It does seem as though political opinion is moving in the direction of reducing attempts to mitigate then problem at the low end.
Also unconsidered is the idea that one period of adaptation early in one's life is no longer enough, and that is a new consequence of technological change that wasn't true during the heyday of the large corporation.
If the 'poor' and 'middle classes' simply don't have the resources to devote to accomodating change and developing new skills, their position will be systematically enforced. Information may be more widely available than ever, but learning still takes a long time and requires practice, and tacit knowledge is ever more important.
Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply anything about economic policy? I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. Economics are sentiment driven by a huge factor. Robert Shiller's work in behavioral economics and his book Irrational exuberance has established and popularized this idea. Krugman's discussion of the unsuitability of BitCoin as a currency rests largely on the peculiar nature of human sentiment and behavior. Large income gaps are perceived by most people as unfair irrespective of the contributions by the wealthy. No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. I don't think the association of the net worth of an individual to the contribution that they have made to society is very strong. Economies rewards people largely on the basis of demand/supply with I believe is a weak proxy for social contributions.
Perhaps you want to draw an analogy to say gay marriage where the popular vote might end up denying gay rights, but I don't think a similar argument holds in the case of wealth distribution.
Um, I do.
But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.
When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other
people were able to understand it.
However, the General theory was a far greater achievement than the Special theory, because the idea of mass influencing the geometry of space-time was far less obvious and it may have been a decade before anyone else would have investigated that possibility. Nevertheless: someone else would have come up with it. Einstein was no greater than any of the other great physicists of the time, who each had brilliant idea. Einstein just happened to have one that became widely known.
But it is really off topic. Let's say Einstein and his contemporaries are more important than Bill, the guy who really made DOS, and the first few MS employees, but obviously the later group is a lot wealthier.
This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.
> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity
They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.
This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.
In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.
Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.
And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field.
I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible.
However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.
Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.
Windows is a better corporate OS than any of the alternatives and Office is an awesome piece of software by any standard.
While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
Hardware is king - try executing your code manually if you disagree. Try wiring the world with a particularly clever algorithm or executing that massively parallel algorithm on a single-core CPU.
When he says software is king he means that it's profitable to dominate because its incremental costs are minimal. And with the DMCA preventing reverse engineering, software patents preventing use of trivial algorithms, etc, they're assuring the monarchy will last forever.
> If Apple/Amiga had won that round we [...]
... could still have a free market where competitors weren't locked out before they started.
Microsoft delivered crippled products to its customers specifically to preserve its marketshare. If I did that as a consultant it'd be criminal.
> poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
Hardware is ultimately fungible so the same boom would have occurred regardless. The boom was happening before MS and the PC, and before Apple too.
Just as an example, it'd be as reasonable to credit RMS for the hardware commoditization as Gates. Stallman was largely personally responsible for reinventing proprietary lisp-machine functionality. By killing off one of the most potentially profitable specialized hardware companies Stallman started the commodity hardware trend.
If anyone really influenced it though it was one of the computing pioneers like Turing simply by proving computational equivalence. After that it's a given.
If we're genetically constructed to feel unhappy about something, and we build a society that makes that thing true, then it seems as though we are manufacturing suffering, and we should seek to reduce it.
From what perspective can it be 'right' to knowingly maintain a society where the majority of people are guaranteed to suffer?
Also - isn't there a giant difference between 'banning being rich', and making it possible for a reasonable number of people to share in prosperity. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that the US was more prosperous when there was less inequality, and yet there were always some very rich people.