6 ms·

It feels like a tautology. Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop i

It feels like a tautology. Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something, at which point they will want to do the same. The only 'solution' is for everyone to be equally poor, because wealth will never be distributed evenly. Those that generate wealth will not stand to lose it, and they have the options to make sure it doesn't happen.

082349872349872 4y ago
Another solution is to prevent any given period's oligopolies from ossifying. A "new deal" of the cards, so to speak. (In tech we are relatively lucky that people's careers tend to be longer than the relevant oligopolies)
- scarface74 4y ago
  Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000. It still is in the top 5. Its personal computing operating system has had a 80%+ market share since at least the early 90s.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  Ossified oligopolies are often the result of government regulation making competition difficult. There needs to be an easy path for competition to rise alongside large companies. Large corps need to be allowed to fail when they make mistakes as well. No bailouts. No special treatment. The tricky part is special treatment isn't always obvious. High minimum wage, insurance requirements and regulatory compliance are all things that are easy for large corps to follow but very costly for cash strapped startups. Often it is the large corps asking for more rules which is a ladder pull of sorts. There are many businesses that just haven't started because they don't pencil out with the high cost of compliance.
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  One near effortless solution is to oss-ify the code & IP of the failing startups (instead of selling it to patent trolls for pennies on dollars anyways). this way oss community moves forward and nextgen startups have something to build off of. at the very least it should help with some rentseeking via basic IP or slowly cutting features and moving them to higher revenue products. this could be done tomorrow with almost no effort if VCs want with early stage startups. Really its a shame to see some good startups fail but their IP locked up behind legal red tape for ever.
jorvi 4y ago
The insidious is that even if you somehow created a 100% inheritance / wealth transfer tax (that is, children would inherit virtually nothing from their parents), people with wealth would just rely on creating exclusive networks that the have-nots would not be able to join. Now that I think of it, sort of like the patricians and plebeians of Ancient Rome. You could become fabulously wealthy as a plebeian, but you would never be able to become (and enter the network of) patricians.
mach1ne 4y ago
Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. Looking at the world and our history, it’s not that there is any single optimal point where the trickle-up effect would somehow balance out; however, there does exist a point beyond which the probability for a revolution increases significantly. I don’t know if it’s the only historical circumstance where oligopolies collapsed, but it’s hard to find other examples.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. This is the natural end result of the system we are currently stuck with. It just takes time. Every year, we are inching closer to a world where one person owns everything. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime, but maybe within a century or two, if we continue down the track we are on.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    The push toward fewer and fewer owning "everything" puts humanity in a position where we're not really very likely to survive another century (or two) and even if we do, we probably won't be very "civilized" anymore. If ever it gets to a point where there's just one person in charge of everything then we'd best hope they're benevolent, fair, intelligent, and wise. The nature of human greed makes that highly unlikely.
z3phyr 4y ago
Wealth is not the only variable, though people with wealth try to turn it into one. Can the richest person on earth in a free society, get a personal armed forces with the state of the art platforms directly under their control today? They will be unable to indulge in this aspect as a splurge, because their money is restricted.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Barely. In the US, you can kit out quite a little army if you're so inclined.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> wealth will never be distributed evenly That is of course the other extreme end. Very few people want fully even distribution of wealth, just a reasonable and fair distribution. What exactly is "reasonable and fair" is a whole different discussion.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  The funny thing is that when rhetoric is cooled, people have a really wide and strong agreement about what is "reasonable and fair".
  - epgui 4y ago
    It’s almost as if not everyone agrees on what the basic facts of the “current situation” is. People who are unsuccessful despite working hard and doing good work recognize the unfairness of the situation… And people who are successful tend to like believing that luck didn’t have that much to do with their success.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I like your 'solution' :). Wealth as in "having a lot of money" is only as old as money itself. Most of human history has everybody being "poor" in that sense. I'm no primitivist, but there is something nice about the idea of removing the kind of wealth you can calculate with a calculator from the world. Hard to argue i think that it wouldn't be better, even if you don't think the logistics of it will work. It's a utopian thought we should certainly strive for though. What other beautiful future can one even imagine in the long term?
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Being able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more grain to the silo, you get more tokens. These tokens are exchangeable in the end for grain and that is that. In this way tOtherhe tokens represent a kind of debt. The silo owes you that amount of grain. People begin accepting the token in trade because they can exchange it for grain. It has become money But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue. What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well. A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain. Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt. This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.
kingkawn 4y ago
All Poor Together.
psychoslave 4y ago
This doesn't get the point though, which is that the concentration is becoming heavier and is in acceleration. This clearly won't sustain forever. The article speaks about how it might finish in blood bath of the starving crowd decapiting anything presumably on the side of the rich. It doesn't speacks about a scenario of richest using drone army to make genocide of superfluous plebeans, or using more soft long term means like birth control, great assistance to euthanasia for those who are suffering extrem economical misery as sole alternative and so on. With great powers comes ability to make great atrocities. The article also fails to mention biodiversity collapse as it is being crushed by the human species oligopoly.
BoiledCabbage 4y ago
> Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something... This is true. However you got the following conclusion wrong. People with power will continue to concentrate it. The solution isn't to prevent people from gaining power (or wealth) - the solution is it have an opposite force always pushing to distribute power again. So in relative terms people with good ideas, or financial success can gain wealth or power relative to their peers as a reward for success, but the overall system must ensure that on absolute terms that power or success doesn't continuously consolidate and become to heavy. That is why antitrust, term limits, and yes progressive taxation are some of the most important things a society can do. Checks against power consolidation are the only ways to keep a society functioning with any sort of efficiency. It's the old school mario cart approach. Yes someone can win the race, but the system also says the further ahead you get, the more headwinds you face and the further behind you are, the more likely you get a tail wind. It's the same reason why sports leagues have hard salary caps and specifically draft picks are distributed in reverse order of success/performance. It's the only way to get actual competition. The same holds in business and society in general. Otherwise you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly stamping out competition. The only form of free-market competition is enforced free-market competition.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

