What an unhinged rant ! The leaps in logic from niche economics papers covering specific cases to grand totalising assertions about humanity's nature are unexplained and inexplicable. This essay speaks more about your barely concealed superiority complex than about the value of the "lower half" of humanity.
The claim that the lower half of humanity will descend into "Gothic barbarism" is ridiculous on many levels. I know you don't mean your Gothic comparison literally, but I will nevertheless debunk this idea. Firstly, the savagery-barbarism-civilisation typology of classification is obsolete for more than a century and must go into the dustbin of history. Secondly, the Goths very much were capable of understanding Roman politics, society, institutions and culture. In Iberia they established a highly centralised and powerful monarchy based on the model of the Dominate. In Italy they ruled over a kingdom mostly unchanged from the times of the late Western Empire as well until it's takeover by the Eastern Romans. The legacy of Rome was retained across Europe until the Arab invasions. Furthermore the economic decline of the empire was not due to barbarian *Untermenschen* but due to the complex but delicate economy and trade networks of the *Principate* collapsing under the strain of the Crisis of the Third century and the Denarii turning into a fiat currency under the rampant inflation, which gave rise to the cruder but more robust economic structure of the *Dominate* which emphasised serfdom and destroyed bulk trade. The "Barbarians" were not dullards who could not perceive and preserve the Roman legacy, it's destruction was a byproduct of the Arab conquest. Go read about the Pirenne thesis.
With that said, your claims that the upper half of the population is more productive than the lower half is no forbidden knowledge, it is a Tautology that follows from the very definitions of those terms. Moving on to your claim that there would be mass starvation among this hypothetical seperated lower half, that is simply not true. It does not take much cognitive capacity to operate farm machinery or produce fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process. Btw most famine is caused not by shortage of food but by barriers and restrictions on its transport and mobilty, most of which, mind you, are imposed by capitalists and leaders from the upper half of the population. Regarding your assertion that almost all antisocial behaviour would be absent from the hypothetical upper half, this is also not true. Do not the businessmen, managers and politicians of this world empirically have much more psychopathic and sociopathic traits amongst them ?
Also, your claim that the lower half hardly contributes to human progress is untrue. It may be that they have almost nothing to contribute in more g-loaded fields of acheivement and may not have achieved any drastic breakthroughs for humanity. But is not most human progress gradual and incremental, and have not the masses a part to play in it ? It is ludicrous that you claim that art, science, math, liberalism, democracy and so on are due to the elite alone.
Were the cave painters of Lascaux and Altamira "elite" in some way ? What about the those millions of nameless people who established with their own hands the"science of the concrete" ? What about the spontaneous democracy of the small tribe or clan, an atavistic tendency that even under the cruel yoke of the "upper half" emerged in such diverse places,times and contexts as fraternal associations like *collegia*, *guilds*, *sreni*, land and irrigation management systems such as the *mir*, *rundale*, *mash'a* and *subak* and in areas free from your upper half's repression such as Dithmarschen and Frisia ? If not the common man, who built Thebes of the seven gates, who erected the archs of Rome, who raised up the ruins of Babylon ?
If you choose any individual measure such as IQ to demarcate the "upper" and "lower" halves of humanity, then no doubt there are plenty from the lower half who have contributed for the species. If you have socio-economic-status in mind, then does not the existence of social mobility prove that these halves are not set in stone ? But if you delineate them as to keep this division watertight and immutable, does that not result in a tautology and is therefore wrong ?
Remember that most of the disproportionate contributions to progress that has emanated from the "upper class" are due to them having made themselves a parasite class which has not to worry about the grunt work carried out for them by their subordinates. It is due to this forcible division of labour that the elites obtain slack and more chances for contributions. Those ideas which you proclaim are underproduced public goods are themselves largely iterative improvements of other such ideas, and most of the maximal value of those concepts to be extracted under ideal conditions shall be balanced by the debts owed to precursors of those ideas themselves, should people be able to extract royalties from their ideation so effectively as you dream of.
