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> I mean this inclination doesn't imply anything about what economic policy should be Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply any

by zohebv 15y ago

> I mean this inclination doesn't imply anything about what economic policy should be Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply anything about economic policy? I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. Economics are sentiment driven by a huge factor. Robert Shiller's work in behavioral economics and his book Irrational exuberance has established and popularized this idea. Krugman's discussion of the unsuitability of BitCoin as a currency rests largely on the peculiar nature of human sentiment and behavior. Large income gaps are perceived by most people as unfair irrespective of the contributions by the wealthy. No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. I don't think the association of the net worth of an individual to the contribution that they have made to society is very strong. Economies rewards people largely on the basis of demand/supply with I believe is a weak proxy for social contributions. Perhaps you want to draw an analogy to say gay marriage where the popular vote might end up denying gay rights, but I don't think a similar argument holds in the case of wealth distribution.

sokoloff 15y ago
> No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. Um, I do.
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  Likewise though only for Gandhi.
- zohebv 15y ago
  I should have said most people, rather than noone. Bill Gates helped make the PC cheap by building a hardware independent OS that commoditized hardware. Edison has a fairly colorful commercial history. But the PC/electricity revolution would have happened with or without these individuals, there were enough competitors. The same cannot be said about Einstein. When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other people were able to understand it. Virtually, all peaceful civil disobedience protests that we see all over the world from American Civil rights to the Tunisian revolution follow a template set up by Gandhi. Peaceful civil resistance is an action that was never really thought of as practical/possible before. Bill Gates is making substantial social difference via vaccines now, but I would not count his work at Microsoft in the same league as Einstein/Gandhi.
  - fauigerzigerk 15y ago
    That's difficult to compare. For my own life, the PC and then internet were a lot more disruptive than anything directly related to relativity theory, although there may be indirect connections that I don't understand. And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field. I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible. However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.
  - william42 15y ago
    You are severely overestimating Einstein and Gandhi. If you look at the history of general relativity* you notice that while Einstein was at the center he developed his theory with much help from others such as Hilbert and Levi-Civita. As for Gandhi, he himself was inspired by others such as the March 1st Movement in Korea; his greater fame could be perhaps linked more to the fact that India is huge. Not to take anything away from those two, except perhaps the world's almost deific portrayal of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement
    - zohebv 15y ago
      I do know about Hilbert, however Einstein and Hilbert were in heavy correspondence in the preceding few months and Hilbert never claimed primacy over Einstein. My conclusion, after seeing many accounts appears to be that Einstein would have arrived at the equations irrespective of Hilbert's inputs but not vice-versa. "Hilbert's treatise was exceedingly involved, or indeed confused—according to Felix Klein." Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.
  - Confusion 15y ago
- Ingaz 15y ago
  I'm with you about Gates/Edison. But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.
robryan 15y ago
I think people find it hard to understand that wealth isn't a zero sum game and it doesn't all come down to the number assigned to it. If you compare someone from the 70s to now even if they aren't earning more the price of things has come way down relatively and while people like Gates have generated a heap of wealth they have in turn made everyone lives better with easy access to technology that was almost unthinkable in the 70s.
- wnight 15y ago
  Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs. Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.
  - zohebv 15y ago
    > Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs. While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
    - prodigal_erik 15y ago
      There were quite a few pure-software platforms that never got off the ground because OEMs didn't dare even offer them as options for fear of angering Microsoft. Unless you were savvy enough to build your own machine from parts, they made it as hard as they possibly could to avoid paying for a copy of DOS and later Windows whether or not you would have preferred to run something else. Most famously, Be got a $23M settlement over this, yet never managed to get fair access to the marketplace so they could compete on commodity hardware. Gates's tactics cost us years of progress, and now he's getting accolades for giving away extorted money DOJ should have seized for his victims.

by zohebv 15y ago

sokoloff 15y ago

> No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. Um, I do.

barry-cotter 15y ago
Likewise though only for Gandhi.
zohebv 15y ago
I should have said most people, rather than noone. Bill Gates helped make the PC cheap by building a hardware independent OS that commoditized hardware. Edison has a fairly colorful commercial history. But the PC/electricity revolution would have happened with or without these individuals, there were enough competitors. The same cannot be said about Einstein. When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other people were able to understand it. Virtually, all peaceful civil disobedience protests that we see all over the world from American Civil rights to the Tunisian revolution follow a template set up by Gandhi. Peaceful civil resistance is an action that was never really thought of as practical/possible before. Bill Gates is making substantial social difference via vaccines now, but I would not count his work at Microsoft in the same league as Einstein/Gandhi.
- fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  That's difficult to compare. For my own life, the PC and then internet were a lot more disruptive than anything directly related to relativity theory, although there may be indirect connections that I don't understand. And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field. I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible. However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.
- william42 15y ago
  You are severely overestimating Einstein and Gandhi. If you look at the history of general relativity* you notice that while Einstein was at the center he developed his theory with much help from others such as Hilbert and Levi-Civita. As for Gandhi, he himself was inspired by others such as the March 1st Movement in Korea; his greater fame could be perhaps linked more to the fact that India is huge. Not to take anything away from those two, except perhaps the world's almost deific portrayal of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement
  - zohebv 15y ago
    I do know about Hilbert, however Einstein and Hilbert were in heavy correspondence in the preceding few months and Hilbert never claimed primacy over Einstein. My conclusion, after seeing many accounts appears to be that Einstein would have arrived at the equations irrespective of Hilbert's inputs but not vice-versa. "Hilbert's treatise was exceedingly involved, or indeed confused—according to Felix Klein." Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.
- Confusion 15y ago
Ingaz 15y ago
I'm with you about Gates/Edison. But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.

robryan 15y ago

I think people find it hard to understand that wealth isn't a zero sum game and it doesn't all come down to the number assigned to it. If you compare someone from the 70s to now even if they aren't earning more the price of things has come way down relatively and while people like Gates have generated a heap of wealth they have in turn made everyone lives better with easy access to technology that was almost unthinkable in the 70s.

wnight 15y ago
Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs. Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.
- zohebv 15y ago
  > Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs. While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
  - prodigal_erik 15y ago
    There were quite a few pure-software platforms that never got off the ground because OEMs didn't dare even offer them as options for fear of angering Microsoft. Unless you were savvy enough to build your own machine from parts, they made it as hard as they possibly could to avoid paying for a copy of DOS and later Windows whether or not you would have preferred to run something else. Most famously, Be got a $23M settlement over this, yet never managed to get fair access to the marketplace so they could compete on commodity hardware. Gates's tactics cost us years of progress, and now he's getting accolades for giving away extorted money DOJ should have seized for his victims.