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> truly smart people are not wasting their time with work that is in any way associated with the movements of small green pieces of paper. What you call "movem

by bhupy 6y ago

> truly smart people are not wasting their time with work that is in any way associated with the movements of small green pieces of paper. What you call "movement of small green pieces of paper", others might call "resource allocation", which is a pivotal function in civilization-building.

jordanpg 6y ago
I don't disagree, but I maintain that it isn't something that most of the best and brightest spend a lot of time thinking about. The fact that the acquisition of lots of money is an end in and of itself pursued by a class of skilled "elite" white collar workers (like VCs) is basically a side effect of the "resource allocation" you mention run amok coupled with faulty wiring in our monkey brains.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Acquisition of lots of money is not the same as moving money around, which was your original point. Acquisition of lots of money is also a proxy for impact — if you provide just $3 of value to every American, ONE TIME, congrats, you're a billionaire. Hell, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year. Most smart people spend a lot of time thinking about building empires. Making money is just a really nice side effect of building the empires. In this world, there are 2 endeavors that make a LOT of money: empire building and macro resource allocation. The majority of the best and brightest will spend a lot of time thinking about those two endeavors no matter what the underlying system is. In a parallel universe where all resource allocation and production is driven by the government — your elite class will simply be in the officer ranks of those bureaucracies. It's no different from the military where the elite West Point graduates enjoy greater status than the enlisted rank-and-file.
mempko 6y ago
And if you haven't noticed, the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction happening now signals a complete miss allocation of resources. Will we fall as fast as we rose?
- bhupy 6y ago
  You could certainly argue that there is a mis-allocation of resources towards the kinds of energy we need to be using. I don't think you can look to the climate crises, and then conclude that there is a compete mis-allocation of resources, across ALL industries. That's plainly absurd. We don't have a mis-allocation of resources in the production of food, clothing, appliances, electronics. Insofar as we have a mis-allocation of resources towards energy sources, it's because externalities are not included in the price of the thing. There is a pretty straightforward way to fix this that does not involve totally shifting the way we allocate all of our other resources...

by bhupy 6y ago

jordanpg 6y ago

I don't disagree, but I maintain that it isn't something that most of the best and brightest spend a lot of time thinking about. The fact that the acquisition of lots of money is an end in and of itself pursued by a class of skilled "elite" white collar workers (like VCs) is basically a side effect of the "resource allocation" you mention run amok coupled with faulty wiring in our monkey brains.

bhupy 6y ago
Acquisition of lots of money is not the same as moving money around, which was your original point. Acquisition of lots of money is also a proxy for impact — if you provide just $3 of value to every American, ONE TIME, congrats, you're a billionaire. Hell, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year. Most smart people spend a lot of time thinking about building empires. Making money is just a really nice side effect of building the empires. In this world, there are 2 endeavors that make a LOT of money: empire building and macro resource allocation. The majority of the best and brightest will spend a lot of time thinking about those two endeavors no matter what the underlying system is. In a parallel universe where all resource allocation and production is driven by the government — your elite class will simply be in the officer ranks of those bureaucracies. It's no different from the military where the elite West Point graduates enjoy greater status than the enlisted rank-and-file.

mempko 6y ago

And if you haven't noticed, the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction happening now signals a complete miss allocation of resources. Will we fall as fast as we rose?

bhupy 6y ago
You could certainly argue that there is a mis-allocation of resources towards the kinds of energy we need to be using. I don't think you can look to the climate crises, and then conclude that there is a compete mis-allocation of resources, across ALL industries. That's plainly absurd. We don't have a mis-allocation of resources in the production of food, clothing, appliances, electronics. Insofar as we have a mis-allocation of resources towards energy sources, it's because externalities are not included in the price of the thing. There is a pretty straightforward way to fix this that does not involve totally shifting the way we allocate all of our other resources...