It is not coincidence that any major development in human progress is done near simultaneously by multiple pioneers, such as calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, oxygen by Carl Scheele and Joseph Priestly and the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, because progress is contingent not on individuals and ideas, but on materialistic forces and needs, which influence development of certain concepts, tools or ideas in response to social and economic needs through creative destruction. This materialistic impetus would last regardless of which type of individuals exist.
Your suggestion that we should allow people to capture yet more of the value they create from ideation flies in the face of a reality that has allowed increasingly longer periods of copyright, patent and trademark validity and has received nothing in return. Indeed, this recent increase in the time validity of intellectual property rights is driven not by rational economic arguments but from rent seeking behaviours from corporate companies.
I see not why the Swedish model is inferior to the American one. True, if applied in American conditions it may result in a slower rate of growth and a more slow paced economy. But beyond a certain point, the returns to human happiness from economic abundance steeply drop off. We must remember that economic ideas, including the very concept of growth, are merely means for humanity and not a end in and of itself. While we may have a market economy, we must remember to keep it embedded in wider society, in the Polanyist sense. Even if somehow the absurd assertion by you that the bottom half of society does not contribute in significant ways is true, which it is not, they gain more utils from resources provided to them than to the "elite". Therefore it is necessary for society as a whole to give them unto their last, as unto thee.
'Sweden needs us to not be like Sweden' - took the words right out of my mouth
Also reminds me of this hilarious footnote from a recent Paul Graham essay: "It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome."
But also, if you are blessed as an externality-causer (either at an individual or national level), I think you should take that responsibility as part of the deal. You aren't better, just different.
This seems to point at an important effect and then completely miss it's own point.
Yes. Ideas are important. The smartest people are important. But the smartest people in the world aren't the richest, or anywhere close. The correlation between intelligence and wealth is at best tenuous.
Also, by the time someone is already rich, it's well past the ideal time to invest in them. They have already grown up, been through school and then taken years for their good ideas to pay off. They are quite often getting old.
Also, the marginal increase in ideas per money for these people is tiny. They are already rich.
Also, there is a last-mile effect. Alan Turing contributed more to our understanding of computers than Bill Gates did. But Bill Gates took the ideas the last mile, from prototypes to popular products. Rich people are generally people who do manage to capture the economic value of an idea. Besos managed to capture a large fraction (or perhaps more than) the economic value of the idea of Amazon.
For mathematics, once you have enough money to live on, returns on money start diminishing sharply. You can't think 2x as hard for 10x the money.
What you want to be doing is finding all the 6 year olds with an IQ of 150, and hiring them personal tutors. If you wait until the people are adults doing their own thing in the world, you have already missed the best opportunities.
You want to make sure that there are no eccentric geniuses working menial jobs because they don't fit in with standard academia. You want to fund first principles science A LOT.
What this misses is how people react to taxation. If higher tax rates don't discourage people from working hard then there is no harm.
And there is every reason to think you can support extremely high marginal tax rates before you reach this point (at least for the us where you have to give up very valuable citizenship to escape taxation). The strongest evidence for this is that so few high earners decide to work much less so they can do something else with their time.
That's because the primary reason that people at the top work hard isn't because they want a second iphone but because they either want to to be 'succesfull' and money is a measure of this - a measure that doesn't stop working even if the government taxes it a high marginal rates as long as the best surgeon can buy a car the mediocre one can't -- or because they want rivalrous goods. They want to go to the best restaurant, visit the fanciest hotel etc etc but again this isn't harmed as long as you tax everyone (provided you inch it up slowly and ideally tax inherentence).
"If higher tax rates don't discourage people from working hard then there is no harm."
It sure seems like high earners are harmed by high taxes. You can't just say that they don't want a second iPhone and handwave away the idea that they want to consume or purchase any non-rivalrous goods. The idea that high earners simply want to dine at the best restaurants, and would not mind if all the Michelin-starred restaurants disappeared, leaving Chili's as the best restaurant, is also preposterous. And of course they are harmed by not being able to leave an inheritance for their descendants.
First, I was speaking of societal harm. Certainly the loss of utility to the person taxed isn't zero but that's a different question than whether the tax reduces their incentive to work hard (hypothetically you could imagine someone who actually worked harder when u raise the marginal tax rate...not suggesting that's true but merely illustrating it's a different question).
