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okey but the burning question now is: how much more fair it becomes when the richer participants give specifically to poorest participants, instead of random on
by dgan 1y ago
okey but the burning question now is: how much more fair it becomes when the richer participants give specifically to poorest participants, instead of random one?
- munificent 1y agoThe system is fair. While the distribution is non-uniform, over a long enough time span, all participants will appear at every place in the distribution.
- msgodel 1y agoWhat incentive is there to work to become rich if you have to give it away anyway?
- Jimpulse 1y agoInitially, security. Then maybe a realization that you don't need all of your wealth to be secure.
- msgodel 1y agoHow does it provide security if you're giving it away? Why do you need it if not working for it means you're more likely to get it for free?
- parliament32 1y ago> maybe a realization that you don't need all of your wealth to be secure Then why wouldn't I just stop working? Why bother working at all if I'm guaranteed to be subsidized by other people?
- input_sh 1y agoTo give your life a purpose? To do something meaningful and fulfilling? To build something cool? To be able to afford additional, cooler things? To work on a common mission with likeminded people? To contribute something back to the system? To experience how things work in the background? To have a sense of ownership over your productive output? And if you wanna express yourself creatively or just do nothing for a while, that's fine by me too! I'm sure you'd get bored after a while and want to make yourself useful again, so I don't think you should starve in the meantime.
- msgodel 1y agoOh yeah I forgot that's why I deal with insane corporate administrative bullshit to write bad software that solves problems only generated because of the scale of the internal social interactions: because it gives my life meaning. You have hobbies and personal relationships to give your life meaning, you pay to be allowed to do that not the other way around.
- darkwater 1y ago> You have hobbies and personal relationships to give your life meaning, you pay to be allowed to do that not the other way around. And why don't you want to turn that around?
- ncruces 1y agoI'm sure people who, idk, have to clean up office toilets, do it because it's meaningful and fulfilling.
- Spivak 1y agoA little bit of inequality is good as an incentive as you describe. A large amount of inequality devolves an economy into being pseudo-centrally-planned as nearly all the wealth is allocated by a small group of super wealthy individuals. You want the incentive to get rich and then have that incentive fall off as you acquire more wealth.
- msgodel 1y agoWe already have a pretty steeply progressive income tax. Part of the problem with schemes like this is that the wealthy have the resources to dodge them so it mostly just creates problems for the productive middle class.
- WalterBright 1y agoYou can't do great things without a large amount of money. Preventing people from accumulating large amounts of money means you cannot have things like SpaceX. By limiting wealthy people, you put a cap on your own standard of living.
- andriamanitra 1y agoMost great things that require a large amount of money are funded mostly by collectives (historically the state and church, more recently companies) rather than wealthy people. SpaceX has certainly done some cool stuff (even before it started being funded by taxpayer money through government contracts), but I think the value of all of these billionaire-funded endeavors are a rounding error in comparison to all the infrastructure, science, education and healthcare that has been collectively funded. By limiting excessively wealthy people you give money a better chance to be allocated well.
- Straw 1y agoYou might find it interesting to know that in the mid 1800s, in the UK, during a 10-year period, private investment in railways totaled 40% of GDP- an average of 4% per year. For comparison, the Apollo program was <0.5% of GDP. The list of enormously valuable privately developed technologies goes on and on- in fact, almost all technologies. Many of these developed in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very little government spending on research/etc. For example, oil, railways, cars, etc. Even in cases where government research did help, often the practical realization takes a lot of money! P.S. Companies are not necessarily collectives. It depends on the ownership structure.
- dfxm12 1y agoYou can become rich enough that you can afford to give away a dollar to someone every second and still be rich. For some perspective, this full amount is about 33% of annual income of $100mm. The richest people make well more than this. Consider, even without such a system, more people than you realize have enough to live on (and pass on for generations), but still work. A lot of rich people also didn't work for their wealth. People have worked their whole lives and not become rich. I'm not sure there's a connection.
- Nifty3929 1y agoUnfortunately, money is not stuff. Taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people doesn't create any additional stuff for those poor people to consume.
- bongodongobob 1y agoRich people generally don't make a goddamn thing.
- WalterBright 1y agoElon Musk
- yetihehe 1y agoIt would create more stuff by increasing market size. Those poor would be able to afford more stuff, so more stuff would be made. I'm currently in process of making something people don't need, but might like (recreating old glass who everyone remembers from their youth). I can't produce too much, because it's not competitive with cheapest glasses. If more people had more money, more people would be able to impulse buy that glass and I could make more of it. If more people had money, they would be able to do such things themselves, I'm only doing it because I'm earning a lot and banks essentially compete in who can give me the cheapest money to do interesting things. It's pretty funny actually and I have access to money much more cheaply than poor people (lower interest rate).
- scotty79 1y agoWhat incentive is there to work if you are going to die anyway? The incentive is that you could potentially enjoy something briefly and that's the best deal you can get.
