Billionaires Build

> Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves.

Ideally, but in reality public education is not an equalizer like that. Wealthy parents give their students advantages that school can't provide in our society: e.g. upper class culture and habits, resources for extra education, connections, etc.

Even the institutional bits aren't equal: local property tax based funding mechanisms mean richer people live in better-resourced school districts than poorer people, with better educational opportunities.

How do you measure the value lost by the jobs of stablehands, cobblers, milkmen, and movie projectionists?

Well, maybe you could have an extremely large group of people independently allocate that capital to firms who they believe could provide them with utility immediately, rather than having it inflate the cost of capital?

Thank you for saying this. As a high-schooler from a lower middle-class family in Greece, I feel this pain every single day. It's therapeutic to see it is not as personal as it feels.

I know my generation has free access to almost all of human knowledge online, I know hard work and study can pull me out of this hell. I start every day hoping to do just that, but my accomplishments remain depressingly few regardless. Honestly, it's even getting worse over time, I was a far brighter and gifted kid once. I live in fear of how much smarter some of my peers are getting and I can't catch up.

It's like, every time I try to escape this mess, I fall back to a predetermined state of idleness. Most of the blame is on me; I was actually given some good opportunities to better myself by teachers who cared, I was a step away from scholarships at private schools and studying abroad etc. and I blew it all away. I never worked hard enough. Some of my failures may just boil down to luck.

Still, it is sad to think (with hindsight) how much different everything could've been, if my starting conditions were just a bit better. If I had been given a nudge in the right direction at challenging moments, instead of having to rely on self-study and self-help. If my parents had made me play an instrument, learn math earlier, read more books or make friends. God, it would've been so much better had I known somebody who had already done the things I wanted to do.

Breaking out of the loop is very, very hard without help. It is like the Münchhausen Trilemma. Anyway, I hope this comment is not inappropriate for HN, I just have nowhere else to vent. Sorry.

no.

A better first-order approximation to reality, is "Billionaires Exploit".

A second order approximation is that Billionaires exploit a) the political system by funding politicians indirectly so they will implement policies that enhance profits, b) poor employees by paying them a wage they cannot live on without government subsidies while keeping them in precarious arrangements to avoid union benefits and c) natural resources by avoiding costs which should be inherent [ eg. defer cost of redressing carbon pollution and recycling ].

Paul meets the best kind of proto-billionaire - innovators who aspire to _make_ something useful, or at least something that people want - and perhaps doesn't get to interview the appalling idle-rich dynasty billionaires who inherit obscene wealth, and cannot spend money faster than it grows.

We should not be congratulating Gates on investing money in Vaccines - we should have taxed him properly and used that money to fund vaccines/healthcare and climate initiatives. Then perhaps the 15 copies of windows 'tax' - which I paid for but never used because I installed linux - would be distributed democratically.

Look around.. what part of the world is not on fire ? Startups are not the solution to our current evils. I would suggest that we have abandoned the fair rules that governed our economy, and our democracies, weakening our systems and institutions - and this has put us in peril.

Covid is merely a kick-the-tyres test before the real game of climate change, and we have failed that test. The pandemic has exposed dire systemic weaknesses. If one 9/11 per day of aunties dying is not enough to wake us up, will the permanent melting of the ice caps even be noticed ?

Printing digital cash to prop up stock prices is a great way to get us through a pandemic induced economic shock, but we need to learn from this quickly, and rebuild our institutions - a free market works only if people can trust that the rules of the market are fair. We must rapidly align the engine of enterprise to our global survival : tax the uber-rich brutally, spend it wisely in the war on climate change.