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Good example of Betteridge's Law. Also - inequality is a red herring. As long as the poorest people are doing better, it's irrelevant that Bill Gates is a Billionaire.
"What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good."
> Smart software... is ushering in an era of "hyper-meritocracy." > ...the cognitive requirements of working with smart software... > Online education... will only deepen inequality... Because of the premium it places on conscientiousness. some people are pure self-starters... But at the same time, I think it’s a pretty small percentage of the population. These are all excellent points. It's funny -- centuries ago, w…
> [..] your shortcomings are made so much more obvious. If you're the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations for fun, then you'll probably have a great career ahead of you. But that's just not the case for most people. This made me chortle a bit. True, there are some nerds in ghettos across the world, but I doubt they have safe shelter, food, water, and a half decen…
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I find your comment bizarre. A baker doesn't spend $X on flour unless she can make more than that from selling the bread. Companies don't pay programmers big bucks and give nice benefits unless they make a lot more off the software programmers build. Nobody is getting ripped off here.
I think the point was that you don't see many bakers bloviating on web forums about how merit-worthy they are.
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> As long as the poorest people are doing better, it's irrelevant that Bill Gates is a Billionaire. But the human psyche doesn't seem to work that way. There's a fair amount of research suggesting that we tend to measure our well-being not in absolute terms, but relative to those around us or who are otherwise on our mental radar. [ADDED:] No matter how well someone is doing, if he perceives that others "around" him…
If most people are envious of Bill Gates, does it follow that they have the right to take away his money and redistribute it?
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If most people are envious of Bill Gates, does it follow that they have the right to take away his money and redistribute it?
They have the right to tax it or inflate it away.
Eventually things tend to even out. Money wants to flow, and you can't have an economy with all money concentrated in so few hands and nobody to spend it.
pg writes about a lot of this in his essay Mind the Gap. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
"the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than linear. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on."
> Smart software... is ushering in an era of "hyper-meritocracy." > ...the cognitive requirements of working with smart software... > Online education... will only deepen inequality... Because of the premium it places on conscientiousness. some people are pure self-starters... But at the same time, I think it’s a pretty small percentage of the population. These are all excellent points. It's funny -- centuries ago, w…
I'm not sure how this really relates to merit or shortcomings or being your fault . I'm good at technology, and I make money at it, but I don't see this as a particularly great merit or the result of my hard work and prescience. I've liked and been adept with computers since I was 4 or 5; I'm "the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals" you mention. I'm no good at drawing, though, and I'm not particula…
If we imagine technology jobs dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow and drawing suddenly became a high paying career, would you invest the time and effort required to become good at drawing, or would you rest on your innate interests and watch your job opportunities fade away? That is the distinction the parent appears to be making. The tools are available to become good at just about anything you can imagine, but it requires a certain type of person to push towards that goal when the natural curiosity is not present.
I call bullshit on this. The nordic countries have a pretty great tech sector too, and they don't suffer from this. Its a policy thing, and I was always under the impression that this is a choice that the USA has made consciously, and is widely acepted as a given - that cutthroat capitalism creates greater inequality, with (maybe) bigger growth rates.