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> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) tha

> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.

tomoyoirl 3y ago
> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people. Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  This (conveniently) ignores (as do so many similar analyses) the opportunity costs of entering into a labor contract. When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too. Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may have lost no capital, often face much more dire circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing. >even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw good money after bad It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
- Draiken 3y ago
  What? You're ignoring all the lives he ruined to play with that company. Sure, he lost money, but he has plenty to lose. He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the price, not him. It's always the workers that pay the price.
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    If getting laid off from a six-figure salaried job is what people are calling "life-ruining" in this day and age, then we're clearly doing something right as a society! Sadly, I've had the misfortune of living through far deeper traumas, and I can't help but laugh at the suggestion that getting laid off from my current tech job would somehow "ruin my life" by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, it might cause some temporary distress, but my rainy day fund would be able to tide me over until something else came along.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  (I see you edited your post to add the last line). Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over large quantities of economic and financial resources, and because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin" those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase of an asset followed by its degradation. But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might have happened in Elon was not in a position to command the utilization of the wealth that purchased Twitter? What else might that wealth have been used for? What might it have been accomplished?
  - jryan49 3y ago
    You could make the opposite argument about all the innovations, are and science, rich people have funded throughout history. Like what if Boeing didn't have all that money to dump into airplanes.
    - kagakuninja 3y ago
      To start with, Boeing benefitted from massive amounts of government contracts during their history, which provided much of the money they "dumped into airplanes". Secondly, we now see a company whose products have severe safety defects due to the influence of cost-cutting managers, more concerned with profits than quality.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      You are presupposing that such things would not have happened if the resource allocation decisions made by the wealthy had been made via some other (more democratic) means. There's not really much evidence to support that claim (though to be fair, not much evidence to refute it either).
      - jryan49 3y ago
        That's my point, I don't think it seems to matter very much... Sometimes an individual has a good idea, sometimes we all come up with good ideas...
pdonis 3y ago
> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions Not at all. A large fraction of the "already rich" did not get their wealth by productive efforts. They got it by convincing other people to take the wrong end of zero sum trades, thus siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets into their own. Even in the case of Jeff Bezos, who has certainly created a lot of wealth through Amazon, it's also true that his own personal wealth is not entirely due to that productive effort; a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers. In other words, the real problem is not wealth accumulation, but wealth accumulation through zero sum games, or more generally through gaming the system instead of producing. (There was a pg essay on this years ago.)
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers Why would any worker or supplier do an exchange with Amazon where they lose?
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Because they don't realize it's a zero sum game until they're already playing it, and then their exit options are limited.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      People quit Amazon all the time. Nobody is chained to their desk. Zero-sum games are called "theft", "fraud" and/or "wealth redistribution" schemes.
      - vacuity 3y ago
        Being able to quit a terrible workplace doesn't imply that one has achieved a reasonable standard of living and is just making more money. Indeed, if people continue working at a workplace where they're subjected to conditions they think are terrible, they probably don't do it just to make more money.
WalterBright 3y ago
> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about making diet and exercise decisions than I am. I have faith that Mick Jagger is far better at crafting a new song than I am. I have faith that Tom Hanks could make a far better movie than I can.
- devbent 3y ago
  > I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about making diet and exercise decisions than I am. Smart athletes let technocrats (e.g. scientists and doctors) make those decisions for them! In the case or billionaires, we know Zuckerberg is really good at making social media apps. That doesn't mean he's good at anything else! Plenty of talented rich people have demonstrated that given the chance they'll lose lots of money on foolish ventures outside their area of expertise.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I bet you'll find their track record is a lot better than that of non-wealthy people. Most non-wealthy people I know do a lousy job of managing their finances. Frontline ran an episode a few years ago about 401k plans. They found that the wealthier the employee was, the better returns they had on the company 401k plan, despite the fact that the plan was identical for all the employees.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      OK, so people who are good at managing their money are ... drum roll, please ... better at managing their money. This is a tautology. The question is not whether rich people are better at running their own finances, it is whether they are the best people to be making resource allocation decisions. In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so they will do what people want, and so we get what we want and they get rich and that's good". This is just so absurd that it's really not worth deconstructing.
rockemsockem 3y ago
Much better to have a large number of wealthy actors deciding how to allocate capital than just one (the government). Certainly we can do with higher taxes for the ultra wealthy though. It's hard to imagine what one can do with 100 billion dollars that you can't do with 10 billion.....
- devbent 3y ago
  Let's just have a really large number of reasonably well to do actors deciding how to allocate capital. After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!
  - rockemsockem 3y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of course there will be stupid and actively harmful allocations. But the government does both of those things too. So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to the government.
    - devbent 3y ago
      > I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Kind of. If the premise that government + a few rich people is a better way to spend $ (e.g. our current system !) then how about we also try government + spreading $ around so a lot of people are well off and can "allocate capital". The fact is a rising tide lifts all boats.
      - rockemsockem 3y ago
        I certainly think our current system is better than 0 rich people. I think a better system would include more money spread around the middle class, fewer people in poverty, and a larger number of rich people with fewer individuals having > 10 billion dollars. That makes it harder for a small group of rich folks to band together to screw up democracy since there should, presumably, be greater diversity of opinions in the group of rich folks. The main post is literally saying "no rich people" so that's the part I'm focusing on, but yes the middle class in America needs far more help than it's getting.
satellite2 3y ago
The issue here is the genericity if money. I think hardly anyone would argue that he shouldn't make decisions for Amazon. He is probably the best individual for this. The issue is that controlling Amazon also comes with the possibility of getting out of it and somehow be allowed to control vast amount of resources completely independent of it and possibly built decades or even centuries before Amazon even existed.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  One of Bezos' best attributes was (is? no idea) knowing that he was not the best individual to make most of the decisions for Amazon. He had strong ideas about how to hire people, how to create "meta-strategies" and then let the people who he believed actually knew stuff make the choices. So actually, even within Amazon, he almost certainly was not the best person to make almost any of the decisions the company faced. You final sentence is precisely on point, IMO.

