Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.
Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as ear…
These are all valid questions whose answers are necessary, but ultimately they are solved problems for which we often can just copy the solution from previous iterations. Somebody just needs to do it and I don’t see why these persons should get far far more than the lions share. Let them get remunerated and also substantially, but not the most.
The vast majority of entrepreneurs does not deserve renumerations of such high proportions, they just get them because they can. Past accumulation, capital structures, capital dependency, path dependencies - which ultimately are all just positions of power - allow the entrepreneur class to squeeze out such high returns.
But they’re not even the root of the problem, because they are squeezed out by the financial class who has the privilege of squeezing others out by virtue of having squeezed out others before.
We have these systems of hierarchical exploitation and accumulation for thousands of years, but saw only real improvement with technological innovation.