3 ms·

> The big question is what is that greater good. Yes. And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. They amass great fortunes o

> The big question is what is that greater good. Yes. And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. They amass great fortunes on the backs of the labor force then tell them what's good for them is to ... go to mars[1]. The fuck!? No. Hell no. People shouldn't be allowed to be THAT wealthy. I don't know how that looks but just no. [1] Knowing full well that same labor force won't be invited.

mc32 3y ago
What happens when you don’t have these captains of industry to set up large enterprises to leverage labor? Does labor self-organize and endeavor in creating its own wealth-creating machine? Who would be a better distributor? The government, those with a self interest, or idealists like Bill Gates or Buffett, etc? I personally don’t know.
- vsareto 3y ago
  I think you'll find that even if you cap lifetime earnings and max inheritance at one billion dollars (and were able to rigorously enforce that), you'd still have a healthy population willing to start large enterprises. If someone needs more motivation than earning billion dollars to start large industrial enterprises, I guarantee there's someone who'd be willing to try it for a billion or less.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    If someone earns their allotted billion under that system, wouldn't they just stop working once they reach the limit? Seems counterproductive.
    - jonasdegendt 3y ago
      pg has an interesting essay exploring this question called Billionaires Build[0], the TLDR is that he finds that these people are intrinsically motivated to keep going for reasons other than monetary gain. Otherwise they would’ve quit long before a billion dollars anyway. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        This is what he says: "One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do." That there's nothing you'd rather do in the present context, doesn't mean that'd also be true if you make it literally financially pointless. In any case, I think this is all a non-starter. If loop-holes were not readily available, people would simply move to different countries. The exact thing is happening in Norway to a somewhat comical degree. They recently chose to increase their wealth tax on billionaires. Dozens of billionaires thus chose to leave the country directly because of this, resulting an overall decline in tax revenue than if the country had retained the previous tax levels. [1] [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-abandoning-norway-at-record-rate-as-wealth-tax-rises-slightly https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-aba...
        ricardo81 3y ago
        I wonder how much that motivation is about 'well, if I sold out- these other people are purely about the monetary gain from it and me cashing out' vs the original mission. Or in other words, the altruism of the motivation.
    - vsareto 3y ago
      Someone else could take that position and you'd have little trouble finding someone qualified and willing to do it.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    If people don’t need the financial motivator to do great things, what do you need the cap for, then?
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
As Clement Attlee('s biographer) put it: > Charity is a cold, grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Of course a politician would say that.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    When a billionaire gives me a universal free-at-point-use medical system, I'll start to listen to them.
- mycologos 3y ago
  This requires a person to believe that money which wends its way through a political system, with its attendant cronyism and moral hazard, is better spent than money with a shorter path between its donors and recipients. The caveat is that the overall level of outflows from rich to poor might be (would probably be?) lower without taxation, but it is possible for individuals to be telling the truth when they say they believe that money does more good as charity than as tax revenue.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    I think Clement Attlee did a pretty good job of using tax revenue.
roenxi 3y ago
> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively. Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt. > go to mars[1]. The fuck!? After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.
- mycologos 3y ago
  > The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. I believe that there are genuine skills separating billionaires from normal people, but I'm not sure that the primary one is reliably "[being] better than average at doing the rational thing". Being OK at logic, starting with some money, and having an enormous tolerance for risk seems to be a common formula for becoming billion-scale rich (and also, in most cases, much poorer than that). I'd argue that this kind of appetite for risk, and volatility in general, makes such people questionable managers of society's resources, though I guess there are more "steward-style" billionaires like Buffett that might be more palatable.
somenameforme 3y ago
Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, amounts to quite little. For instance, the Iraq War cost around $2 trillion. [1] Take the complete wealth of the richest 25 Americans [2] and you still couldn't even come close to funding that one conflict. And it's not like Iraq was an outlier. This happens repeatedly, and endlessly. The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...

mc32 3y ago

What happens when you don’t have these captains of industry to set up large enterprises to leverage labor? Does labor self-organize and endeavor in creating its own wealth-creating machine? Who would be a better distributor? The government, those with a self interest, or idealists like Bill Gates or Buffett, etc? I personally don’t know.

vsareto 3y ago
I think you'll find that even if you cap lifetime earnings and max inheritance at one billion dollars (and were able to rigorously enforce that), you'd still have a healthy population willing to start large enterprises. If someone needs more motivation than earning billion dollars to start large industrial enterprises, I guarantee there's someone who'd be willing to try it for a billion or less.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  If someone earns their allotted billion under that system, wouldn't they just stop working once they reach the limit? Seems counterproductive.
  - jonasdegendt 3y ago
    pg has an interesting essay exploring this question called Billionaires Build[0], the TLDR is that he finds that these people are intrinsically motivated to keep going for reasons other than monetary gain. Otherwise they would’ve quit long before a billion dollars anyway. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      This is what he says: "One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do." That there's nothing you'd rather do in the present context, doesn't mean that'd also be true if you make it literally financially pointless. In any case, I think this is all a non-starter. If loop-holes were not readily available, people would simply move to different countries. The exact thing is happening in Norway to a somewhat comical degree. They recently chose to increase their wealth tax on billionaires. Dozens of billionaires thus chose to leave the country directly because of this, resulting an overall decline in tax revenue than if the country had retained the previous tax levels. [1] [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-abandoning-norway-at-record-rate-as-wealth-tax-rises-slightly https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-aba...
      - ricardo81 3y ago
        I wonder how much that motivation is about 'well, if I sold out- these other people are purely about the monetary gain from it and me cashing out' vs the original mission. Or in other words, the altruism of the motivation.
  - vsareto 3y ago
    Someone else could take that position and you'd have little trouble finding someone qualified and willing to do it.
- randomdata 3y ago
  If people don’t need the financial motivator to do great things, what do you need the cap for, then?

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

As Clement Attlee('s biographer) put it: > Charity is a cold, grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

oh_sigh 3y ago
Of course a politician would say that.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  When a billionaire gives me a universal free-at-point-use medical system, I'll start to listen to them.
mycologos 3y ago
This requires a person to believe that money which wends its way through a political system, with its attendant cronyism and moral hazard, is better spent than money with a shorter path between its donors and recipients. The caveat is that the overall level of outflows from rich to poor might be (would probably be?) lower without taxation, but it is possible for individuals to be telling the truth when they say they believe that money does more good as charity than as tax revenue.
- rjsw 3y ago
  I think Clement Attlee did a pretty good job of using tax revenue.

roenxi 3y ago

> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively. Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt. > go to mars[1]. The fuck!? After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.

mycologos 3y ago
> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn. I believe that there are genuine skills separating billionaires from normal people, but I'm not sure that the primary one is reliably "[being] better than average at doing the rational thing". Being OK at logic, starting with some money, and having an enormous tolerance for risk seems to be a common formula for becoming billion-scale rich (and also, in most cases, much poorer than that). I'd argue that this kind of appetite for risk, and volatility in general, makes such people questionable managers of society's resources, though I guess there are more "steward-style" billionaires like Buffett that might be more palatable.

somenameforme 3y ago

Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, amounts to quite little. For instance, the Iraq War cost around $2 trillion. [1] Take the complete wealth of the richest 25 Americans [2] and you still couldn't even come close to funding that one conflict. And it's not like Iraq was an outlier. This happens repeatedly, and endlessly. The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...