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> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
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I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense). I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.
No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagin…
Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades.
There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
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Even if everything you just said was true, it completely misses the point and is irrelevant to my comment.
Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
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Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Either way it got me curious and I started reading your other comments and I realized you're just not a very nice person and highly mistaken about a lot of things. You're not very logical or scientific or academically inclined. So I just wanted to help you out and teach you some stuff that's all.
Just responded to a couple comments you made. Just trying to be informative. :)
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>There's nothing wrong with income inequality. People are just envious. It isn't envy some feel when they can't afford medical care for themselves and those they care about. This applies to a lot of things in additional to medical care. If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive…
When people say “inequality isn’t a problem” they mean it isn’t a problem on its own, assuming living standards are decent for most. Even Friedman and Hayek were for UBI and safety nets respectively. Healthcare, housing and education are too expensive today, even the extreme libertarians don’t deny this.
>If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive for a stable democracy.
This is unfounded. The influence of the wealthy on politics is insignificant relative to public opinion. David Shor has demonstrated that big donors are to the economic left of their party bases for both R and D. Trump and Bloomberg presidential campaigns are vivid illustrations of the limits of money in politics.
They’re forcing Musk to go through a deal he signed but doesn’t want now. Billionaires parted with half of their net worths in their divorce settlements. Neither of these would have happened in any other society in the world at any point in history.(My relatives from Asia were baffled, they asked me why these guys don’t simply bribe the judges, find legal loopholes or even use the threat of force to silence their (ex)wives.)
The wealthy in America today inherited their wealth to a lesser extent than in Europe, and again also relative to the wealthy in any society in history.
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There are proven instances where systems such as this can remain stable. Slavery is one. There are tons and tons of other systems throughout human history where massive inequality remains stable. In fact inequality is the bedrock of civilization according to our current theories of anthropology. How do self interested parties gather together to fund great infrastructure projects and technology required for the progre…
Isn't a representative government the opposite? When a large number of people work together to decide to funs or accomplish some goal, voting and taxes
The point of government IS centralization. The US government is sort of an attempt at centralization with checks and balances. An attempt to make sure that the centralization doesn't become too powerful. A movement towards the extreme but not all the way.
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Because inequality beyond a certain excess makes a system unstable, and given the chance, even wealthy people would rather be wealthy in a stable world than an unstable world. There is not only one power distribution, there is a whole set of them.
I don't think it's stark. That's how the entertainment business naturally works. Footballers, youtubers, actors, etc... Onlyfans has a very low barrier to entry and being better than a 100 other people isn't all that hard, assuming you have the body for it and the marketing chops. I don't understand why you'd want a company doing the government's job, that's what taxes are for.
Most of us feel it. It's real. Don't let anyone gaslight you. You aren't sick: our culture is sick. (For those alone and struggling). Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone…
I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence. It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.