4 ms·

I'll bite: efficient use of resources.

by derrida 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago
We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it. Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it. (For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.) There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.
- derrida 14y ago
  The comment changed that I replied to. My view was wealth concentration == inefficient use of resources (on the whole, exceptions being self-made entrepreneurs)
adventureful 14y ago
michaelochurch: "We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it." Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes. Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.
- _delirium 14y ago
  On the Walton example, Sam Walton has been dead for a while now. A number of Walton heirs and heiresses are on the Forbes 400 list, but they did not work for their money.
afterburner 14y ago
The resources won't be used efficiently if the few with all the power/money can press their priorities on the rest of the populace. In the US, this takes the form of billionaires heavily influencing government policy, both through party funding to draw up the legislature and propaganda to win votes. In looser countries, this effect is even more direct. You have to count on benevolent tyrants if you allow wealth concentration to run its course. That's hoping for a lot.

I'll bite: efficient use of resources.

by derrida 14y ago

I'll bite: efficient use of resources.

We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it. Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it. (For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.) There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.

derrida 14y ago
The comment changed that I replied to. My view was wealth concentration == inefficient use of resources (on the whole, exceptions being self-made entrepreneurs)

adventureful 14y ago

michaelochurch: "We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it." Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes. Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.

_delirium 14y ago
On the Walton example, Sam Walton has been dead for a while now. A number of Walton heirs and heiresses are on the Forbes 400 list, but they did not work for their money.

afterburner 14y ago

The resources won't be used efficiently if the few with all the power/money can press their priorities on the rest of the populace. In the US, this takes the form of billionaires heavily influencing government policy, both through party funding to draw up the legislature and propaganda to win votes. In looser countries, this effect is even more direct. You have to count on benevolent tyrants if you allow wealth concentration to run its course. That's hoping for a lot.