This focus on super-rich individuals is totally misguided. What's important is the economic system. Rich individuals are simply a nauseating side-effect of capitalism. Nobody really likes it, but there simply isn't anything better. The burden of proof is on the complainers. Even Marxist-sympathetic Peter Singer gets it.
>Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated was still there, and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
> This focus on super-rich individuals is totally misguided. What's important is the economic system. Rich individuals are simply a nauseating side-effect of capitalism. Nobody really likes it, but there simply isn't anything better. The burden of proof is on the complainers.
Serious critics aren't suggesting we do away with capitalism, they're suggesting that it has negative externalities that can be corrected by better taxation. The focus on billionaires is exactly right, because as the model in the article shows, taxation can suppress the extreme inequality that results.
I don't get the productivity argument. What productivity is enabled by billionaires or even individuals? Noam Chomsky has covered this, but most corporations benefit extensively from decades of government funded research and development. The socialist driven productivity is there, it's just that we slap capitalism on it at the end and think it was that that got us here.
I think this is referring to a widely used mental model in economics whereby you look at the allocation of resources "other than money". So if you look at a piece of farmland, you look at how many people it feeds and not so much at the fact that person X owns it and person Y needs to pay X for food. The fact that X becomes richer as a side-effect of Y not having to starve triggers our sense of injustice, but at the end, what really matters is that everyone gets fed. If, trying to right such injustices, you end up with an economic system where that piece of land feeds fewer people, you might have done yourself a disservice.
R&D is just one aspect. Productivity refers to general competent management incentivized by market pressure.
Anti-capitalists apparently can't even run lemonade stands these days:
Well, what is "economy"? Economy exists because we split work, and we do that to optimize taking care of our needs. I make tools for more efficient hunting, you do more efficient hunting with that in order to get food not just for you, but for others, including me, with these. It also means if machines do most of that work there will actually be less economy, but more free time for humans.
If you look at what is commonly called "economy", more and more of what is done there actually has a negative real economic value, it effectively hurts humans. The reason behind that is how we measure this economic value: It is completely broken. But as long as people strongly believe in this garbage, everything is focused on that, even it is trailed by chaos and destruction.
So capitalism, at least in its current form (neo-liberalism), fails as hard as socialism or communism, for that matter. Reason for that: Humans.
I also don't think anyone expects completely equal distribution of everything, but things are so far off in the other corner by now that something needs to be done, fast.
>Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated was still there, and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
http://archive.today/2021.04.25-160837/https://www.newyorker...