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A comment on A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality. Parent comment

Re:A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Ineq... by jeffdavis on Monday November 19, 2018 @04:58PM (#18490097)
Not sure that all the money is moving to those who own the most capital/machines. It seems to be moving to those that have the most data.

Mark Zuckerburg has very little of what I'd call "capital" that actually produces stuff, yet he makes tons of money.

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Re:A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Ineq... by johnchristopher on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @06:09AM (#18493028)
Means of production.
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Re:A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Ineq... by jeffdavis on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @06:59PM (#18507011)
Are you saying that data is the means of production?

I would disgree. Advertising is more important because stuff is less valuable. Therefore the data (which enables effective advertising/selling) is more valuable than the means of production.

They certainly aren't the same thing. You can produce tons of stuff without data. You would just have no idea what to produce or how to sell it.

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Re:A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Ineq... by johnchristopher on Friday November 23, 2018 @06:35PM (#18519510)
> Are you saying that data is the means of production?

No, I was thinking about the infrastructure (servers). I am saying that Facebook has the infrastructure (rackspace) to produce (or subsidize the production) content and the money actually goes to Facebook. I don't know if the reasoning is sound though: would a newspaper own the means of production if they owned the printing machines ?

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Re:A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Ineq... by jeffdavis on Sunday November 25, 2018 @08:00PM (#18530185)
Servers are capital, I agree, but I don't think that's what makes FB valuable. The data is what's valuable, and I think it's a mistake to think of data as capital.
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