411–420 of 660 posts
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Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your earnings aren't extracted at a cost to someone else.
TIL, exploitive labor practices are not a cost to someone else.
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Not to be snarky, but how could there be empirical evidence for anything that hasn't been done before?
That's true. Although when embarking on a brand new frontier without any empirical evidence available, one would assume there's ample theoretical evidence to make up for it. In this case both appear to be lacking.
However when the power is held by people who would potentially face significant financial loss from either theoretical or empirical evidence, it shouldn't be a surprise that such evidence is lacking, no?
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Society has collectively voted that Amazon massively improves their lives. If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart and hosting their software on HP enterprise servers in a musty office basement. That's all the clear and evident result of the market system which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic votes ris…
The meme that the market system is democratic is strange to me. It's not a dictatorship, but it's odd to claim that something is democratic when I (as a moderately well off American) have as many votes as ten less well-off people in my own country. More, if you adjust for the number of votes each person need to use to not die. The difference grows further when you consider that there are people with well over 1,000x…
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Come on. You make it sound as if Amazon started a campaign to directly shut these in-person businesses down. The reality however is more mundane and exactly what parent comment mentioned: people voted with their feet and dollars, the in-person businesses that did shut down could not adapt and we are all the better for it.
Some people aren't better off for it, like the people who are being overworked at Amazon.
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Whatever you think of 1907, the US went from a highly unequal society (an entire sector of citizens not even owning themselves) followed by being a failed state after an an insane civil war that decimated the population... To world power with a much MORE equal society, in five decades with no centralized financial institution
> To world power with a much MORE equal society, This statement relies heavily on how one might want to measure an equal society.
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Bezos' AWS made cloud computing viable, leading to the last two decades of economic growth without per capita energy consumption (due to datacenter energy efficiency). Bezos' Amazon lowers the cost and availability of goods of all kinds drastically, enriching everyone (and especially the poorer among us). The State makes bombs and drops bombs, not Bezos. Bezos deploys capital in ways which have proved to fill market…
AWS would not be possible without the contribution of hundreds of thousands of people and projects from the inception of the internet. It really is just a software on some redundant servers running open source software... it's not that incredible.
He used money he hoarded from another venture to allow the thousands of engineers to build it. Anyone can do that.
And I'm 100% sure Bezos was not the one that came up with the idea either. He just benefited from being in a position of power with tons of capital at the right time.
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> Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined? The answer might be "they should be able to" But are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not benefi…
Why would it be better to have fewer entities allocating large chunks of capital?
In a hypothetical country, if there's 1B dollars and no limit, one person could own the 1B and everyone else in the country be dirt poor.
If there is a 1M limit, then one person could own 1M tops, and the rest of the money is still there.
Therefore there would be more entities capable of allocating large sources of money.
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I agree that no human organization will always make the best decisions. That's why I'm advocating for a larger number of human organizations making decisions independently (as much as is possible in the world today). I was also being somewhat soft in my language, so let me amend it to, sometimes the government makes bad choices and fails to invest in crucial areas. Are you advocating for more organizations created as…
It's not just government that fails and makes bad choices. So I'm not interested in questions that frame the distinction as being between private decision making and public decision making. We have agree that no human organization will always make the best decisions, so the question is how do we try to improve the chances? There was a lot of interest in this in the 1960s, but it fell away as neoliberalism triumphed,…
You can even look at space exploration as an example since when we talk about rich people everyone thinks of Elon now. There are so many space companies started with private investment. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Armadillo Aerospace, Rocket lab, Polaris, a planetary resources, and more that I've never heard of. That's way more than 2 or 3.
I think humanity is at its best when it can organize into small groups working on big things that can be made available and/or useful to everyone else and that's just really hard to do without money. I don't want to spend my time allocating capital. Randomly assigning the job to as many of those interested in doing so as possible seems like the best solution, with augmentation from the government of course.
Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and never have to earn another cent. I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker o…
Any solutions that are in conflict with human nature will never be successful. Ambition and envy are basic human traits. At a deeper level, we are beings that measure everything (including light, sound, smell, touch and taste) by way of comparison. Communism fails because no one has anything left to aspire to and everyone is therefore equally miserable.
So are compassion and generosity. And contradiction.
The role of systems in society should be to oil the pathways for the better parts of human nature to come forth, and make the other traits less convenient.
How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions that devalue wages & salaries while inflating asset prices? QE & LIRP have literally been “rich get richer, poor get poorer: the policy”. People educated enough in finance to follow the effect tend to be in the asset-holding camp so there is less complaint. I’m not advocating high rates as good for the poor; I’m championing shaping the…
The most frustrating part of economic arguments, right there. There is an official policy that prices will go up exponentially, controlled by a tiny committee who implements the policy by, effectively, money printing. The official justification is a just-so story with no compelling evidence that I've ever seen. We seem to have gotten there because politicians don't like sound management any more than anyone else and…
Any excuse is good to raise the price if some people really need your product and it doesn't jeopardise your demand enough. (This is called demand inelasticity.)
No price fall is needed or done when the excuse goes away.
If you control supply side sufficiently, you can also use that to further raise prices and keep them high. Thus equilibrium economics efficiency arguments fail.
Housing has limited but highly inelastic demand. So does food, water, healthcare, energy, fuel. Some of these cannot be substituted easily either.
And the smarter capitalist to get maximum profit will do anything to make this demand yet more inelastic by reducing choices, especially away from their control. Be it by monopoly, cartel, tacit cartel, hostile takeovers, PR to bury options, government intervention, over or underregulation...
Assets are liabilities unless they're directly in demand or are actively capital (as in used to make things). For example, having houses nobody can buy that will disintegrate is a liability. It's even clearer with office buildings which are a bit more elastic in demand. Unless you control most housing and can thus enhance relative demand, of course...
The justifications for current capitalism are very vacuous based on willing misinterpretation of it. Even ignoring the whole monetarist view which is a second order misinterpretation.