- mhuffman 1y ago>The incentive is that you could potentially enjoy something briefly and that's the best deal you can get. Many people might say that is a lower incentive than to being able to leave your family better off than they were, or in your more greedy interpretation, so that their children and their children can enjoy something less briefly than you were able to.
- scotty79 1y agoMany more people are single and don't plan on having a family. And for those who have .. tax is always lower than 100%. You won't leave your family worse off by earning more money, regardless of the specific level of the tax.
- the_cat_kittles 1y agowhat incentive is there for you to post this comment if it isnt going to make you rich?
- wtcactus 1y agoPreventing the freeloader mindset to gain more ground due to the need of some people to indulge in virtue signaling.
- dakr 1y agoThis argument reminds me of theists asking, "without a god, what is there to keep you from being amoral and running around killing people?" Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic external levers. We have agency, understanding, and drive to have empathy and to create.
- msgodel 1y agoRight but the natural state of humanity without real social norms and meta norms is to just form small, violent, relatively unproductive tribes. Civilization doesn't scale without rules.
- kqr 1y agoOf whose natural humanity? Areyou naturally violent and unproductive without coercion? I'm not.
- msgodel 1y agoI build things, just not things anyone else wants. Other people absolutely do seem to have violent tendencies without coercion. People don't naturally collaborate the way you see them in the developed world no.
- kqr 1y agoYou say people don't collaborate yet cite no source, so I can only assume you mean you wouldn't be collablrative. I can assure you I would be collaborative. The idea that people in the wild are uncivilised savages is old racist propaganda.
- jaoane 1y agoIs this a serious comment? It hits all the bases.
- 1y ago
- Nifty3929 1y agoI think there is a bit stronger version of your argument: The wealth that I have is intrinsically tied to me personally: It's a business that I'm running, an idea I'm pursuing, etc. Taking it away from me destroys it. The discrepancy comes from confusing money with wealth. You can take my $100 and then you will have $100. But if you take my business away from me, you will end up with very little. And so will everybody else that was benefitting from the business that I was running.
- andriamanitra 1y agoThis is a compelling argument but there is an upper limit of how much wealth can be intrinsically tied to a person. When we start talking about 8, 9, 10, 11, even 12 figures it's really hard to argue that the value of the wealth would diminish if it was distributed among more people. If anything I would expect people with more modest amounts of wealth to be more motivated to manage it (rather than hiring someone else to do it, at which point there is no intrinsic personal connection).
- _1tem 1y agoWhat incentive is there to work to create wealth if an interest-based system is rigged towards the already-wealthy?
- WalterBright 1y agoCreating wealth for yourself is what matters. Other people having more than you is irrelevant.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _1tem 1y agoThe wealthy have no incentive to invest their money in productive enterprises if it is sufficiently profitable to sit on it and earn interest. Similarly, people who would otherwise work hard at productive enterprises are discouraged by seeing how easy it is for the wealthy to simply do nothing and get richer. And the result you have is: the modern American economy, where most efforts go into derivative financial products and investing, rather than actual productive enterprise. Day-to-day goods and services get worse and more expensive while the stock market keeps going up.
- WalterBright 1y agoEarning mere interest is a poor rate of return, and the taxes paid on the interest make it worse than useless. Wealthy people want larger returns, and that's why they invest in companies. > where most efforts go into derivative financial products No evidence for "most". > and investing Yes, investing in productive enterprises. Who do you think invested in Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, etc?
- _1tem 1y ago> Earning mere interest is a poor rate of return You're looking at just the APY on savings accounts. Actually the rich make far more than that on interest-derived financial products through various forms of rent-seeking. Interest is the hidden tax baked into every transaction. Some studies found interest accounts for roughly half of end-user prices—12 percent on garbage collection, up to 77 percent on public housing.[1] And as Musk warns: “If we don’t act, the entire government budget will be used just to pay interest — there won’t be money for anything. No, there won’t be money for Social Security, no Medicare, nothing. That’s where we’re headed.” [2] In the late-stage capitalist West, most public and private money goes to servicing interest at some point in the food chain. [1] https://base.socioeco.org/docs/margrit_kennedy.pdf https://base.socioeco.org/docs/margrit_kennedy.pdf [2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/elon-musk-rings-alarm-bells-says-the-u-s-is-going-bankrupt-and-urges-immediate-action-else-the-dollars-going-to-be-worth-nothing/articleshow/116719516.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/e...
- WalterBright 1y agoNot enough incentive is left for a sustainable society. It turns out that selfish incentives are far more effective than any others.
- dfxm12 1y agoEveryone starts with the same money in this thought experiment. How do you define richer and poorer with that in mind?
- cantaloupe 1y agoThis more detailed simulation shows the impact of UBI, interest, etc. Unsurprisingly it is much more balanced with UBI and even more extremely skewed with interest accruing. https://joshworth.com/jpw/does-this-simulation-explain-why-life-is-unfair/ https://joshworth.com/jpw/does-this-simulation-explain-why-l...