And if a higher marginal tax rate doesn't reduce the incentive to work then the fact that each extra dollar adds more utility for a poor person than a rich one is a compelling reason to believe such taxes can increase net utility (helps the poor more than it harms the rich).
But while I agree the utility loss isn't zero it's alot closer to that than you suggest. I mean is it really preposterous that alot of our utility is about relative status?
Ask yourself if you would be happier as a wealthy person in 1885 or a poor person today. I think it's obvious that the answer is the wealthy person in 1885. But even the poorest members of society today have possessions and access to services that would have been worth more than the wealth of all but the richest captains of industry in 1885. Imagine you travelled to 1885 and auctioned off access to an iphone the internet, a computer, the closet full of high quality clothes we all have, the chance to live in a modern apartment and even modern medicare level medical care. Even assuming they all work by magic (1885 ppl can't reverse engineer etc) those goods would have been worth a huge fortune. So in objective terms the poor of today are far materially wealthy than the wealthy of the past yet it still sucks to be poor today and was pretty good to be rich in the past.
And I don't think it's that hard to understand at least part of the mechanism. Don't you think someone who bought a really fancy sports car in 1940 got essentially the same amount of joy from owning such high performing car as someone who buys a Ferrari today? Even though a car with the performance of the 1940's sports car wouldn't be at all impressive today. That strongly suggest alot of consumption is ultimately about relative performance/coolness/etc and that higher taxes on the very rich wouldn't really reduce their utility very much at all.
Also, it's what you should expect a priori given that evolution shaped us to care about things that improve our ability to attract good mates and produce successful offspring. Given we all now have the food and antibiotics that keep our kids from dying should it be surprising that relative status would start to dominate?
What are you talking about. Our clothes are constructed with wonder materials they couldn't dream about and with much much higher quality sewing, weaving etc.
That doesn't always mean more durable -- if people are going to throw out the item after spilling some pizza on it or snagging it rather than patching and sewing it that would just waste resources -- but if you want durable clothes they are easily found and quite cheap.
Our clothes are made of plastic that causes cancer, endocrine disruption, and infertility. Oh and they are made by slaves.
You can still buy clothes that are well-made but they will cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars, which, incidentally, is what well-made clothing has always cost when adjusted for inflation.
You may not like our clothes now but that's your preference. They are what most people want and someone in the 1860s would have fucking loved that shit.
I’ve been asked something like “so you think Bezos has more worth than you?”
Of course! What kind of question is that? It’s so obvious to me, but many disagree. Perhaps they think they are just as valuable as Bezos or Musk are, but I have no idea how they come to that conclusion.
Good question, but you probably already know the answer to this.
It's just Liberalism (all of Liberalism, not just woke or whatever), which developed from protestant Christian values. The modern Liberal West for better or worse was founded on the idea that we're all equal, down to its essence it's a secular religion.
This is going to be a major problem for the west once AI replaces all human labor, because the class divide is going to become so massive between the elite and the useless people that it's either going to be solved through UBI (elites throwing a bone to the parasites basically) or eugenics. I don't care if Yuval Noah Harari is for "midwits", he is 100% correct that this is going to be the biggest problem we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century and it's not going to be rosy. He and Moldbug at least.
I'm not an economist, but from what I've read I am doubtful that labor is fully replaced by AI. My guess is that it just increases productivity, but that humans would still do things.
I fear for the people in the bottom 85-90% of the ability distribution. I think we are already fast approaching the point where these people can be replaced in most cognitively taxing activities. Maybe it’s just that I’m one of these people, but I deeply worry what will happen in a society where these people are “superfluous”—an execrable term in this context, by the way.
The word "worth" has two distinct meanings. By one meaning, human value, we are all worth the same. By the other meaning, economic value, the invisible hand is *highly* discriminatory.
I believe conflating economic and human value is the ur-mistake of Marxism. The average worker does not produce the same economic value as the CEO, and the fact that the latter earns so much than the former does not mean he has acquired it by theft.
