I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now.
As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only solace is I'll probably be long dead by the time that happens.
The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses on top of the public debt, became the leader of the new nation and enjoyed no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves. Today we can see the same thing happening again with different rich guys' names. But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
His wealth was mainly in very illiquid land. A lot of it was near worthless unless US won the war since it was beyond the line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and white settlers were generally banned from settling there.
Otherwise like many landholders back in the day he was semi-broke and had limited access to cash.
Of course after the war of course he was both compensated for his expenses and got “his” land in Ohio (more or less)
Well, most of Elon Musks assets today are also not cash and highly dependent on the federal government going his way on key issues. He's certainly not dumb doing what he does if his goal is to get richer and more powerful. But unlike 200 years ago, we can watch live how that stuff plays out.
For comparison, the war with Iraq (a far less formidable opponent than the globe-spanning British Empire) cost the US-UK alliance $1.1 trillion [1]. Musk's net worth is $353 billion [2].
Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.
Being able to outspend the other side is definitely a good indicator of winning odds. There is some friction of course, but it’s a very rough approximation of how much industrial might you can put into the field. And just having money isn’t enough either, you have to be able to spend/convert it into a military power in some way.
So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.
They were also financed with a finite resource, or at least, one that grew at a much slower rate, governed by the laws of physics as they impacted the economic feasibility of gold mining. Rather than an indefinitely large supply of "money future generations will pay back."
That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.
And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war.
The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning.
It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.
The British also realized that as long as the Americans would borrow from the Bank of England, and were willing to trade their raw goods to England where they could be processed into industrial goods and then sold back to them, there wasn't much of a need to win the war in the first place -- though they didn't realize this all at once (as evidenced by the War of 1812). It was when the Americans (in the North) got to disrupting this economic situation that things really kicked off that they needed to back the Confederacy in what was effectively America's third revolution. Despite losing that one too, America's economy and politics were impacted enough that it was just a few decades later the British agent and American turncoat Woodrow Wilson was able to bring the former colonies back to heel with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, and entry into WWI as Britain's ally.
It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.
The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.
Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.
Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.
Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.
Perhaps but IMHO it’s a very high risk strategy and I doubt it’s necessarily optimal if more wealth is his primary goal (as opposed to his other seemingly highly megalomaniacal ambitions..)
So far his actions haven’t really been that beneficial for Tesla (of course its sales growth might have significantly slowed down even if he stayed out of politics). SpaceX can only make that much even if it gets to appropriate the entire budget of NASA. Also at the end of the day his and Trump’s relationship might fall apart any day.
That doesn't seem likely to me as I don't see how someone can get to be that rich without being incredibly motivated by more money. Surely a normal person would get a few million and decide that they had more money than they'd ever need?
If you only care about money then there’s no difference between a few hundred million and anything above that. What can you not do with money with a few hundred million? Not much.
The people who get to be billionaires are motivated differently to normal people. They are more like feudal kings.
In every system. The whole point of money is you can use it to get what you want. The whole point of having power is that you can use it to get what you want. They are the same thing if not completely interchangeable. You can use money to buy power and you can use power to accumulate money.
You can use money to buy things people are willing to sell.
You can use power to get people to do they would not otherwise do.
Generally, if money is able to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, there needs to be some sort of duress, or corruption. People who are content with what they have don't resort to prostitution or otherwise compromising their principles for money. Those who are held under crippling debt, or who come to have no principles, are much more inclined to do so.
Power is more subtle, and it is related to money, but no, they're not the same thing.
I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as directly comparing Musk and George Washington. But I suppose there are some parallels [if we take the more cynical] perspective. Both were willing to take on significant risk to upend the established socio-economic order primarily for the benefit of their respective social classes (wealthy landholders and tech-oligarchs).
But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallows (fortunately or unfortunately for everyone else) is not a risk Musk is facing yet.
And its not like confiscating his property would do much. Like most billionaires his wealth is almost entirely stocks which while theoretically liquid would loose most of its value if you tried to sell it all at once.
