> no science, that justifies our current economic conditions.
but there is.
lots and lots and manipulation and misdirection honed thru the ages and written in plain view in traditions and old symbols.
there's a reason old lord of the mannors had dog and horse breeds on their walls, while having power of who marries who on their domains. but modern science will never touch those points. still, there's lot of science on why you agree to the boom bust cycle and all that.
I pulled myself up by my bootstraps once and now I'm the richest person alive.
Paul Graham is forced to appear non-scientific because there is no science, that justifies our current economic conditions. There's the whole field of economics, sure, but that only studies what does happen in our current economy, not how we should run an economy. The only things available to justify our current economic conditions are pseudoscience and appeal to power.
A world where people get rich by starting tech companies that make a mark on the world that appeals to current rich people isn't much better than a world where people get rich by being the children of current rich people. In both cases you get rich by helping the rich class perpetuate itself, not by actually making the world better.
Noahpinion's article misses a point: it talks about how there isn't that much actual wealth and most "wealth" is fake zero-sum financial instruments and since there isn't much actual wealth there isn't much point taxing it. But it ignores that taxing zero-sum financial instrument wealth still alters the world, in a way that many find desirable: simultaneously deleting a positive-value financial instrument from a rich person and its counterpart negative-value financial instrument from a poor person may not change the total net wealth, but it reduces inequality.