Interview with Paul Graham

India. India is a big country and deaths are going up there.

The US and Europe seem past it to me.

I think your point is less about wealth creation, and more about access to capital and how that influences who can fund what work. It's a subtle distinction, but I think an important one - and yes you're right access to capital and how capital is allocated is zero sum and this influences what work is done.

I don't think this is entirely a bad thing though because in a society with an effective market what makes money should be related to what people want. The incentive alignment that comes from this (and capitalism generally) has allowed the largest creation of wealth in human history (of which everyone benefits when you look at things like infant mortality, public health generally, standard of living, etc.).

This doesn't mean there aren't places to improve in terms of equality of opportunity for access to capital or that there shouldn't be rules to prevent incentives that can lead to outcomes worse for individuals and the group (see the fish farming story in this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), but it also doesn't mean that the wealth tax or dis-incentivizing wealth creation is a good idea. Venture Capital is important here because it gives access to money to people and ideas that would have a hard time getting it otherwise (on bets that only occasionally pay off huge).

We want people to be incentivized to take risks and start companies that can create massive amounts of wealth and entire new industries. If you have a wealth tax, someone making a couple million a year as an investment banker will be less likely to leave and risk that money to create something since they'll probably get to the cap without doing that anyway.

Starting a company is already a pretty hard/risky decision to make, we don't want to make it harder.

> How many talented engineers work at Rolls Royce to create £250,000 cars which would be better put to use elsewhere? How many software engineers work at startups funded as a moonshot for the wealth of the founders work on CRUD apps where they could be working on something like scientific or educational tech? How much chemical engineering talent do we sink into cosmetics?

The way to fix this is with incentives that encourage people to go into areas society thinks are more worthwhile, but I think you're too dismissive of things like CRUD apps. Those things provide enormous value for the companies that need them (I think even cosmetics research has led to new medical knowledge).

That said, I agree with the spirit of your questions - I wish humanity was better at coordinating. There's so much we could do if we were better at coordinating. I think capitalism and incentivizing for wealth creation (with controls for human rights/environment) is the best we've got to make the most progress the fastest. It aligns human nature and rewards people that make things that people value.

There's a risk of a corrupting influence on liberal democracy that needs to be controlled (https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...), but I think this is best structure for society to efficiently allocate resources/capital in a way that encourages the most wealth creation and growth.

Does this mean you end up with things like Las Vegas where human investment would be better off elsewhere? Yes, but I think that's an acceptable trade-off for everything else you get (and people like Las Vegas).

Attempts to remove the capitalist incentive structure and dictate what's important for people to do (or worse control how money is allocated to people) seems to lead to massive corruption and people doing what's necessary to get the money (which is often unrelated to actual success).

As far as Academi - I'm not arguing for unregulated, no-government, capitalism. Companies should provide value within society and society should enact legislation via elected representatives in some form of liberal democracy (and companies should operate within those laws). I may not agree with every action that happens here, but nobody will - and that's why we have liberal democracy to sort it out.

I want that too, but it's unrelated to a wealth tax or the existence of billionaires. I'd argue the wealth tax dis-incentivizes growth and makes it less likely your neighbor could have enough to eat and a warm house. We can and should improve the lower bound of society, but you don't do this by taxing wealth and dis-incentivizing growth.

> 2. If wealth that is generated is taxed, this means that it is harder to accumulate wealth, this means that the people that do manage to accumulate wealth have better qualities than the people that do so in a tax free environment. And thus they make better decisions about how to allocate their money.

I don't think this follows. Maybe it's harder so only the nastiest people attempt to do it and fight more with each other since their wealth decays over time? I don't have strong opinions on this, it's just not very compelling.

> 3. Billionaires are not accountable to anyone for how they spend their wealth. This is fine if they are all like Musk. But they are not. Of the countless number, only two are trying to build rockets to Mars. Counter examples are Osama Bin Laden and the guys who funded the NRA. If the wealth is taxed then it is fought over in a shared space in which we all have a say, no matter how small.

Yeah - on this we agree, there should be restrictions (there actually are some on political contributions and obviously things that are illegal/sanctioned). Limits on how wealth translates into political power should exist and probably need to be better. This is a different issue than a wealth tax and dis-incentivizing growth.