I doubt money has been Elon's primary motivation for at least the last 25 years, possibly longer. He is seeking approval and recognition, maybe power. His love for Mars might go beyond the recognition he gets from it. But Money is just a gateway to all of these things, and in a way a byproduct.
> George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth
Is that true ?
As far as I am aware, the money the French Government alone loaned to the US during the revolutionary war (at least two million dollars[0]) far exceeded the value of Washington personal wealth (estimated at $780,000 in 1799 [1], so at the time of his death, not during the war).
And this is not counting all the loans made from other foreign sources (the Spanish Government and private Dutch investors), and the money raised directly by the Continental Congress.
Also, as others have said, it would have been almost impossible to liquidate his assets (his lands and his slaves) during the war - the problem was availability of cash, not wealth.
It goes far beyond that: France sent troops and France and Spain sent their navies to protect the East Coast and fought with the British navy to prevent them from landing forces. They also prepared an invasion to invade the British isles, which tied what forces Britain had remaining to the British isles. That is how the small rebel contingents were able to win against the scarce British presence. Even that required Lafayette to come up from the south with his French contingent and do a pincer move.
Your source says that it depends on how you look at it. See the similar discussion regarding Iraq war spending in the other comments.
But it is also totally irrelevant, because the point is that Washington was one of the richest people in America before the war started and even richer when he died. There is no doubt about that.
I'm not doubting that Washington was very very rich.
I'm doubting the different and very specific claim that "George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War" with just a third of his wealth.
To me, the math simply does not add up. I suppose it can be chalked up to hyperbole ?
I also don't see how a discussion of the Iraq war could be relevant to that claim ...
War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it. Would you for example say that George Washington would have owned more than 30,000 slaves in today's world? A straightforward extrapolation of the population size might suggest so. But then again that is also grossly overlooking many other aspects. So you would also be right to doubt it. Either way, you would still be missing the point of the discussion.
> War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it.
Perhaps so. But you're the one who made the initial claim so confidently and definitively. To now say "it's complex and based only on a few notes, and depends on how you want to see it" is basically the same as saying "my original claim was my spin on it, which I was asking everyone to take as accurate".
The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime.
Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off.
If the British had the kind of power that even half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded.
You have to both outnumber the loyalists to certain degree and show significant determination. Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. As a percentage of the population that's less than what Belarus saw, but at the same time Yanukovych had significantly fewer people willing to do his bidding than Lukashenko.
>Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak.
Euromaidan succeeded because it also had massive support and influence from the western powers and from the western(mostly US) itelligence agencies to make the pro-Russian regime change happen.
Similar to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, it was a decades long effort from the US itelligence agencies, they didn't just sit around and wait for the local population to revolt.
People ignore how much external interference these revolutions get in order to make regime changes happen.
I was following the events very closely. The most obvious foreign interference I saw was Russian spetznaz being brought in as reinforcements to try and suppress tbe protests for longer.
Yeah obviously, but I never claimed there wasn't interference from both sides since Russia would be stupid not to have interfered, but it's not like CIA, who also would have been stupid not to have interfered, wears high visibility vests with their org's logo while on duty abroad or posts their ops on Wikipedia for everyone to see.
If the public knew everything the CIA was doing, they would be not very good at their job. Stuff like this is usually declassified only 50+ years later or sometimes never. So please, let's not use the "I've only seen Russian agents in the streets but not CIA" as some sort of argument since that insults everyone's intelligence.
Agree! I’m not saying CIA (or whichever other three letter agency) were not involved in any way. But the way I see this, if I was out in the streets trying to get rid of a pro-Russian stooge making my country an autocratic puppet regime, I would be thankful to whomever is paying for the tea, or helping in any other way.
" half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded."
tbh British empire at that time still has Canada,India,Australia and not counting 'small size' territory they has, Yes they can supress American Revolt absolutely but it would be a burden and not cost effective at the same time. colonies is bussiness after all
if they can't produce wealth then why fought so hard to defend this land???
> The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime.
Did they, though... The Western media depicts all color revolutions as such movements, complete with 'the military speaking out'. They did the same in Venezuela and other places. The 'military guys speaking out' turned out to be Colombian mercenaries who put on the wrong Venezuelan army uniform and whatnot.
