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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: American Equity

#541

Post by Retric »

kgwgk wrote: post #533
Retric wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a short list of recent bank failures most of which are very much traditional banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U... Including the United States' largest savings and loan association, until its collapse in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...

You are right, I was thinking of large (systemic) failures and actually I had completely forgotten about WaMu. Clearly forbidding the banking business (as in savings and loans) would prevent bank failures. But I´m not sure the alternative businesses that would fill the void would be much better.

> would be much better

I suspect, but can't prove companies that need to demonstrate comptitence in lending to gain access to capital would be better at making loans than companies who gain capital by doing other things and then suddenly have access to a lot of capital and need to find a use for it.

Consider tech companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft have access to vast amounts of Capital yet does not really effectively use it for much.

Re: American Equity

#542

Post by pdfernhout »

eru wrote: post #511
pdfernhout wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've suggested here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-p... "For example, imagine a basic income for everyone was supported by a 6% tax on all wealth that is based on monopoly scarcity. So, this would be an annual tax on real estate equity, bank accounts, cash and gold hoards, copyrights and patents, and so on -- basically anything that requires the government to defend it as a monopoly ag…

Robin Hanson has some similar ideas. See eg http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/em-cities-by-combo-auc... and a few others. But he starts from a different angle: he's interested in economic efficiency. So he wants a system that moves economic goods into the hands of people who value it most (and compensate the previous owner fairly at market prices). He proposes a system where people declare the value of their vari…

Thanks for the pointers and insightful comments!

Re: American Equity

#543

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #315
maxerickson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem literally is that many people don't have an adequate share of the GDP. The footnote proposes to tax capital the same as labor. An interesting thing about Bill Gates is what a tiny sliver of GDP he managed to capture over almost 40 years. Something like $0.1 trillion out of several hundred trillion dollars.

Wealth is not the same thing as income, like speed is not the same thing as distance traveled. GDP is the national income.

Mostly agree, though I'd quibble (as did Simon Kuznets) that GDP is a poor metric for national income. The entire field of national income accounting is rather fraught.

Going back to Adam Smith, "Wealth is the annual produce and labour of the nation". Elsewhere he argues that "the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods". As a man not given to short sentences, I recommend paying attention when he uses them.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...

Defining, and measuring, and allocating wealth has been a bit of a conundrum for the past 240+ years. And a while before by some reports.

Re: American Equity

#544

Post by kgwgk »

Retric wrote: post #540
kgwgk wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole industry of sharia-compliant finance to work around the ban on loans. The solution for the christian dislike for money-lending back on those days was for non-christians to do it. A world where people don’t need loans might be nice, but not all the people can use your parents’ money (and depending on what you want to do and how rich is your family, even you might need additional financing).

That's more about compliance in name only than actually following the faith. Like arguments if turning on the lights counts as setting a fire.

Of course. The point is that, paraphrasing Crichton’s Jurassic Park, debt finds a way.

Re: American Equity

#545

Post by dredmorbius »

jerf wrote: post #100
throwawayjava wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea is basically UBI couched in capitalist terms. If every American gets a share of GDP, and GDP is concentrated, then that means that either 1) the share of GDP that each person gets is tiny and inconsequential (see: GOP-style tax cuts) or else 2) you need progressive taxation. Another difference, aside from wording/marketing, is that the UBI is implemented as a progressive redistribution of future wealth gene…

This would address one (but not all) of my fundamental complaints about UBI though: What do you do when due to some disaster, you must pull back your UBI payments? Consider significant war losses, for instance. In this case the answer is that GDP would go down and so would the payment. (Though maybe we can't tie it to GDP per se, since in a war situation you can't afford to see your GDP rise due to forced constructio…

The currency inflates.

If the situation lasts long enough, the standard of living falls.

Money exists to move goods around. If all the money is in one place, goods cannot move.

Money is not limited. It is an information measure of, variously, debts, or bidding rights to production. What it can bid on is limited, and how currency-denominated asset valuations change as money supply and circulation do, can also change.

But the problem in the case of a national disaster isn't that money cannot be produced. It's that those who would rely on money to address immediate needs (water, food, shelter, medical care, transport) have no bidding rights (currency, credit, grants) to transact purchases. You're balancing the interests of those outside the disaster zone (assuming there is an outside) with those in it. (Though this generally is the case.)

If the disaster is big enough, and rescue or infrastructure needs sufficiently high, those may affect national accounts and economic activity for a time, but it would take an absolutely massive shock for the impairment of raw productive capacity alone to impact the economy. Far more likely that buying power is lacking amongst a segment of the population.

And for that, money is precisely the cure.

Re: American Equity

#546

Post by dredmorbius »

gumby wrote: post #403
koolba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

> Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth "Nobody?" Other countries manage it.

Any examples offhand?

Re: American Equity

#547

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #290
koolba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

It'd be better to tax things we don't want, like pollution.

Massive inequality is among the things we really shouldn't want.

Massive rent-seeking, enclosures, network effects, and benefiting by public infrastructure and institutions, without paying back full costs, or by imposing dislocations on other economic sectors, as well.

Aviation accounts for 6% of transportation fuel use. For a small portion of passenger and minuscule fraction of cargo movement.

Re: American Equity

#548

Post by gumby »

dredmorbius wrote: post #546
gumby wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth "Nobody?" Other countries manage it.

Any examples offhand?

Well France is the most famous example, but several other European countries (e.g. Spain and Switzerland in my experience) do too, as well as some in South America.

Hmm just checked the Wikipedia and it says that Donald Trump proposed it for the US as well.

Re: American Equity

#549

Post by tptacek »

tmccrmck wrote: post #274
kolbe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I respect Sam's ambition. But there's a meaningful difference between him being a good investor in a bull market and the type of people who could really add some insight into these issues.

This was the sentiment of everyone outside of SV when Altman was considering running for governor this year. I'm glad Sam actually cares about helping people, I really do, but it reminds me so much of Obama's quote about tech entrepreneurs giving him advice: The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country…

Is there evidence somewhere that Altman was really considering a run for governor?

Re: American Equity

#550

Post by dredmorbius »

gumby wrote: post #548
dredmorbius wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples offhand?

Well France is the most famous example, but several other European countries (e.g. Spain and Switzerland in my experience) do too, as well as some in South America. Hmm just checked the Wikipedia and it says that Donald Trump proposed it for the US as well.

Thanks.
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