20 Comments
User's avatar
Ido Hartogsohn's avatar

Well when they calculated innovators capture just 2% of the value created by their inventions I'm quite certain they didn't mean people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Meanwhile inequality is rising in the US and in the world, and life expectancy is coming down. Also, we will overshoot the Paris accord temperature goal. One of the few problems greed is not likely to solve soon. Instead we have job-destroying AI on the near horizon and a very unknowable and not necessarily bright future ahead. I’m not sure what to wish for to be honest.

James Pethokoukis's avatar

The story about inequality is not what you think it is. You should start there. Same goes for producing abundant clean energy. I know it's hard to hear this!

Max More's avatar

What are you talking about? Life expectancy is rising both in the USA and the world. Inequality -- a biased way of saying "differences in income or wealth" --is decreasing globally. Get away from your ideology and look at the actual facts.

Josego's avatar

Inequality is decreasing between nations but not within nations, hence the internal wealth of nations is captured by the minority of rich people like your daddy Elon. https://www.scribd.com/document/968429719/WIR26-Executive-Summary-English

jabster's avatar

Why is (wealth or income) inequality a problem?

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Rising inequality is. If an increasingly large portion of the population is having trouble feeding their kids while a tiny fraction captures trillions while paying for politics to spare them from paying fair taxes like they do now, you have a recipe for social unrest.

Magane's avatar

It never gets old when people who support immigration complain about ā€œinequalityā€ and jobs being replaced by AI

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Immigration does not necessarily reinforce inequality. It is structural with very low minimum wage jobs. So far jobs lost due to AI have been high paying jobs in AI companies, completely different population. Janitors are not likely to replaced by AI soon. Uber drivers maybe.

Magane's avatar

There are specifically visas designed to target those more well-off, such as H1Bs, O-1 Visa, EB-1, H-1B1 (from specific countries), TN Visa, etc. Certainly, they more often opt for outsourcing in such cases.

jabster's avatar

The problem you describe there is with insufficient government revenue for a more generous welfare state, or economic stimuli to spur growth and employment. Not ā€œinequalityā€ per se.

I asked Claude to tell me how much more revenue we could bring in if we raised the income tax code to the Laffer max (which we should do, btw). Its answer was about $400-600 billion. That still leaves us with an annual deficit of about $1.4-1.6 trillion.

If you want a more generous welfare state (and depending on the details, I might support that), we have both a revenue issue and a spending issue to address first.

Not sure what you would want beyond that.

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Maybe given the fantastically effective military the US has at present, The People could decide to spend less on this.

Flash Sheridan's avatar

Putting data centers in heliocentric orbit, per the SpaceX prospectus (disclaimer: I read it and invested) would help global warming as well as the NIMBY problem. As for inequality, that rose whenever I got a raise, as did relative poverty; actual poverty is worth worrying about, and Musk helped that by making some SpaceX manual laborers millionaires yesterday. Inequality looks bad to the envious but is not a real problem.

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Datacenter in orbit are not feasible.

Flash Sheridan's avatar

Please share with us your astronautical engineering qualifications, and the page numbers of the prospectus on which you discovered errors Mr Musk and his team somehow overlooked.

Hugues Talbot's avatar

You seem to believe M. Musk makes his announcements based on carefully vetted engineering studies by his world-renowned team of experts. I don't think this is the case.

Thank you for spurring me to share my quick back-of-the-enveloppe study on this challenge. Take a look at my page here on Substack.

Best

Flash Sheridan's avatar

I’m afraid the latest posting from you I see is March 5th, ā€œDreaming of a Blue Texas.ā€

Hugues Talbot's avatar

Yes sorry it took me a while to format things. It's my first real post.

Ministry of Truth's avatar

It’s good news because it achievable and some kid somewhere is challenging and motivating him or herself to become the first Zillionaire as I post this. It’s called healthy competition.

jabster's avatar

I’m excited for all of the tech that will come out of SpaceX that can be used for other purposes.