They did yeah. There was this whole hashtag-like thing on Telegram where people who had a regime uniform in their wardrobe would stuff it in the trash. It was mostly demobilised conscripts, policemen, and such. There was also one high ranking retired officer who openly spoke out against the regime, who’s in exile now.
Having written that, so yes and no. As in, I don’t think there were many (any?) active service members. That likely would’ve been very dangerous. But people who had close and recent ties with the military, so could be expected to be regime loyalists, yes, plenty.
EDIT: I never follow Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus on “Western media”. I read Russian, so I follow a bunch of Telegram channels from those countries. The protests in Belarus were basically covered live.
One thing the 'reactionaries' (anti-revolutionaries) do is spread propaganda of powerlessness. I'm not saying you are doing it intentionally, but they do it for a reason.
Belarus had 500.000 people show up. But they got beat down. Hong Kong had millions of people show up. But it just led to massive crackdowns. Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.
> Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.
Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc...
Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are comparable.
Something else to note is that military officers swear an oath the constitution, not POTUS (like enlisted do). Asking someone to order or to shoot fellow Americans, particularly if unarmed, would definitely be a test. If something like that did happen, we would be entering a second civil war.
If it actually does come to a new civil war, my money is still on whoever owns most of the military. Small arms are nice and well, but they don't help you a lot when the other guy has got APCs and tanks.
I think it would be an open question as to which side ends up owning most of the military. Bases are all over the US along with national guard. The people in the military are also a pretty diverse group. In a civil war situation I don’t think it would be an automatic siding with DC.
One of the reasons the military has so many independent branches is that it would take all of them to rebel and join the opposing side in order to win. It's impossible to tell how they would side in a real internal conflict and the whole apparatus probably has to break down first before they will ever officially take sides of a force that opposes the federal government. At that point there will be total chaos and the wealthiest people can once again swoop in, amass the most powerful force and take over.
In the US's two most recent wars, the people with small arms outlasted the US military. It happened in 3 of the 5 U.S. wars since WWII, and in the other two there was nobody with small arms.
It's always the people who have never fought in a war that say things like this.
APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly.
Happened in Iraq all the time.
The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies.
(If you spend a lot of time learning to fight against an insurgency, you also spend a lot of time learning how to wage one against a technologically superior force.)
It's actually pretty similar when you get to the bottom of it. Lenin was a member of the nobility during the Tsar rule. He saw his oppurtunity when Russian leadership was weakened after the first World War (similar to how the British were weakened after the Seven Years' War) and took it. The biggest difference is that he had unsuccessfully tried before and was orchestrating the whole thing from his exile base in Switzerland. Hunger was just a useful tool to overthrow the government more easily. If hunger alone was enough, Mao would have gotten his ass kicked harder and faster than anyone else in history. But in the end hungry people don't make good soldiers and only soldiers can bring drastic change in governance.
>he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.
Literally all the founding fathers stood to be wealthier by getting the colonies to work with Britain than against it. Like, this is basic fucking math. Dragging armies across the economy you do business in with the end result being you are on your own and can no longer rely on the dominant economic power for protection and trade agreements and whatnot is not how you get fabulously rich if you are already starting from "not peasant".
If you want to look at them through an economic lens the right one to choose is "the founding fathers were rich enough that they knew that even if revolution was bad on a macro level they'd still be filthy rich and wouldn't starve"
>But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
I think you need to look at more revolutions. What tends to happen is a shuffling of the people who are already on top and the "HN class" of high end professionals, academics, media personalities, business leaders and other "peasants who are critical to the system" wind up in the gulags or losing their heads because the "fungible peasants" are pissed off at them for really squeezing out every penny until the system collapsed.
> 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War
That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes.
If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.
The October Revolution wasn’t a popular uprising but a surgical strike by a minority faction. just after the take over, SRs were more popular but bolsheviks crushed them fast without much resistance. so it wasn't about what people wanted but what a determined minority could pull off.