(The idea that we should all be remunerated according to the economic value of our output is quite a different story, of course. In a world where some people can generate quite literally a million times the average value, it seems suboptimal to do things this way.)
"The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education."
Auto dealers are easily in the top half of the distribution. You're also underestimating the importance of sales. The most common way historically to become a millionaire in the USA is through sales. You make some good points but check your facts a bit first please.
Thats smth you think he's implying and he very well could be, but that sort of makes his point starker, even smarter than average ppl cannot aggregate to produce the thoughts and contributions of a Neumann
Splitting humanity into halves is more like cutting a bagel than a loaf of bread. The current population descends from a small population of tough-as-nails survivors. The bell curve is tight. Humans are, mostly, just as smart, dedicated, lazy, suspicious, caring, and loving as you or I am.
God this really is a blackpill isn't it. The ideas here I find abhorrent really - but my reflexive disgust has no impact on whether or not they are in fact true.
Society has a social obligation to look after the bottom half. Human compassion trumps cold-blooded economics in this case. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend that their innate human value is at all the same thing as their line-goes-up value to the wider economy.
When discussing taxation, we ought to distinguish income form consumption taxation.
Another point to consider are how much effort that would go into increasing consumption is an attempt to raise consumption relative to other consumers compared to a leisure/consumption tradeoff? The prices of Michelangelos fall.
Something else to consider is the need to distinguish the top half ex post and ex ante. How meritocratic is the society to allow "natural aristocracy" to emerge?
What an unhinged rant ! The leaps in logic from niche economics papers covering specific cases to grand totalising assertions about humanity's nature are unexplained and inexplicable. This essay speaks more about your barely concealed superiority complex than about the value of the "lower half" of humanity.
The claim that the lower half of humanity will descend into "Gothic barbarism" is ridiculous on many levels. I know you don't mean your Gothic comparison literally, but I will nevertheless debunk this idea. Firstly, the savagery-barbarism-civilisation typology of classification is obsolete for more than a century and must go into the dustbin of history. Secondly, the Goths very much were capable of understanding Roman politics, society, institutions and culture. In Iberia they established a highly centralised and powerful monarchy based on the model of the Dominate. In Italy they ruled over a kingdom mostly unchanged from the times of the late Western Empire as well until it's takeover by the Eastern Romans. The legacy of Rome was retained across Europe until the Arab invasions. Furthermore the economic decline of the empire was not due to barbarian *Untermenschen* but due to the complex but delicate economy and trade networks of the *Principate* collapsing under the strain of the Crisis of the Third century and the Denarii turning into a fiat currency under the rampant inflation, which gave rise to the cruder but more robust economic structure of the *Dominate* which emphasised serfdom and destroyed bulk trade. The "Barbarians" were not dullards who could not perceive and preserve the Roman legacy, it's destruction was a byproduct of the Arab conquest. Go read about the Pirenne thesis.
With that said, your claims that the upper half of the population is more productive than the lower half is no forbidden knowledge, it is a Tautology that follows from the very definitions of those terms. Moving on to your claim that there would be mass starvation among this hypothetical seperated lower half, that is simply not true. It does not take much cognitive capacity to operate farm machinery or produce fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process. Btw most famine is caused not by shortage of food but by barriers and restrictions on its transport and mobilty, most of which, mind you, are imposed by capitalists and leaders from the upper half of the population. Regarding your assertion that almost all antisocial behaviour would be absent from the hypothetical upper half, this is also not true. Do not the businessmen, managers and politicians of this world empirically have much more psychopathic and sociopathic traits amongst them ?
Also, your claim that the lower half hardly contributes to human progress is untrue. It may be that they have almost nothing to contribute in more g-loaded fields of acheivement and may not have achieved any drastic breakthroughs for humanity. But is not most human progress gradual and incremental, and have not the masses a part to play in it ? It is ludicrous that you claim that art, science, math, liberalism, democracy and so on are due to the elite alone.
