Surprising that needed proving
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You are correct, if it wasn’t Gates it would have been somebody else. And this article would be about that person.
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I suspect Piketty’s rule is not limited to late stage capitalism. I think we see this pattern across all of history. (And fiction. “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”)
In fact, I suspect that in any human economy, you can only pile money so high before the integrity of that money pile will collapse. Call it the ‘angle of repose’ for finance.
For individual wealthy people, the problem becomes how do they minimize their exposure to entropy and to envious peasants. For the larger society, it becomes how much of the economy can go into safeguarding these fortunes, before there is no real economic progress at all. By many accounts, we passed that threshold in the mid-seventies.
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The best system we have had for that so far has been social democracy. The system we have right now is failing miserably at this, but that isn’t what it is there for.
I am not motivated by envy. I have no desire to be a billionaire, and if I had that kind of money most of it would go into libertarian-socialist organisations and starting workers co-operatives, with no expectation of getting that money back even if the businesses are a success.
For a lot of people the problem isn’t that there are some people who are extremely wealthy, it’s that the working classes are struggling to make ends meet while the wealthy are making increasingly more money. We are seeing similarities between feudalism and the current form of capitalism (one of the major differences is that under feudalism, the ruling classes had a duty of care towards the serfs).
I’d like to see fewer billionaires and more Mondragon style businesses.
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The problem is that it “gamifies” goals as well as behaviors. The “winners” get to decide what making your life great even means. Success at anything depends upon what your actual goals are. How does anybody else know what I think is great? How long I should live? Or what I should do while I am here?
People are not even playing the same game, so “worth” is a meaningless metric. If I am training to master Pac Man, what do I care if you are a champ at Call of Duty? That’s nice, good for you, but it doesn’t help me, interest me, or get you into my tournaments. I don’t need to start playing CoD because Branson or Musk think it’s cool. That would effectively derail my life, my investment of time and effort, and subvert my goals. And they are not “better” than me or anybody else who is not competing in their preferred niche. That’s the underlying problem with “class” - you aren’t actually competing against or meaningfully compared with those who are playing a different game than you are. It’s like a baseball team playing against a football team. Neither are really winning fabulous wealth because it is a meaningless contest.
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By which time, they will all be extremely wealthy, superbly-educated, well-established, well-connected adults. I think they’re doing okay already. Only inheriting ‘a few million’ on top of that isn’t going to stop them having an enormous advantage over pretty much everyone else.
Oh, libertartian-socialist.
I thought you were going to build us all island-cities!
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Try looking at libertarian-socialism. Back in the 19th century this was one of the things that was suggested when someone asked what the workers would do with their free time.
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Exactly. There is almost no difference in privilege between having or inheriting a few million, vs. multiple billions. Except perhaps for the political power it can buy. Even then, at some point it really is just hoarding.
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Dunno, the Internet was a military research project, the WWW has it’s root as a information management system in a public research institution. The connection to Gates, his money and the OS he sold is not that obvious for me.
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We have entered the evidence free zone.
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Hard to believe, but there was a time that computers existed and nobody wanted one.
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Are we actually debating the impact of Bill Gates on the personal computer and it’s acceptance into everyday life? I don’t think I’m going to fit in here.
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Let’s quote you again:
So I thought you were discussing the impact that an economic system had, rather than the impact a person had.
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Uh, who made you Decider of the Point? I’m pretty sure I get to decide myself what the “point” is…
(Also, I’m not sure “the advancements” benefit people quite as much as you say.)
Envy is the driving force of capitalism. Without envy, capitalism would not work at all. Capitalism does not work as well as expected, because people are not primarily driven by envy.
Despite this, defenders of capitalism are constantly writing scathing denunciations of envy. it makes no sense.
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To shamelessly steal from Steve Hughes, if it were me, I’d be, ‘Good! What the fuck d’you think I was going to spend it on?!’
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To shamelessly steal from Gary Kildall… oh, no wait, that was Bill Gates.
Too true!
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Windows ME. Never forgive, never forget.
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Well, but it wouldn’t, necessarily - it could very easily have been a whole bunch of other people, i.e. not one guy with 90 billion dollars. There certainly didn’t need to be one guy sitting on a pile of money/skulls for the wealth of an industry to exist.
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Maybe you’re not, but that’s not the reason.
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[quote=“anon50609448, post:43, topic:83939”]
it does seem like letting people make their own decisions about employment, housing, spending, etc. makes a better society than dictating those decisions centrally by an aristocracy but we have a pretty good understanding now of how unfettered individual decision making concentrates wealth and therefore power, so and we need to have rules in place to make sure that doesn’t happen or capitalism basically self destructs into a new aristocracy.[/quote]
Now you are totally channeling Adam Smith. This was pretty much his whole thesis, that a well regulated capitalism outperforms all other systems for resource distribution and allocation, so we should use it wisely, with rules that specifically harness it to achieve non-capitalist goals that are important to humanity.
Humbabella for President!
Don’t worry, elites self-destruct. It’s messy and you don’t want to be standing too close, but it’s inevitable.
That hasn’t happened in my lifetime, or my father’s lifetime, or in the lifetime of any KinderFodder…
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