tomoyoirl 3y ago

> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people. Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
This (conveniently) ignores (as do so many similar analyses) the opportunity costs of entering into a labor contract. When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too. Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may have lost no capital, often face much more dire circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing. >even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw good money after bad It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
Draiken 3y ago
What? You're ignoring all the lives he ruined to play with that company. Sure, he lost money, but he has plenty to lose. He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the price, not him. It's always the workers that pay the price.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  If getting laid off from a six-figure salaried job is what people are calling "life-ruining" in this day and age, then we're clearly doing something right as a society! Sadly, I've had the misfortune of living through far deeper traumas, and I can't help but laugh at the suggestion that getting laid off from my current tech job would somehow "ruin my life" by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, it might cause some temporary distress, but my rainy day fund would be able to tide me over until something else came along.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
(I see you edited your post to add the last line). Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over large quantities of economic and financial resources, and because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin" those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase of an asset followed by its degradation. But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might have happened in Elon was not in a position to command the utilization of the wealth that purchased Twitter? What else might that wealth have been used for? What might it have been accomplished?
- jryan49 3y ago
  You could make the opposite argument about all the innovations, are and science, rich people have funded throughout history. Like what if Boeing didn't have all that money to dump into airplanes.
  - kagakuninja 3y ago
    To start with, Boeing benefitted from massive amounts of government contracts during their history, which provided much of the money they "dumped into airplanes". Secondly, we now see a company whose products have severe safety defects due to the influence of cost-cutting managers, more concerned with profits than quality.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    You are presupposing that such things would not have happened if the resource allocation decisions made by the wealthy had been made via some other (more democratic) means. There's not really much evidence to support that claim (though to be fair, not much evidence to refute it either).
    - jryan49 3y ago
      That's my point, I don't think it seems to matter very much... Sometimes an individual has a good idea, sometimes we all come up with good ideas...

pdonis 3y ago

> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions Not at all. A large fraction of the "already rich" did not get their wealth by productive efforts. They got it by convincing other people to take the wrong end of zero sum trades, thus siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets into their own. Even in the case of Jeff Bezos, who has certainly created a lot of wealth through Amazon, it's also true that his own personal wealth is not entirely due to that productive effort; a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers. In other words, the real problem is not wealth accumulation, but wealth accumulation through zero sum games, or more generally through gaming the system instead of producing. (There was a pg essay on this years ago.)