> The October Revolution wasn’t a popular uprising but a surgical strike by a minority faction
And with that argument, you reduce every.single.revolution to a 'surgical strike by a minority faction'. The French Revolution becomes a surgical strike of a few enlightened bourgeois in Paris. The American Rebellion becomes the rebellion of a very small clique of rich colonial landowners. No revolution would be an exception.
Every single revolution happens through a vanguard party pushing it forward - that's what the Bolsheviks got right.
> it wasn't about what people wanted
It wasn't what the better-off bourgeois and their dependents in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions wanted. It was apparently what the people wanted, because the resulting, foreign-aided civil war was won by the power of those people. No revolution can win a civil war without popular support.
Cryptography, as the state department used to understand, is a munition (but of course, thank God for the First and Second Amendment). Cryptography based peer to peer currency that can replace a debt based system of inflation that provides an unfair advantage to the first spender of the new money is a particularly powerful munition in addressing this issue.
At least Bukele seems to get this. As does the IMF, as evidenced by their panicked attempt to shut him down.
No rush in any case though; the people who understand Bitcoin the best are those that need to, and rapid adoption is just a stressor on those building out the rails.
> Instead he put the losses on top of the public debt, became the leader of the new nation and enjoyed no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves.
That’s a rather skewed take. You might see what Washington himself said about becoming that leader.
George Washington wasn’t a signer of the Declaration of Independence either, so this idea that he concocted the revolution for personal gain is silly. He was appointed to lead the Continental Army by John Adams because of Washington’s military experience and his being from Virginia which was an asset in unifying the colonies.
Unions have done more to increase the wages of the working class than tax cuts for the rich have ever done.
If you want to live in a country with rampant poverty, homelessness, crime, etc then go to a country with low or no income tax. If you're not a lord in a feudal society then you're a serf.
> How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past?
One lasted about 70 years, turned a country from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities".
The other big one went from "agrarian" to "makes most of your smartphones, e-readers, etc."
But more than that, if your standard for "marxist" is "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes", then the UK, France, and Germany are currently also Marxist. The UK and France brings the number of permanent UN security council members who are "Marxist" to 3 (not 4, because Russia doesn't have those things today), and those plus Germany are the economic backbone of western Europe.
It went from from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities, and still couldn't provide toothpaste to its people".
Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
So the USSR may not be making the point for you that you think it is...
> It went from from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities, and still couldn't provide toothpaste to its people".
> Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
Yes, and? I don't feel a need to claim the USSR was in any sense "nice" or "wise" or anything else like that. They were awful in many, many ways.
If my point had been about niceness, I could of course also point out that at the same time, the USA was still in the middle of saying "well obviously black people need to have separate bus seats" and had yet to end redlining policies, while the UK had yet to fully internalise that perhaps the people in the colonies who kept shooting the troops might possibly not like what we had done and were continuing to do with their homes.
But such was never the point I made in the first place.
Think lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Famine is the default, that everyone used to suffer on a regular basis. The USSR, India, China, these are all countries had all been suffering from mass famines at the start of their industrialisation, and compare them to how Ireland was part of the UK when the potato famine happened: The Soviet famines were 1930–1933 (including Holodomor) and 1946–1947 (which was partly due to WW2 and a need to not look weak due to very legitimate fear of America at that point); the Chinese one was the Great Leap Forward in 1958-62 (the CPC only took power in December 1949); the last really severe Indian famine was 1943, just before the British were made to leave.
Then think of the housing stock. Of electricity. Of plumbing, even (even today, Russia's % of that is pretty low). Pre-industrial societies basically do not have mass plumbing — can't pump sewage away without power. Toothpaste is important, but it's way down the list compared the radical improvements to quality of life that these governments brought their people (which is not to say they therefore are above criticism, they're absolutely fair game for criticism!). Even good nations aren't above criticism, and the USSR wasn't even good. The USSR in particular had huge avoidable problems caused by their own censorship preventing themselves from fully understanding how badly wrong their own policies were.
Even despite all the stuff the USSR did wrong, they still made things a lot better than what came before. (Unlike, say Pol Pot, who was an unmitigated disaster for Cambodia).
