Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe – John Naughton

The ironic thing of course is that you can tell everything you need to know about the readers of a paper from the brands that advertise in it, and the readers of the Graun are second only to the FT in their opulence. They are the 1%.

Yes, let's do that! Here's a wake up call: I don't have access to any ingredients that everyone else doesn't also have access to!

Because it's not the ingredients. It's how I see them and what I do with them. You choose to cry all day long about scarcity and injustice. I choose to rejoice in the abundance and the unlimited opportunities given to me.

This is what makes me wealthy and you poor. Not the government. Not the political system. Not any form of justice or lack thereof. There is ULTIMATE justice in this world, ALWAYS. It is just as it should be.

Cuba's doing pretty well, except for the fact that the USA has put an embargo on them (due to political reasons), making it extremely hard for them to trade with anyone, and massively driving down the value of their currency.

>The more Washington tries to legislate us out of this mess, the deeper we descend into inequality. As one example: regulatory concerns are keeping the brightest, most innovative, and most honest among us out of the fintech sector, and so now I see mostly dishonest or reckless players. If there's ever a sector that needed disrupting, it's consumer banking, but the banks have erected so many regulatory barriers, that small players can't get in.

I have to disagree. "Financial technology" does not need to be "disrupted". It needs to be boring. Finance is supposed to be boring, because all the real action is happening elsewhere and its only job is to channel money from savers to borrowers. Consumer banking is a point-A-to-point-B delivery service with some risk attached (the risk of a loan not being repaid). It's as boringly statistical and actuarial as insurance (to which it is rightfully closely related).

I mean, frankly, the USA consumer banking sector just doesn't need more cryptography-fueled gold-standard imitations, nor more ever-so-clever statistical models for mutual funds that blow up and die when their basic assumptions are violated by that chaotic monster of chaos known as "Reality", nor more ways for a banker to write a loan he knows won't be repaid and then escape the responsibility of eating his own damn losses when the borrowers can't repay. What it needs is to finally catch up with the rest of the world and let people send money via online banking, and receive their paychecks each month via direct deposit without two weeks' delay, and to not charge so many damned ATM and debit-card fees.

I can easily think of a list of sectors that really do need disruption. And here they are:

1) Housing and energy. We can (re-)nationalize education and health-care like a sensible country, but out of Elizabeth Warren's Four Big Expenses that are beating up on the average family, that still leaves housing and energy in severe need of disruption. Passive houses, solar panels, electric cars, selling my excess energy back to the grid, micro-houses, high-quality urban housing: I, as a prospective customer, want more of all of these, and yet few to no "disrupters" are trying to provide me with that for which I might part with my money!

2) Public transit. Yes, this one would often be a public service, but I've heard good arguments in favor of the way Japanese train companies combine real-estate development arms with train arms to build whole neighborhoods around the public-transit network. Implementing that would be a double whammy. Or work on self-driving cars and buses. Or invent new ways to get through watery or mountainous terrain for transit purposes, to go where cars can't.

3) Food. The food system is appallingly wasteful and damaging while also delivering an inferior product. Why, in the largest single breadbasket nation in the entire world, is a tomato so damned expensive and yet so flavorless? Not an organic, artisanal, locally-grown tomato specially treated by elves for the most wonderfully tomato-y taste you'll ever get, just a regular tomato grown with all the pesticides and artificial fertilizers Monsanto can provide, then ripened artificially with ethylene gas and shipped in cold storage. Where are my super-techno-greenhouses and hydroponic farms that can provide fresh, tasty crops throughout the year and the continent? Where is my lab-grown meat, with an order of magnitude improvement in the energy-and-ingredient efficiency of turning plant matter into deliciousness?

4) Prosthetics and other curative medical technologies. Holy crap, it is actually difficult to conceptualize the amount of productivity lost each year to disability! A half-decent economic system should know, in the bones of its accounting procedures, that every disease left uncured is free money left on the table, productivity left unmobilized.

And so on and so forth.

Want to disrupt something? Just look around with your eyes open and find a sector that seems to run the way it does for no reason greater than historical accident. You'll find dozens of them, the world is full of stuff like that. Where there's no rational reason for the sector to be the way it is, there's little to stop you from disrupting it, using greater efficiency to deliver higher quality to the consumers and higher wages to the workers. Go for it!

Or at least make me a decent video game. Or better yet, an ebook that's comfortable for full-color textbooks and reference works, so I don't have to purchase and store tens of kilograms of heavy dead trees just to hold things I want to know.

But please don't come complaining about how "disruptive" bankers are just trying to do God's work by merging consumer banking with investment banking, until the Big Bad Government came in and regulated them all to death. Because what it looks like to me, is that too many people just want to get their VC cash for making "an app", whereas most of the big inventions and innovations we need require some form of actual, physical-and-biological engineering expertise.

But it seems totally uncontroversial and obvious to me that some people will generate vastly more wealth than others. Like think back to your class in high school. Some people were intelligent and industrious and went on to have creative jobs. Some people did just enough to get passing grades and went on to have repetitive, non-creative jobs. Extrapolate this differential in productivity over their entire working lives, what would you expect to happen? You cannot easily identify who created any given piece of wealth, but you can conduct thought experiments like the above that tell you something about the wealth generating process. Of course, the nice thing is, all of society gets the benefit of improved technology and scientific knowledge, regardless of how much they contributed in that direction.