I can't defend billionaires proposing having their employees wear shock collars, but I still think the article is unfair in 2 important ways. 1) The capitalism

I can't defend billionaires proposing having their employees wear shock collars, but I still think the article is unfair in 2 important ways. 1) The capitalism he decries is making the poorest people in the world much, much better off. Here's life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-globally-since-1770 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-globally-..., but if that doesn't appeal to you there are lots of other L-shaped charts showing good things happening in poor places in the last 50 years. There's an argument that middle class people in wealthy places are worse off today over the last 50 years, but there is not a credible argument that poor people are. 2) I completely understand the discomfort of being around billionaires speculating about how to save themselves when everything goes to hell, but it doesn't mean they want or expect things to go to hell. Investors are trained to think about the effects of plausible worst case scenarios, separately from considering probabilities. If you have a billion dollars it may be worth spending a million dollars preparing for societal collapse, even if that's a very unlikely outcome. The sad fact is that societal collapse is normal in human history- most currency that's ever existed has become worthless, most governments that have formed no longer exist. Rich countries since 1950 are an exception to this rule, but accepting that it's possible they will collapse doesn't mean it's any more likely now than it was 50 years ago. I think a billionaire spending some time thinking about how he would handle societal collapse is reasonable, even though focusing only on their individual survival rather than how they could help society is not especially admirable.