082349872349872 4y ago

Another solution is to prevent any given period's oligopolies from ossifying. A "new deal" of the cards, so to speak. (In tech we are relatively lucky that people's careers tend to be longer than the relevant oligopolies)

scarface74 4y ago
Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000. It still is in the top 5. Its personal computing operating system has had a 80%+ market share since at least the early 90s.
tastyfreeze 4y ago
Ossified oligopolies are often the result of government regulation making competition difficult. There needs to be an easy path for competition to rise alongside large companies. Large corps need to be allowed to fail when they make mistakes as well. No bailouts. No special treatment. The tricky part is special treatment isn't always obvious. High minimum wage, insurance requirements and regulatory compliance are all things that are easy for large corps to follow but very costly for cash strapped startups. Often it is the large corps asking for more rules which is a ladder pull of sorts. There are many businesses that just haven't started because they don't pencil out with the high cost of compliance.
DesiLurker 4y ago
One near effortless solution is to oss-ify the code & IP of the failing startups (instead of selling it to patent trolls for pennies on dollars anyways). this way oss community moves forward and nextgen startups have something to build off of. at the very least it should help with some rentseeking via basic IP or slowly cutting features and moving them to higher revenue products. this could be done tomorrow with almost no effort if VCs want with early stage startups. Really its a shame to see some good startups fail but their IP locked up behind legal red tape for ever.

jorvi 4y ago

The insidious is that even if you somehow created a 100% inheritance / wealth transfer tax (that is, children would inherit virtually nothing from their parents), people with wealth would just rely on creating exclusive networks that the have-nots would not be able to join. Now that I think of it, sort of like the patricians and plebeians of Ancient Rome. You could become fabulously wealthy as a plebeian, but you would never be able to become (and enter the network of) patricians.

mach1ne 4y ago

Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. Looking at the world and our history, it’s not that there is any single optimal point where the trickle-up effect would somehow balance out; however, there does exist a point beyond which the probability for a revolution increases significantly. I don’t know if it’s the only historical circumstance where oligopolies collapsed, but it’s hard to find other examples.

