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Those eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enl

Those eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enlarging the club.

gojomo 3y ago
That's a rather simplistic reading of the history, and those eras also delivered a greater share of income, & more living-standards advances, to everyone than our current "be slow and careful and deferent to so many political veto-points" era. Consider a model instead where sure, you can turn off the spigots of progress to try to punish the wealthy – but in practice, the wealthy can defend themselves, through some combo of either their accumulated power, or the same competencies that made & kept their wealth in the first place. So whatever lesser growth still happens, your (& the EPI's) bugaboos still get their share – a bit like 'liquidation preferences' in an investment, but springing not from contractual terms but the full structural arrangement of world – prior endowments, some merited some not, and the nature of human competition. But the new lower-growth era, no matter the dreams of its advocates, mostly deprives the needier masses. They wind up with a bigger 'haircut' than the wealthy. Of course, if you're totally in thrall of class resentment & ideology, you won't be discouraged by the many-decades of failure in 'slowdown' policies so far. "We must do even more of it," a comfortable tenured neo-marxist professor might argue. "Heighten the contradictions! Speed the revolution, where the growing suffering of the masses help them finally achieve class-consciousness & hand our enlightened vanguard the plenary power they need for great justice." Like pre-scientific medicine: "The blood-letting hasn't worked yet? More blood-letting!" If you've actually paid attention the last 175y, the political forces unleashed by stagnation, resentment, and demonization of tech & capital-allocation tend to instead empower the worst regimes, that then destroy both material abundance & political freedoms.
- mcguire 3y ago
  Are you speaking of the dot-com era, the web 2.0 era, or the era that gave us tetraethyllead?

Those eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enlarging the club.

gojomo 3y ago

That's a rather simplistic reading of the history, and those eras also delivered a greater share of income, & more living-standards advances, to everyone than our current "be slow and careful and deferent to so many political veto-points" era. Consider a model instead where sure, you can turn off the spigots of progress to try to punish the wealthy – but in practice, the wealthy can defend themselves, through some combo of either their accumulated power, or the same competencies that made & kept their wealth in the first place. So whatever lesser growth still happens, your (& the EPI's) bugaboos still get their share – a bit like 'liquidation preferences' in an investment, but springing not from contractual terms but the full structural arrangement of world – prior endowments, some merited some not, and the nature of human competition. But the new lower-growth era, no matter the dreams of its advocates, mostly deprives the needier masses. They wind up with a bigger 'haircut' than the wealthy. Of course, if you're totally in thrall of class resentment & ideology, you won't be discouraged by the many-decades of failure in 'slowdown' policies so far. "We must do even more of it," a comfortable tenured neo-marxist professor might argue. "Heighten the contradictions! Speed the revolution, where the growing suffering of the masses help them finally achieve class-consciousness & hand our enlightened vanguard the plenary power they need for great justice." Like pre-scientific medicine: "The blood-letting hasn't worked yet? More blood-letting!" If you've actually paid attention the last 175y, the political forces unleashed by stagnation, resentment, and demonization of tech & capital-allocation tend to instead empower the worst regimes, that then destroy both material abundance & political freedoms.

mcguire 3y ago
Are you speaking of the dot-com era, the web 2.0 era, or the era that gave us tetraethyllead?