Were the cave painters of Lascaux and Altamira "elite" in some way ? What about the those millions of nameless people who established with their own hands the"science of the concrete" ? What about the spontaneous democracy of the small tribe or clan, an atavistic tendency that even under the cruel yoke of the "upper half" emerged in such diverse places,times and contexts as fraternal associations like *collegia*, *guilds*, *sreni*, land and irrigation management systems such as the *mir*, *rundale*, *mash'a* and *subak* and in areas free from your upper half's repression such as Dithmarschen and Frisia ? If not the common man, who built Thebes of the seven gates, who erected the archs of Rome, who raised up the ruins of Babylon ?
If you choose any individual measure such as IQ to demarcate the "upper" and "lower" halves of humanity, then no doubt there are plenty from the lower half who have contributed for the species. If you have socio-economic-status in mind, then does not the existence of social mobility prove that these halves are not set in stone ? But if you delineate them as to keep this division watertight and immutable, does that not result in a tautology and is therefore wrong ?
Remember that most of the disproportionate contributions to progress that has emanated from the "upper class" are due to them having made themselves a parasite class which has not to worry about the grunt work carried out for them by their subordinates. It is due to this forcible division of labour that the elites obtain slack and more chances for contributions. Those ideas which you proclaim are underproduced public goods are themselves largely iterative improvements of other such ideas, and most of the maximal value of those concepts to be extracted under ideal conditions shall be balanced by the debts owed to precursors of those ideas themselves, should people be able to extract royalties from their ideation so effectively as you dream of.
It is not coincidence that any major development in human progress is done near simultaneously by multiple pioneers, such as calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, oxygen by Carl Scheele and Joseph Priestly and the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, because progress is contingent not on individuals and ideas, but on materialistic forces and needs, which influence development of certain concepts, tools or ideas in response to social and economic needs through creative destruction. This materialistic impetus would last regardless of which type of individuals exist.
Your suggestion that we should allow people to capture yet more of the value they create from ideation flies in the face of a reality that has allowed increasingly longer periods of copyright, patent and trademark validity and has received nothing in return. Indeed, this recent increase in the time validity of intellectual property rights is driven not by rational economic arguments but from rent seeking behaviours from corporate companies.
I see not why the Swedish model is inferior to the American one. True, if applied in American conditions it may result in a slower rate of growth and a more slow paced economy. But beyond a certain point, the returns to human happiness from economic abundance steeply drop off. We must remember that economic ideas, including the very concept of growth, are merely means for humanity and not a end in and of itself. While we may have a market economy, we must remember to keep it embedded in wider society, in the Polanyist sense. Even if somehow the absurd assertion by you that the bottom half of society does not contribute in significant ways is true, which it is not, they gain more utils from resources provided to them than to the "elite". Therefore it is necessary for society as a whole to give them unto their last, as unto thee.
'Sweden needs us to not be like Sweden' - took the words right out of my mouth
Also reminds me of this hilarious footnote from a recent Paul Graham essay: "It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome."
But also, if you are blessed as an externality-causer (either at an individual or national level), I think you should take that responsibility as part of the deal. You aren't better, just different.
This seems to point at an important effect and then completely miss it's own point.
Yes. Ideas are important. The smartest people are important. But the smartest people in the world aren't the richest, or anywhere close. The correlation between intelligence and wealth is at best tenuous.
Also, by the time someone is already rich, it's well past the ideal time to invest in them. They have already grown up, been through school and then taken years for their good ideas to pay off. They are quite often getting old.
Also, the marginal increase in ideas per money for these people is tiny. They are already rich.
Also, there is a last-mile effect. Alan Turing contributed more to our understanding of computers than Bill Gates did. But Bill Gates took the ideas the last mile, from prototypes to popular products. Rich people are generally people who do manage to capture the economic value of an idea. Besos managed to capture a large fraction (or perhaps more than) the economic value of the idea of Amazon.
For mathematics, once you have enough money to live on, returns on money start diminishing sharply. You can't think 2x as hard for 10x the money.
What you want to be doing is finding all the 6 year olds with an IQ of 150, and hiring them personal tutors. If you wait until the people are adults doing their own thing in the world, you have already missed the best opportunities.
You want to make sure that there are no eccentric geniuses working menial jobs because they don't fit in with standard academia. You want to fund first principles science A LOT.