ryandrake 4y ago
> Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. This is the natural end result of the system we are currently stuck with. It just takes time. Every year, we are inching closer to a world where one person owns everything. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime, but maybe within a century or two, if we continue down the track we are on.
- blooalien 4y ago
  The push toward fewer and fewer owning "everything" puts humanity in a position where we're not really very likely to survive another century (or two) and even if we do, we probably won't be very "civilized" anymore. If ever it gets to a point where there's just one person in charge of everything then we'd best hope they're benevolent, fair, intelligent, and wise. The nature of human greed makes that highly unlikely.

z3phyr 4y ago

Wealth is not the only variable, though people with wealth try to turn it into one. Can the richest person on earth in a free society, get a personal armed forces with the state of the art platforms directly under their control today? They will be unable to indulge in this aspect as a splurge, because their money is restricted.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
Barely. In the US, you can kit out quite a little army if you're so inclined.

Beltalowda 4y ago

> wealth will never be distributed evenly That is of course the other extreme end. Very few people want fully even distribution of wealth, just a reasonable and fair distribution. What exactly is "reasonable and fair" is a whole different discussion.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
The funny thing is that when rhetoric is cooled, people have a really wide and strong agreement about what is "reasonable and fair".
- epgui 4y ago
  It’s almost as if not everyone agrees on what the basic facts of the “current situation” is. People who are unsuccessful despite working hard and doing good work recognize the unfairness of the situation… And people who are successful tend to like believing that luck didn’t have that much to do with their success.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

I like your 'solution' :). Wealth as in "having a lot of money" is only as old as money itself. Most of human history has everybody being "poor" in that sense. I'm no primitivist, but there is something nice about the idea of removing the kind of wealth you can calculate with a calculator from the world. Hard to argue i think that it wouldn't be better, even if you don't think the logistics of it will work. It's a utopian thought we should certainly strive for though. What other beautiful future can one even imagine in the long term?

DubiousPusher 4y ago
Being able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more grain to the silo, you get more tokens. These tokens are exchangeable in the end for grain and that is that. In this way tOtherhe tokens represent a kind of debt. The silo owes you that amount of grain. People begin accepting the token in trade because they can exchange it for grain. It has become money But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue. What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well. A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain. Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt. This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.

kingkawn 4y ago

All Poor Together.

psychoslave 4y ago

This doesn't get the point though, which is that the concentration is becoming heavier and is in acceleration. This clearly won't sustain forever. The article speaks about how it might finish in blood bath of the starving crowd decapiting anything presumably on the side of the rich. It doesn't speacks about a scenario of richest using drone army to make genocide of superfluous plebeans, or using more soft long term means like birth control, great assistance to euthanasia for those who are suffering extrem economical misery as sole alternative and so on. With great powers comes ability to make great atrocities. The article also fails to mention biodiversity collapse as it is being crushed by the human species oligopoly.

BoiledCabbage 4y ago

> Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something... This is true. However you got the following conclusion wrong. People with power will continue to concentrate it. The solution isn't to prevent people from gaining power (or wealth) - the solution is it have an opposite force always pushing to distribute power again. So in relative terms people with good ideas, or financial success can gain wealth or power relative to their peers as a reward for success, but the overall system must ensure that on absolute terms that power or success doesn't continuously consolidate and become to heavy. That is why antitrust, term limits, and yes progressive taxation are some of the most important things a society can do. Checks against power consolidation are the only ways to keep a society functioning with any sort of efficiency. It's the old school mario cart approach. Yes someone can win the race, but the system also says the further ahead you get, the more headwinds you face and the further behind you are, the more likely you get a tail wind. It's the same reason why sports leagues have hard salary caps and specifically draft picks are distributed in reverse order of success/performance. It's the only way to get actual competition. The same holds in business and society in general. Otherwise you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly stamping out competition. The only form of free-market competition is enforced free-market competition.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]