That the USSR was, and China now is, able to reach the point of challenging the USA for hegemony, is nevertheless a national success story. Despite both being flawed. Likewise India now having a GDP higher than the UK, even if they're still a long way behind on the per-capita front.
There are zero rights without obligations. Why do we never hear about the latter?
To read about people standing up for their rights in a Marxist State read Robert Conquest's 570 pages of 'The Great Terror' - an account of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of the Soviet Communism that emerged from the 1917 revolution. 'We'll do it differently' is the usual response. Sadly this always leaves out appreciation of the human factor whereby charismatic leaders arise and are convinced they know the truth and the way. Before considering a revolution, ensure there's a solution for this human problem of leaders who lead the masses (they regard the latter as such) down a path that in retrospect is seen to be a disaster. Pol Pot, The Great Leap Forward, the Iranian Revolution. We need to sit down and think about this before taking to the streets.
How about evolution rather than 'eggs in one basket' revolution?
> There are zero rights without obligations. Why do we never hear about the latter?
I hear much about the latter. The right to freedom of speech vs. the obligation to not defame, to not pump up your own share price, to not leak state secrets, to not openly call for civil wars in foreign countries, etc.
The right to bear arms, vs. the obligation to keep them locked up so kids can't play with them.
While I share your opinion that revolutions are generally bad and messy things, there's plenty of people who think the rich are failing their obligations to the society which gave them the right to own property.
Taking an isolated look into history is unhelpful and lacks wisdom. The events you mention will feel and sound raw due to how close it is to us. Looking at it this way, it only serves to protect existing entrenched power structures because it fails to acknowledge why revolution happen. If the system evolved, we wouldn't have revolution. It's the last straw.
China's economy is more state owned than not. The private market is strictly controlled with socialist ideology. The difference between Chinese markets and liberal markets is that the state there controls the capitalists, in the US the capitalists control the state.
Xi has been moving in that direction yes, but generally that has not been true. Also, it sounds like you greatly sympathize with Chinese authoritarianism, maybe you need to do a reality check. You can always go live in China if prefer that. I've been many times, for months at a time, since I have in-laws there. Lately I would describe it as a high-tech North Korea.
I honestly would prefer moving there but it's pretty hard to attain citizenship. I believe the US is going to collapse and potentially balkanize in the coming years and don't want to witness it firsthand.
To someone who thinks "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes." are "very Marxist", China is indeed Marxist.
I know you're not the person who responded with that conflation, but if you were, to ask if Lenin would agree with that assessment is a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
False equivalence. The strawman that sticks out gets hammered. Peter Turchin has mapped this out. The elite wealth pump is what's ending the US empire and prosperity. This is why Trump is in power. Talk and negotiations dont work anymore, do you think people will lay down and give up?
>Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top.
I agree. Too often 'revolutions' are framed as though common people were responsible for it - because it appeals to the modern day 'peasants' ( the 'middle' class and below) ideas of a 'fair' society. They are just pawns in a larger game and they are oblivious to it.
Because it's literally the same basic concept. The fall of the French monarchy and the eventual rise of Napoleon followed the exact same principles: Rich people born into nobility using their military influence and public dissent to overthrow a government and establish themselves as new rulers. The biggest difference here is that Napoleon came from a more modest form of nobility by comparison and was an actual military genius who rose from a low-end officer all the way to the top because of his skills on the battlefield (at least until his success went to his head and he crowned himself emperor). But he wouldn't have gotten anywhere without his soldiers.
> Rich people born into nobility using their military influence and public dissent to overthrow a government and establish themselves as new rulers.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the French Revolution was done by the rich born into nobility (even if minor)? Even if the rich still had an advantage during the entire turmoil, I think it's hard to argue that for the decades after 1790 that there wasn't a huge boost to social mobility.
Washington did not have anywhere near the financial resources to fund the Revolutionary War, and the war was financed mainly through debt, foreign aid, and state contributions. While he did benefit from independence in some ways, he did not orchestrate it as a means to avoid taxes or personally enrich himself.
I think that's a very narrow and largely inaccurate view of revolutions.