Or at least not actively smother them in environments that discourage excellence and cater to the least common denominator.
What this misses is how people react to taxation. If higher tax rates don't discourage people from working hard then there is no harm.
And there is every reason to think you can support extremely high marginal tax rates before you reach this point (at least for the us where you have to give up very valuable citizenship to escape taxation). The strongest evidence for this is that so few high earners decide to work much less so they can do something else with their time.
That's because the primary reason that people at the top work hard isn't because they want a second iphone but because they either want to to be 'succesfull' and money is a measure of this - a measure that doesn't stop working even if the government taxes it a high marginal rates as long as the best surgeon can buy a car the mediocre one can't -- or because they want rivalrous goods. They want to go to the best restaurant, visit the fanciest hotel etc etc but again this isn't harmed as long as you tax everyone (provided you inch it up slowly and ideally tax inherentence).
"If higher tax rates don't discourage people from working hard then there is no harm."
It sure seems like high earners are harmed by high taxes. You can't just say that they don't want a second iPhone and handwave away the idea that they want to consume or purchase any non-rivalrous goods. The idea that high earners simply want to dine at the best restaurants, and would not mind if all the Michelin-starred restaurants disappeared, leaving Chili's as the best restaurant, is also preposterous. And of course they are harmed by not being able to leave an inheritance for their descendants.
First, I was speaking of societal harm. Certainly the loss of utility to the person taxed isn't zero but that's a different question than whether the tax reduces their incentive to work hard (hypothetically you could imagine someone who actually worked harder when u raise the marginal tax rate...not suggesting that's true but merely illustrating it's a different question).
And if a higher marginal tax rate doesn't reduce the incentive to work then the fact that each extra dollar adds more utility for a poor person than a rich one is a compelling reason to believe such taxes can increase net utility (helps the poor more than it harms the rich).
But while I agree the utility loss isn't zero it's alot closer to that than you suggest. I mean is it really preposterous that alot of our utility is about relative status?
Ask yourself if you would be happier as a wealthy person in 1885 or a poor person today. I think it's obvious that the answer is the wealthy person in 1885. But even the poorest members of society today have possessions and access to services that would have been worth more than the wealth of all but the richest captains of industry in 1885. Imagine you travelled to 1885 and auctioned off access to an iphone the internet, a computer, the closet full of high quality clothes we all have, the chance to live in a modern apartment and even modern medicare level medical care. Even assuming they all work by magic (1885 ppl can't reverse engineer etc) those goods would have been worth a huge fortune. So in objective terms the poor of today are far materially wealthy than the wealthy of the past yet it still sucks to be poor today and was pretty good to be rich in the past.
And I don't think it's that hard to understand at least part of the mechanism. Don't you think someone who bought a really fancy sports car in 1940 got essentially the same amount of joy from owning such high performing car as someone who buys a Ferrari today? Even though a car with the performance of the 1940's sports car wouldn't be at all impressive today. That strongly suggest alot of consumption is ultimately about relative performance/coolness/etc and that higher taxes on the very rich wouldn't really reduce their utility very much at all.
Also, it's what you should expect a priori given that evolution shaped us to care about things that improve our ability to attract good mates and produce successful offspring. Given we all now have the food and antibiotics that keep our kids from dying should it be surprising that relative status would start to dominate?
“High quality clothes”? No.
What are you talking about. Our clothes are constructed with wonder materials they couldn't dream about and with much much higher quality sewing, weaving etc.
That doesn't always mean more durable -- if people are going to throw out the item after spilling some pizza on it or snagging it rather than patching and sewing it that would just waste resources -- but if you want durable clothes they are easily found and quite cheap.
Our clothes are made of plastic that causes cancer, endocrine disruption, and infertility. Oh and they are made by slaves.
You can still buy clothes that are well-made but they will cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars, which, incidentally, is what well-made clothing has always cost when adjusted for inflation.
You may not like our clothes now but that's your preference. They are what most people want and someone in the 1860s would have fucking loved that shit.
I’ve been asked something like “so you think Bezos has more worth than you?”
