Re:Just Be Rich
by abecedarius on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @01:36PM
(#26796007)
Until roughly 1800, per capita wealth was roughly stagnant. Since then, it's increased roughly 50 times. Maybe more controversially, I'd say we're nowhere near the limits of further development to even greater wealth: technology is a long way from physical limits (e.g. compare biology to human tech), our access to resources has barely begun (e.g. solar power and resources from space).
How do you look at this history and think the right way to approach it is as a fight over who gets what part of an existing pie? That was the standard conceptualization in the beginning! It can't be the key to the 50x change. The recent headwinds against equality have also been a period of relative stagnation in productivity growth. Shouldn't we look really earnestly into how the hell progress happened in the first place?
Yes, we also have a big problem in that poverty should not exist in a society this rich. But this is genuinely a first-world problem. Job 1 is to not screw up what got us here in the first place.
Even if the pie keeps growing for everyone, the rich are taking a bigger and bigger proportion of the pie, and proportion is what makes you poor. If I have 10% of a $10M the pie today and you have 90%, and tomorrow I have 5% of a $20M pie and you have 95%, then you have proportionally taken from me, and I am worse off, despite having the same absolute dollars "pie equity".