WalterBright 3y ago
> a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers Why would any worker or supplier do an exchange with Amazon where they lose?
- pdonis 3y ago
  Because they don't realize it's a zero sum game until they're already playing it, and then their exit options are limited.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    People quit Amazon all the time. Nobody is chained to their desk. Zero-sum games are called "theft", "fraud" and/or "wealth redistribution" schemes.
    - vacuity 3y ago
      Being able to quit a terrible workplace doesn't imply that one has achieved a reasonable standard of living and is just making more money. Indeed, if people continue working at a workplace where they're subjected to conditions they think are terrible, they probably don't do it just to make more money.

WalterBright 3y ago

> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about making diet and exercise decisions than I am. I have faith that Mick Jagger is far better at crafting a new song than I am. I have faith that Tom Hanks could make a far better movie than I can.

devbent 3y ago
> I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about making diet and exercise decisions than I am. Smart athletes let technocrats (e.g. scientists and doctors) make those decisions for them! In the case or billionaires, we know Zuckerberg is really good at making social media apps. That doesn't mean he's good at anything else! Plenty of talented rich people have demonstrated that given the chance they'll lose lots of money on foolish ventures outside their area of expertise.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I bet you'll find their track record is a lot better than that of non-wealthy people. Most non-wealthy people I know do a lousy job of managing their finances. Frontline ran an episode a few years ago about 401k plans. They found that the wealthier the employee was, the better returns they had on the company 401k plan, despite the fact that the plan was identical for all the employees.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    OK, so people who are good at managing their money are ... drum roll, please ... better at managing their money. This is a tautology. The question is not whether rich people are better at running their own finances, it is whether they are the best people to be making resource allocation decisions. In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so they will do what people want, and so we get what we want and they get rich and that's good". This is just so absurd that it's really not worth deconstructing.

rockemsockem 3y ago

Much better to have a large number of wealthy actors deciding how to allocate capital than just one (the government). Certainly we can do with higher taxes for the ultra wealthy though. It's hard to imagine what one can do with 100 billion dollars that you can't do with 10 billion.....

devbent 3y ago
Let's just have a really large number of reasonably well to do actors deciding how to allocate capital. After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of course there will be stupid and actively harmful allocations. But the government does both of those things too. So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to the government.
  - devbent 3y ago
    > I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Kind of. If the premise that government + a few rich people is a better way to spend $ (e.g. our current system !) then how about we also try government + spreading $ around so a lot of people are well off and can "allocate capital". The fact is a rising tide lifts all boats.
    - rockemsockem 3y ago
      I certainly think our current system is better than 0 rich people. I think a better system would include more money spread around the middle class, fewer people in poverty, and a larger number of rich people with fewer individuals having > 10 billion dollars. That makes it harder for a small group of rich folks to band together to screw up democracy since there should, presumably, be greater diversity of opinions in the group of rich folks. The main post is literally saying "no rich people" so that's the part I'm focusing on, but yes the middle class in America needs far more help than it's getting.

satellite2 3y ago

The issue here is the genericity if money. I think hardly anyone would argue that he shouldn't make decisions for Amazon. He is probably the best individual for this. The issue is that controlling Amazon also comes with the possibility of getting out of it and somehow be allowed to control vast amount of resources completely independent of it and possibly built decades or even centuries before Amazon even existed.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
One of Bezos' best attributes was (is? no idea) knowing that he was not the best individual to make most of the decisions for Amazon. He had strong ideas about how to hire people, how to create "meta-strategies" and then let the people who he believed actually knew stuff make the choices. So actually, even within Amazon, he almost certainly was not the best person to make almost any of the decisions the company faced. You final sentence is precisely on point, IMO.