Of course! What kind of question is that? It’s so obvious to me, but many disagree. Perhaps they think they are just as valuable as Bezos or Musk are, but I have no idea how they come to that conclusion.
Good question, but you probably already know the answer to this.
It's just Liberalism (all of Liberalism, not just woke or whatever), which developed from protestant Christian values. The modern Liberal West for better or worse was founded on the idea that we're all equal, down to its essence it's a secular religion.
This is going to be a major problem for the west once AI replaces all human labor, because the class divide is going to become so massive between the elite and the useless people that it's either going to be solved through UBI (elites throwing a bone to the parasites basically) or eugenics. I don't care if Yuval Noah Harari is for "midwits", he is 100% correct that this is going to be the biggest problem we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century and it's not going to be rosy. He and Moldbug at least.
I'm not an economist, but from what I've read I am doubtful that labor is fully replaced by AI. My guess is that it just increases productivity, but that humans would still do things.
By the time labor is fully replaced by AI we will have reached the singularity, and all economic concerns become moot.
Before that point, the replacement of labor with AI will be a gradual process. The low-skill cohorts are likely to be the ones replaced first.
I fear for the people in the bottom 85-90% of the ability distribution. I think we are already fast approaching the point where these people can be replaced in most cognitively taxing activities. Maybe it’s just that I’m one of these people, but I deeply worry what will happen in a society where these people are “superfluous”—an execrable term in this context, by the way.
The word "worth" has two distinct meanings. By one meaning, human value, we are all worth the same. By the other meaning, economic value, the invisible hand is *highly* discriminatory.
I believe conflating economic and human value is the ur-mistake of Marxism. The average worker does not produce the same economic value as the CEO, and the fact that the latter earns so much than the former does not mean he has acquired it by theft.
(The idea that we should all be remunerated according to the economic value of our output is quite a different story, of course. In a world where some people can generate quite literally a million times the average value, it seems suboptimal to do things this way.)
"The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education."
- Adam Smith
In what other context would we accept unqualified the views of a man from the 1700s on biology?
Auto dealers are easily in the top half of the distribution. You're also underestimating the importance of sales. The most common way historically to become a millionaire in the USA is through sales. You make some good points but check your facts a bit first please.
Thats smth you think he's implying and he very well could be, but that sort of makes his point starker, even smarter than average ppl cannot aggregate to produce the thoughts and contributions of a Neumann
> even smarter than average ppl cannot aggregate to produce the thoughts and contributions of a Neumann
But he is talking about lowering tax rates on the very rich because they were so productive.
And there are plenty of thicko celebrities (boxers, footballers, actors etc) that are way
richer than Von Neumann.
So it would make more sense to tax the rich celebs, and give the money to the poor but gifted kids.
Long live John Galt!
Splitting humanity into halves is more like cutting a bagel than a loaf of bread. The current population descends from a small population of tough-as-nails survivors. The bell curve is tight. Humans are, mostly, just as smart, dedicated, lazy, suspicious, caring, and loving as you or I am.
For certain definitions of human, maybe.
While the US is undoubtedly the world leader in most fields of innovation, it only has 4% of the world’s humans.
The benefits of US innovation indeed very quickly spill over to the rest of the world, but the US does not capture these benefits directly.
Arguments around optimal taxation have to be made at global level, and global tax coordination is very difficult.
What ability are you talking about?
If you mean IQ you're wrong. I know lots of high IQ women and they have negative economic value.
Their role is to make smart babies.
God this really is a blackpill isn't it. The ideas here I find abhorrent really - but my reflexive disgust has no impact on whether or not they are in fact true.
Society has a social obligation to look after the bottom half. Human compassion trumps cold-blooded economics in this case. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend that their innate human value is at all the same thing as their line-goes-up value to the wider economy.
When discussing taxation, we ought to distinguish income form consumption taxation.
Another point to consider are how much effort that would go into increasing consumption is an attempt to raise consumption relative to other consumers compared to a leisure/consumption tradeoff? The prices of Michelangelos fall.
Something else to consider is the need to distinguish the top half ex post and ex ante. How meritocratic is the society to allow "natural aristocracy" to emerge?