are willing to accept. It also depends what we're optimizing for - if we naively set it for "maximum number of humans fed and cared for", we really are all going to be eating bugs and living in pods.
We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.