The problem with the super wealthy isn't that they are rich, but that they are powerful. You can shape and change the world by buying politicians, funding NGOs, and demanding that the media you fund run the stories you want them to, while suppressing ones that you do not like. And right now, there isn't a lot we can do about this.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty poor article compared to his other stuff.
I suspect Alexander is eventually going to end up a communist. Not because that's the right answer to anything but simply because his primary income and role in society now comes from his status as being a public intellectual (of sorts) and the psychiatry is increasingly a side business, or so I understand. At least it cannot pay as well as Substack does. Communism is the kind of idea that appeals strongly to intellectuals who write or want to write a lot about society. So maybe not a big shock to see him write weird arguments about redistribution.
Another reason for suspicion that it's going that way - the odd focus on super-intelligent AI risk and "effective altruism". Obsession with the coming arrival of a world-ending crisis that only a small clique of intellectuals is smart enough to perceive is a common marker of intellectual corruption, especially if it involves arguments about exponential growth. Whether it's the collapse of capitalism, overpopulation, COVID, climate change, the "sperm crisis" etc, people who are paid to sit around and theorize all day frequently seem to end up concluding the world will end without their unique insight.
If I'm right about this trend it's a pity, but c'est la vie. All good things come to an end. Alexander has still gifted the world a great body of excellent articles that will probably be famous long after he's dead.
-Maybe Wal-Mart should give K-Mart some sort of "land acknowledgment" on every sale. K-Mart got to most of where Wal-Mart eventually got to before Wal-Mart did.
-I wonder if Scott A would agree to redistribute his substack revenue to Doc or Arnold on the ground that all Scott A ever did was recognize a niche and fill it.
-Scott A's argument falls prey to some of the EA issues you pointed out in your "help a friend move" essay. As you suggest, he's trying to add up all of Amazon's value *to society* without recognizing that this total value is an accumulation of millions of voluntary transactions, each of which created value for Amazon and whichever of its employees or customers was involved in each transaction (those parties themselves being the units that make up the *society* who got the value Scott A is trying to calculate). It seems to me that Scott A is just mood-affiliating and then attempting to use logic to justify it post hoc, while simultaneously ignoring the logic that goes against the argument.
-Scott appears to have set up a very good example of a strawman in the "The typical neoliberal defense..." paragraph.
-Full disclosure: I did not read the entire ACX post or Arnold's post.
"losing that first duel wouldn’t be good for your career, but you also had to win the next 99…"
I think this gets to the heart of Scott's hypothetical. Not only did Bezos have to win 99 more duels, he had to risk his life (fortune) every step of the way. If we set a cap at some amount (say one billion), then that also caps the incentive to further risk existing capital behind new ideas. By accepting the possibility of limitless rewards, we are in effect incentivizing knowledge creation (the knowledge of how to build and operate an effective online shopping process). This is no trivial matter.
Bezos made a fortune by making the world a better place. In other times, with other institutions, people made fortunes by impoverishing everyone else. Yet, intellectuals pat themselves on their own backs by creating arguments to neuter the guys that are adding value.
The problem with the super wealthy isn't that they are rich, but that they are powerful. You can shape and change the world by buying politicians, funding NGOs, and demanding that the media you fund run the stories you want them to, while suppressing ones that you do not like. And right now, there isn't a lot we can do about this.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty poor article compared to his other stuff.
I suspect Alexander is eventually going to end up a communist. Not because that's the right answer to anything but simply because his primary income and role in society now comes from his status as being a public intellectual (of sorts) and the psychiatry is increasingly a side business, or so I understand. At least it cannot pay as well as Substack does. Communism is the kind of idea that appeals strongly to intellectuals who write or want to write a lot about society. So maybe not a big shock to see him write weird arguments about redistribution.
Another reason for suspicion that it's going that way - the odd focus on super-intelligent AI risk and "effective altruism". Obsession with the coming arrival of a world-ending crisis that only a small clique of intellectuals is smart enough to perceive is a common marker of intellectual corruption, especially if it involves arguments about exponential growth. Whether it's the collapse of capitalism, overpopulation, COVID, climate change, the "sperm crisis" etc, people who are paid to sit around and theorize all day frequently seem to end up concluding the world will end without their unique insight.
If I'm right about this trend it's a pity, but c'est la vie. All good things come to an end. Alexander has still gifted the world a great body of excellent articles that will probably be famous long after he's dead.
This is so good.
-Maybe Wal-Mart should give K-Mart some sort of "land acknowledgment" on every sale. K-Mart got to most of where Wal-Mart eventually got to before Wal-Mart did.
-I wonder if Scott A would agree to redistribute his substack revenue to Doc or Arnold on the ground that all Scott A ever did was recognize a niche and fill it.
-Scott A's argument falls prey to some of the EA issues you pointed out in your "help a friend move" essay. As you suggest, he's trying to add up all of Amazon's value *to society* without recognizing that this total value is an accumulation of millions of voluntary transactions, each of which created value for Amazon and whichever of its employees or customers was involved in each transaction (those parties themselves being the units that make up the *society* who got the value Scott A is trying to calculate). It seems to me that Scott A is just mood-affiliating and then attempting to use logic to justify it post hoc, while simultaneously ignoring the logic that goes against the argument.
-Scott appears to have set up a very good example of a strawman in the "The typical neoliberal defense..." paragraph.
-Full disclosure: I did not read the entire ACX post or Arnold's post.
"losing that first duel wouldn’t be good for your career, but you also had to win the next 99…"
I think this gets to the heart of Scott's hypothetical. Not only did Bezos have to win 99 more duels, he had to risk his life (fortune) every step of the way. If we set a cap at some amount (say one billion), then that also caps the incentive to further risk existing capital behind new ideas. By accepting the possibility of limitless rewards, we are in effect incentivizing knowledge creation (the knowledge of how to build and operate an effective online shopping process). This is no trivial matter.
Bezos made a fortune by making the world a better place. In other times, with other institutions, people made fortunes by impoverishing everyone else. Yet, intellectuals pat themselves on their own backs by creating arguments to neuter the guys that are adding value.