The working poor pay into FICA which is a greater percentage of their cash flow. They get it back upon annual tax reconciliation. The same entitlement programs nonetheless have lots of unfunded liabilities so the money has already been allocated even if it's not currently "there" -- 'The Rich' are beneficiaries of entitlement spending too.
It's a simpler situation than that. Regardless of proportions of payment, we already have a percentage of the population whose public services are paid for by someone else, either directly through income or divided tax or indirectly through higher prices from corporation tax, or more indirectly through inflationary monetary policy.
In other words: we don't need to invent taxing people with more money more. We have that. Millions of people are partly or fully paid for by others. We might want to adjust it, but we don't need to pretend we're doing something revolutionary in doing so.
The Yard sale model in this post demonstrates that rich people are not necessarily better at allocating capital even if/as they accumulate and compound it faster.
The military is NOT where most spending goes - most spending goes to the entitlement programs: social security and Medicare.
It does not demonstrate that at all. It assumes everyone, rich and poor, is exactly equal at allocating capital because they all have a flat 50% chance to make money on every investment.
In reality some poor people are savvy investors and become rich and some rich people are foolish investors and become poor.
What it demonstrates is that people with equal investing skills will see radically unequal outcomes, based entirely on their pre-existing wealth. Presumably you could update this model to give some people “better investing skills” and others worse skills. (In practice you’d just bias the coin flip against the ‘worse’ investors.) I suspect that once inequality has crept into the game then even having “better investing skills” is outweighed by the advantage of being already-rich. But I haven’t run the simulation to see how much investing advantage gets wiped out by wealth inequality: seems like it would be a fun project to code up with my 15y/o.
> What it demonstrates is that people with equal investing skills will see radically unequal outcomes, based entirely on their pre-existing wealth.
Well, duh. Did anyone think otherwise? Obviously a great investor with $1,000,000 will make more money than a great investor with $100. That's not some nefarious plot of evil capitalists to keep down the poors, it's just the math of how percentages work.
What system could possibly eliminate that advantage without destroying the incentive to invest at all? If you're managing a million dollars and you are unable to make any more money than you would investing $100, then why would you invest? What would people do with their money in that case? Hide it under a mattress?
TFA talks about all of this. The point of the article is that in a system with a finite amount of wealth, even a society that starts equal will eventually become highly unequal: as long as there is continued betting/competition where all parties have an equal risk tolerance corresponding to their income. The concentrating effects of these bets is the important lesson. TFA describes some ways to avoid this outcome.
But TFA article is completely unrelated to the real world.
There is not a finite amount of wealth. People create new wealth through innovation.
People do not mindlessly continue the same investing strategy when incentives change. If you reduce the expected return from an investment, they stop investing in it.
So any strategies that might be useful for the contrived game described in the article are not relevant to the real world.
Nearly every economic action you take can be viewed as an investment or bet. Getting up in the morning and going to work represents a bet that your compensation will be worth the time spent. Sending your kids to school/college is an even more obvious example. For self-employed people all of this gets much more literal: every job involves a tradeoff of time and resources that could be spent on different projects. Even open-source hobby projects are can be a time-investment in building your resume. These "bets" have counterparties as well: for example, your employer can afford to negotiate much harder than you can on salary, because you need a job and health insurance more than they need you.
I also agree that this is a simplified model. But its simplicity is what makes it elegant: you can see the effect in a model that lacks all of the complexity of real-world economic activity. In the real world the "bets" are more complicated and the odds more variable, but you can't just claim "this effect must go away" without articulating a clear reason that it would.
The reasonable point you do make is that in our current economy the "pie" isn't fixed: new wealth is being created all the time, and this is one reason we don't collapse into permanent inequality the way this model does. This doesn't negate the model, however, it just means there is something counteracting it. Unfortunately the fear is that in the future (or perhaps even the present) new wealth creation will no longer keep up with this underlying concentrating effect, and we'd better think hard about what to do then.
> but you can't just claim "this effect must go away" without articulating a clear reason that it would.
If the effect is that, all else being equal, people with a lot of money can make more money in an absolute sense than people without a lot of money, then of course it doesn't go away. It's not that that isn't real (it's simply how percentages work) it's that it's not actually a problem because the model is so far removed from reality as to be irrelevant.
The real world is not a 1v1 adversarial game where people are betting against each other. More often they are collaboratively betting together and both benefit if they succeed.
Young, poor* entrepreneur brings an idea, maybe specialized domain knowledge, and time and energy
old, rich investor brings capital, maybe business experience and network, and gives it to entrepreneur to execute.
If all goes well old, rich investor and young, poor entrepreneur both make a lot of money. Young, poor entrepreneur becomes old, rich investor for the next generation.
If the venture fails, old, rich investor loses money (which went to pay some number of employees and vendors, who get to benefit from it), but old, rich investor expects this to happen for some or most investments. Young, poor entrepreneur loses time but gains experience and connections.
