AdditionalPizza OP t1_iseu3kh wrote on October 15, 2022 at 1:04 PM

Reply to comment by alvvayson in We've all heard the trope that to be a billionaire you essentially have to be a sociopath; Could we cure that? Is there hope? by AdditionalPizza

I agree we don't need billionaires, but they exist and they have a desire to hoard their money and power.

Can that desire just be leveled out? It must be some mental illness they have, and I'm sure plenty of common folk have it too, just without the luck.

alvvayson t1_isevph3 wrote on October 15, 2022 at 1:18 PM

They only exist as a side effect of our tax code.

FDR basically culled them all (with help of WW1 and the Great Depression) and they only started to come back around the 1980s.

It really is up to the G7 countries, which happen to all be democracies, to decide how we allocate capital across the globe.

We can't cull the desire though. Some people are just wealth maximizers and empire builders and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I actually think it is a good thing, because they help society build capital, which is better than spending everything on short term living.

But just as we decided that it's no longer acceptable to build physical empires by conquering land, at some point we will have to limit how much of the capital stock can be conquered by these empire builders.

AdditionalPizza OP t1_isewqv3 wrote on October 15, 2022 at 1:27 PM

I agree they only exist because of how the world operates. The difficult part is reversing how the world operates. And it just had occurred to me, the hardest solution may be the simplest. Changing billionaires minds, rather than legislation.

Its a matter of time until healthcare takes off in ways we thought were sci-fi. We're also dangerously close to critical unemployment when a few more narrow AI are released that out compete humans in significant sectors.

Things like open ai codex, it doesn't have to replace programmers, but if you increase programmers efficiency by even small percents it has a cascading effect across all sectors of IT.