6 ms·

The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases

• jdminhbg 3y ago
  Ah yes, nothing says "unburnt money" quite like the public education system.
  • mola 3y ago
    How is that engaging with what I said? There are many ways to fail. I pointed out one of them. Which is pretty dominant in our age. Such a low effort reply...
    • jdminhbg 3y ago
      You praised the decisions “averaged out by the opinions of the many,” which burn billions and billions of dollars in failed experiments every year. Happy to help.
• verisimi 3y ago
  Yes. I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin. As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man. In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
• defendBanana 3y ago
  The few with money are still a fairly large class. They are also paltry in wealth as compared to the masses aka govt spending. It is ok that many of these fails. Some will work (wikipedia, khan academy etc). We should only require that things are being tried.
  • mola 3y ago
    No, these wealthy few are not paltry compared to governments, they used to be. But not anymore. Plus, they took control the government through corruption. Wikipedia is mostly a success of the many, both with the many contributing content and editing and by the many contributing the funds to operate. If it wouldve been funded by someone like gates, it'd be a corrupt for profit ad ridden platform. Not because gates is evil, mind you, it's because gates bias leads him to believe for profit enterprises are the solution for everything. Anyway, i agree experimentation is needed, that's why I was talking about averaging out biases. I just don't agree that the darwinistic model that caused wealth to concentrate to be the best model to achieve this.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      If you're going to make assertions, you can put numbers and sources behind them. E.g. "The richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59565690 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59565690 Or Table 4-5: "Wealth shares and minimum wealth of deciles and top percentiles for regions and selected countries, 2021", p.140 https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2022.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
      • defendBanana 3y ago
        Is that the right statistics here though? Billionaire classes ability to spend should be compared with governments ability to spend. This is not same as wealth.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
• bambax 3y ago
  Agreed. I also love this quote from the article: > Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why. The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
  • verve_rat 3y ago
    Because it doesn't hurt? When you have $30 billion losing $100 million doesn't hurt.
    • bell-cot 3y ago
      Yes...but, in the bigger picture: For self-absorbed, A-list young billionaires, the educational outcomes for the little kids were never all that important. Their never-miss-it-anyway $1e8 bought boatloads of arbitrary power over little people, ~8 years of favorable PR, cool talking points when hanging out with their uber-rich social set, and other things that were valuable to them. I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?
      • xyzzy123 3y ago
        I suspect most humans with a billion dollars under their belt would be quite inclined to believe they can succeed where others have failed. After all, most people "fail" to become billionaires like they did.
        • bell-cot 3y ago
          Yes...but your phrasing suggests that is a rational belief. Vs. I'd attribute it far more to over-inflated self-esteem. Anybody who is both rational and has made it to billionaire has failed many times, at a wide variety of things. And knows the world is vastly more complex than any human actually understands.
• danjc 3y ago
  This has been the case for all of history.
  • amelius 3y ago
    Yes it's like we're living in medieval times. We might as well bring back the feudal lords.
    • indigochill 3y ago
      I think about this on a number of levels a lot. I think things have changed a lot less than we tell ourselves (though they have changed a little bit, in that we are no longer bound to each other by feudal oaths - possibly for the worse). The idea behind governments, even the most liberal, has always been that you give up some of your freedom in exchange for security against violence. This was also the primary motivator for swearing serfdom to a feudal lord. And the idea behind corporations is effectively giving up a large share of your labor value (the other part of serfdom) nominally in exchange for security against economic instability, in that you get a steady paycheck regardless of revenue fluctuations. In practice, I think many people are finding that security is dubious since corporations lay off employees, but they don't understand what the tradeoff is that they made. Lack of loyalty by employers has then fueled lack of loyalty by employees, and overall the situation is more tenuous now for employees. And for that matter when people complain about crime (and why crime against its own citizens is particularly heinous), they're complaining that the government is not holding up their end of the contract with protection from that. I'm not sure whether it's easier or harder today to find a different "lord" in the form of emigration. On one hand we're not bound by feudal oaths so leaving as such is usually pretty easy, but on the other hand the process of living somewhere long-term and changing citizenship can be very difficult on the other side depending where you go.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway69123 3y ago
  How are you measuring concentration billionaires have very little concentration of wealth compared to the budget did the countries they live in, it’s only when comparing to the average joe.
• WithinReason 3y ago
  I wish there was a "rise of the alright"
• londons_explore 3y ago
  I'm of the opinion that money concentrated in few hands actually leads to better big projects. Sure, some will fail, but it's better than the alternative, which is everything run by committee. Committee 's tend to never manage to agree on any big bets - and therefore all resources get ploughed into low risk mundane things with no ongoing benefit. The town hall gets repainted frequently, rather than resources being spent building a cathedral.
  • ehnto 3y ago
    Horses for courses though, I would prefer my council do mundane maintenance than build a cathedral. Maintenance isn't sexy or grand but it is good for the normal, everyday people who have to use the stuff to do the things. Bigger infrastructure projects are often done by the state. But for more frivolous, would never happen otherwise stuff, certainly a single deep pocket is a good thing to reach into.
• eru 3y ago
  > Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. Have you looked at the biases of the many recently? See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
  • dav_Oz 3y ago
    If you reduce the social organizational structure aka the government system of democracy to "mass voting" or "voters opinion" you pretty much end up in an incentive structure where being "irrational" i.e. doesn't cost you or or in the words of Caplan: >when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it. "Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs. "Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge"). "Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order. Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency. Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.