Nobody tricked anybody or stole anything from anyone or "lost a bet" like they are playing a rigged game in Vegas.
If you tell old, rich investor they aren't allowed to make any money by investing in young, poor entrepreneur any more, they don't just keep on doing it and allow you to redistribute their profits. They buy T-Bills instead. Young, poor entrepreneur goes to work for some other company (that old, rich investor probably funded in the past and owns) and gets a mediocre salary instead of getting rich and the world is deprived of whatever innovation they might have had.
This is pretty much fine for the old, rich investors, they're already rich. But it screws over the possibility of getting rich for anyone who isn't already. Which, if you were trying to reduce inequality, is the opposite of what you'd want.
* - or more realistically, middle or upper-middle class
Another unrealistic part about the model is that people keep betting a fixed percentage of their net worth. If you have a million dollars, maybe you can invest $100,000 into the seed round of a startup. If you have a billion dollars, it's unlikely you can invest $100 million into one investment. You spread it across multiple investments, maybe hundreds, and the average return is less than what you would get from succeeding on one big investment, because there simply isn't an opportunity that can make use of that much capital at once.
Again, you are talking about a world where the economy is not static: where there is room for overall economic growth that exceeds the wealth-concentrating effect. That’s the world we’ve lived in for at least the past few decades. But there’s no immutable law that says we’ll be able to maintain 3-10% GDP growth forever. There have been many periods of economic stagnation in the recent past where wealth concentrated exactly the way this model suggests. And there will be similar periods in the future, whether that’s the near future (demographic decline) or slightly more distant future (exponential growth can’t continue forever.)
In either case it is useful to understand the underlying concentrating effect even if one believes it is tolerable because other effects dominate.
There is another contingent of "many," who feel personally protective of Musk and like he needs to be vigorously defended no matter what. It's usually people who have no personal connection to him or his companies but idealize him as representative of something more than any single person is or can possibly be. Musk has flaws too which isn't a groundbreaking or wild thing to say but it makes a lot of people's heads explode. Why is that?
It’s truly hilariously ironic to see people defending (until recently) the literal richest man in the world and someone well known for having a mercurial temper and treating everyone around him like garbage, as being the victim of “bullying”.
How do you differentiate between that and a literate mob trying to correct a incorrect idea? Should we encourage flat earthers? Anti-vaxxers? Apartheid supporters? Where do you draw the line and on what basis?
"An extreme shortage of good-quality collateral was why the GFC happened"
It started with a housing boom in America and housing is not generally poor quality collateral. More money was lent than could be repaid because of the way securitization was being done. Then a bunch of "safe" synthetic derivatives we're created off that bad debt too. The real estate collateral underneath it all was probably the only good thing (and part of the justification for the whole mess in the first place)
"...Because there is no central authority controlling who can participate, decentralized consensus systems must defend against Sybil attacks, in which the attacker creates a majority of seemingly independent participants which are secretly under his control. The defense is to ensure that the reward for a successful Sybil attack is less than the cost of mounting it. Thus participation in a permissionless blockchain must be expensive, so miners must be reimbursed for their costly efforts. There is no central authority capable of collecting funds from users and distributing them to the miners in proportion to these efforts. Thus miners' reimbursement must be generated organically by the blockchain itself; a permissionless blockchain needs a cryptocurrency to be secure.
Because miners' opex and capex costs cannot be paid in the blockchain's cryptocurrency, exchanges are required to enable the rewards for mining to be converted into fiat currency to pay these costs. Someone needs to be on the other side of these sell orders. The only reason to be on the buy side of these orders is the belief that "number go up". Thus the exchanges need to attract speculators in order to perform their function.
Thus a permissionless blockchain requires a cryptocurrency to function, and this cryptocurrency requires speculation to function
Why are economies of scale a fundamental problem for decentralized systems? Participation must be expensive, and so will be subject to economies of scale. They will drive the system to centralize. So the expenditure in attempting to ensure that the system is decentralized is a futile waste."
A million times, this. You see extremely smart, rational, people start to attribute all kinds of personalized and emotional motives to things that are literally systemic, technical finance.
Government cannot create a bottomless supply of renewable energy by pen stroke. Proof of work mining is taking exponentially more resources out of the universe that anything facilitated by it is giving back to the economy or anything. It's terrible trade-off for humanity. This is precisely what mandates are for to stop harmful action not to wish into existence some magical thinking solution so that people can do bad things with negative consequences forever
What else is there to the narrative? This stuff is predominately solutions in search of problems and they are not innovative except for trying to financialize and/or securitize every conceivable digital artifact imaginable. It sucks comprehensively like at the ideological origin points.
Yes, ETFs and Mutual funds are both registered securities. They are regulated instruments/investments. They could not be sold, legally, if they were not registered with the SEC (it doesn't have anything to do, specifically, with being traded on stock exchange- a security can be non traded too)
The parent comment is pointing out that this looks like it meets the same definition as those other things and needs to follow the same laws, no matter how much people like it, want it, think it's better than what's it's "replacing"
