411–420 of 554 posts
There is already a dramatic amount of wealth to go around and yet it is held by fewer and fewer individuals and organizations every year. Just like there is enough food in the world to feed everybody. Our world is not optimized for distributing resources evenly. Can AI change this?
I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has mayb…
Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.
I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has mayb…
Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.
> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Rememb…
This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no long…
Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse.
Amazon software engineers are the same, they just make more money today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a level of lifestyle that allows a person to donate his personal sports car to replace an inert mass, because he'll buy another car. While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
I could afford to donate a $100k sports car to be launched into space if I really wanted to. Lots of people here could. How many billions of dollars short of being able to set off a chain of events that actually make that happen do you think I am?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor. Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes. It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back. The firefighters, schools, and…
> If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor. “Otherwise” is doing a lot of work here. The people can’t “otherwise” move there because the person isn’t selling, that’s the idea. Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out. Not taxing people so they are not…
> Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out.
That's still very much overstretching the word "force." If the government taxes a cigarette factory out of existence, are they "forcing" the workers to move if they need to do so to find another job?
> You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
I view this as a meaningless philosophical question. There are so many ways that life can be unfair. Being taxed into selling your home at a huge profit is just not a concern I care about.
> Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?
This is completely untrue. Rent is solely dependent on supply and demand. Demand is elastic, and supply is very inelastic and even more so in highly desirable cities, so it doesn't get very affected by a tax. If property taxes get passed down to tenants, Prop 13 would have passed the tax savings onto renters, which it clearly has not.
> Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
Financially, a renter would be fine if their home burns down, becomes surrounded by used needles, or has a terrible school district. The homeowner reaps the financial benefit from these services, so they should expect to pay a share.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no long…
Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals. Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse. Amazon software engineers are the same, they j…
"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, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars." He is talking about taxing unrealized gains, which is quite unfair. If the share price of a company doubles, i…
Right. As I understand it, that's part of the point (for economists, anyway): It incentivizes the allocation of scarce resources to those who value it more highly (and thus, presumably, to those who can make more productive use of it).
Now, I don't want to give the impression that I am on board with this argument, since it implicitly incentivizes the concentration of property ownership into the hands of those who will rent it out, rather than those who will use it. Landlords who are faced with a growing tax bill don't have to sell the property to realize their gains, they can just raise rents (not to mention using it as collateral for a loan to purchase more property).
In order to make the incentives align correctly for more participants, you would also have to establish a pretty robust system of rent control to keep spiraling property values from pricing existing homeowners out of the market, and incentivizing redevelopment: if you can't raise rents arbitrarily to cover your property taxes, you have to build more units to rent (but not so many that a glut of available units depresses rental income).
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"…
The estimation of 15% loss of market cap due to the 2.5% cap tax is laughable. That is effectively a reverse buyback of 2.5% every year. It would leave many companies with 0 or negative profit. Any company with P/E above 40 immediately loses money. 20 has their profit chopped in half. The values of these companies would be reduced by at least 50%.
Stock market is the way to efficiently allocate capital. If value of every company is halved it changes nothing to relative performance of them.
> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Rememb…
Horses could not be retrained to do jobs other than those replaced by machines.
Horses did not have voting power.
A large number of unemployed horses would not go on robbing and killing humans in a mob.
And decrease in human population is welcome until some point. (We have relatively more educated people having less / no children, and backward, dumb stupid people having more children, which is BAD).