It can be both? Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for the lower class? I don’t mind that trade off.
If some one were to say to you - you can have 10,000 more iPhones to play with but your friends would get 100,000 iPhones, would you reject the deal?
A century ago people in the US started to tax the rich much more heavily than we do now. They didn't believe that increasing inequality was necessary - or even actually that helpful - for improving their real livelihood.
Don't be shocked if that comes back. (And that was the mild sort of reaction.)
If you have billions and all the power associated with it, why are you shooting for personal trillions instead of actually, directly improving the day to day for everyone else without even losing your status as an elite, just diminishing it by a little bit of marginal utility? Especially if you read history about when people make that same decision?
I don't think that is scalable to infinite iphones since the input materials are finite. If your all your friends get 100,000 iphones and then you need an ev battery and that now costs 20,000 iphones now and you're down 5k iphones if the previous battery cost was 5k iphones. On the other hand if you already had a good battery, then you're up 20k iphones or so in equity. Also, since everyone has so many iphones the net utility drops and they become worth less than the materials so everyone would have to scrap their iphones to liquidate at the cost of the recycled metals.
It can be, but there are lots of reasons to believe it will not be. Knowledge work was the ladder between lower and upper classes. If that goes away, it doesn't really matter if electricians make 50% more.
I guess I don’t believe knowledge work will completely go away.
Its not really a matter of some great shift. Millennials are the most educated generation by a wide margin, yet their wealth by middle age is trailing prior generations. The ladder is being pulled up inch by inch and I don't see AI doing anything other than speeding up that process at the moment.
>Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for the lower class? I don’t mind that trade off.
This sounds like it is written from the perspective of someone who sees their own prosperity increase dramatically so that they end up on the prosperous side of the worsening inequality gap. The fact that those on the other side of the gap see marginal gains in prosperity makes them feel that it all worked out okay for everyone.
I think this is greed typical of the current players in the AI/tech economy. You all saw others getting abundant wealth by landing high-paying jobs with tech companies and you want to not only to do the same, but to one-up your peers. It's really a shame that so much tech-bro identity revolves around personal wealth with zero accountability for the tools that you are building to set yourselves in control of lives of those you have chosen to either leave behind or to wield as tools for further wealth creation through alternate income SaaS subscription streams or other bullshit scams.
There really is not much difference between tech-bros, prosperity gospel grifters or other religious nuts whose only goal is to be more wealthy today than yesterday. It's created a generation of greedy, selfish narcissists who feel that in order to succeed in their industry, they need to be high-functioning autists so they take the path of self-diagnosis and become, as a group, resistant to peer review since anyone who would challenge their bullshit is doing the same thing and unlikely to want too much light shed on their own shady shit. It is funny to me that many of these tech-bros have no problem admitting their drug experimentation since they need to maintain an aura of enlightenment amongst their peers.
It's gonna be a really shitty world when the dopeheads run everything. As someone who grew up back in the day when smoking dope was something hidden and paranoia was a survival instinct for those who chose that path I can see lots of problems for society in the pipeline.
I think you inadvertently stepped in the point — Yes, what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for? Also part of the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What am I going to do with more compute when housing and land are a limited resource.
Gary’s Economics talks about this but in many cases inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up prices.
Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend on the things that matter.
It’s just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.
If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
Land and housing can get costlier while other things get cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take this deal?
I wouldn't be able to hang out with them as much (they'd go do a lot of higher-cost things that I couldn't afford anymore).
I'd have a shittier apartment (they'd drive up the price of the nicer ones, if we're talking about a significant sized group; if it's truly just immediate friends, then instead it's just "they'd all move further away to a nicer area").
So I'd have some more toys but would have a big loss in quality of my social life. Pass.
(If you promised me that those cracks wouldn't happen, sure, it would be great for them. But in practice, having seen this before, it's not really realistic to hold the social fabric together when economic inequality increases rapidly and dramatically.)
No you would have the same house or better. That’s part of the condition.
More to the point, what does research into notions of fairness among primates tell us about the risks of a vast number of participants deciding to take this deal?
You have to tell us the answer so we can resolve your nickname "simianwords" with regard to Poe's Law.
> If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
This boldly assumes the 10k actually reaches me. Meanwhile 100k payouts endlessly land as expected.
usa sources: me+kids+decade of hunger level poverty. no medical coverage for decades. homeless retirement still on the table.
I don't know how nobody has mentioned this before:
The guy with 100k will end up rewriting the rules so that in the next round, he gets 105k and you get 5k.
And people like you will say "well, I'm still better off"
In future rounds, you will try to say "oh, I can't lose 5k for you to get 115k" and when you try to vote, you won't be able to vote, because the guy who has been making 23x what you make has spent his money on making sure it's rigged.
You’re missing the point. It’s not about jealousy it’s basic economics - supply and demand. No I would not take the deal if it raised the demand in something central to my happiness (housing) driving the price up for something previously affordable and make it unaffordable.
I would not trade my house for a better iPhone with higher quality YouTube videos, and slightly more fashionable athleisure.
I don’t care how many yacht’s Elon Musk has, I care how many governments.
What if you could buy the same house as before, buy the same iPhone as before and still have more money remaining? But your house cost way way more proportionally.
If you want to claim that that's a realistic outcome you should look at how people lived in the 50s or 80s vs today, now that we've driven up income inequality by dramatically lowering top-end tax rates and reduced barriers to rich people buying up more and more real property.
What we got is actually: you can't buy the same house as before. You can buy an iPhone that didn't exist then, but your boss can use it to request you do more work after-hours whenever they want. You have less money remaining. You have less free time remaining.
Do you have source for your claim? I have source that supports what I have said - look at disposable income data from BLS
If you’re asking me if I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand basic economics / capitalism, the answer is no. If you’re asking me if I think that in the real world there are negative externalities of inequality in and of itself that makes it more complicated than “everyone gets more but billionaires get more more” than the answer is yes.