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> "You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startup

> "You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups... Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups" I feel the opposite. What keeps many people from starting startups is financial risk (the prior probaility of success is quite low!). Increasing the safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause more people to take the risk. > "For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process." How does this not contradict his earlier point about driven people no longer wanting to start startups if they can't get rich doing it? > "One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you make what you measure." I'm completely behind this statement. Attacking wealth inequality by, say, robbing the rich, is not the right approach. But I think he's mixing up what people mean when they say they don't like inequality and what they actually want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we all go back to being hunter/gatherers. > "I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries that don't choose something worse. " This is a huge statement. I'm happy to see PG has iterated over every possible economic system under every possible level of technology and come to this axiom though; this will save the economists of 2532 a lot of effort they might have spent running this simulation :) > "The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley has been happening for thousands of years... You do not want to design your society in a way that's incompatible with this curve" What acceleration? Uber and Instagram are hardly quantum leaps from what we had > 10 years ago. The iPhone I have in my pocket today is functionally not all that different from the one 5 years ago. What's even worse is that it's questionable as to whether or not the things churning out of the valley are even good at all. No one is betting a curve: the curve is in his imagination. Change feels linear lately. Also, where is the talk about externalities?

closeparen 7y ago
> But I think he's mixing up what people mean when they say they don't like inequality and what they actually want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we all go back to being hunter/gatherers. The top comment on this thread, which predates your comment by an hour, is saying essentially that. Doesn't matter what the absolute wealth level is, only that the variance is small. The thesis of PG's article is that it's important to be precise about what we mean, because many are talking about the "robbing the rich" meaning, and the way it ought to be treated is really different. I'd say the recent shift in terminology from poverty to inequality, and in measurement from "% below an objective threshold" to "ratio between quantiles," is happening explicitly to accommodate the meaning you're disclaiming here. >Increasing the safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause more people to take the risk. Sure, but the operative thing here is increasing the safety net, which you could do without substantially closing the gap between rich and poor. In fact a stronger safety net might lead to more entrepreneurship and thus more founders getting rich, making the inequality stats worse. EDIT: clarity about top comment.

closeparen 7y ago

> But I think he's mixing up what people mean when they say they don't like inequality and what they actually want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we all go back to being hunter/gatherers. The top comment on this thread, which predates your comment by an hour, is saying essentially that. Doesn't matter what the absolute wealth level is, only that the variance is small. The thesis of PG's article is that it's important to be precise about what we mean, because many are talking about the "robbing the rich" meaning, and the way it ought to be treated is really different. I'd say the recent shift in terminology from poverty to inequality, and in measurement from "% below an objective threshold" to "ratio between quantiles," is happening explicitly to accommodate the meaning you're disclaiming here. >Increasing the safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause more people to take the risk. Sure, but the operative thing here is increasing the safety net, which you could do without substantially closing the gap between rich and poor. In fact a stronger safety net might lead to more entrepreneurship and thus more founders getting rich, making the inequality stats worse. EDIT: clarity about top comment.