A lot of revolutions were carried out by people with very little resources - Mao led his army from under-developed hills, the October Revolution didn't have much of an industrial base either, nor did the left in the Spanish civil war (although the military eventually won, but hey, they had a fighting chance).
And aside from that, many revolutions happen relatively peacefully. For example Chile or South Africa. Although the latter case did have some violence and property destruction.
And aside from that, guns in the USA (assuming we're talking about this and not Europe) are cheap and plentiful. And a large, determined, but poorly-armed opposition has often beaten the smaller, well-armed forces of decadent states in the past.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that though - even a peaceful movement can succeed if it's widespread.
Historical nitpick: the Spanish civil war kicked off when the right - most of(police + military + church + rich people) - rebelled against a constitutional republican government. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether that best fits their definition of a "revolution".
Revolutions happen relatively peacefully only when a significant part of the armed forces changes sides or at least refuses to execute orders.
With the transition from conscripted militaries to autonomous robotic weapons, there will be no more humans refusing to execute orders and no more traitors.
A future revolution will succeed only against a grossly incompetent government.
For me it alternates between mind-numbing and mind-blowing the models of political violence people hold.
It's one of the refreshing things about the crazy rightoids of late, how they emphasize how their larp revolution will cash out and retire enemies of the state.
But here on HN we get ESL-Occupy Wallstreet jeremiads that'd make Sorel blush.
I guess my issue is more that I feel like you’re looking in the wrong direction here. Imo the government’s behavior, which I don’t think is quite as egregious as you’re making it out to be, is primarily downstream from other things (notably the interests of money). I asked that question because I don’t think that getting rid of the federal government would help people very much at all.
> no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves.
This suggests that taxing the slaves would have better helped the poor. Was it helping them before the war? Were the poor suddenly worse off because of the revolution?
> it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
Do George Washington's heirs control a significant portion of today's wealth?
The heir question is goalpost moving; it has no bearing.
Whether things may get better for the poor or may not isn’t so much the point as I see it. The observation here is that the poor, and their anger, become pawns for the games of elites. Sometimes those games benefit them where an elite acts as a benevolent avatar of their anger, but this is usually a transient faux-alliance because the elite calls the shots and has no genuine interest in a positive outcome for the poor they claim to represent.
Won't happen in a society where elders are more numerous than young. In the past it required a lot of young males thinking they have not much to lose, but they are becoming extinct.
Old people won't revolt, middle-aged fathers that need to think of their children and mortgage won't revolt.
Yet, my mother and my grandfather participated in the Romanian revolution, where real bullets have being shot against the people. I was almost 8 years old and I will be forever grateful for what they did. There is no other way, there is nobody else to help you if you accept what is happening. It's not on the same level, of course, but my anecdotal experience does not align with what you said. You can't fight lawless with law, but you can at least protest.
Obviously when I use universal quantifiers, even implicitly, it is easy to find counterexamples. Of course there are individuals that are willing to sacrifice even when old.
But don't you think that your (grand)parents may have been more motivated due to having children and grandchildren? Now, why an old, childless lady or man, living on pension, would take risks, especially when they lived their life watching things taking shape? Again, some will act on principles they believe in, but such people are always a minority. And I doubt people in age of your (grand)parents constituted a bulk of protesters.
I am from Poland. When mass workers protests were happening under communist regime, age median was under 30 yrs. Today it is over 40 yrs. Even excluding other aspects (like liberal ideology taking a firm hold here, and real economic growth that happened since), people today are much more complicit, and much less willing to take direct action, even if today's government is much less likely to beat you to death in jail.
I was thinking about this and honestly, I would be more willing to take action exactly if I were old, simply because I'd have less to lose. Sucks to get life sentece at 20, doesn't change much when you're 80.
We are living in feudal system at the moment. Amazon, cloud providers and everything seems to be subscription based nowadays - as Yanis Varoufakis calls it "techno-feudalism". We have system which funnels unimaginable amounts of money to few overlords, it'll keep reinforcing itself creating more and more contrast with time. Open source everything seems to be the only answer if you ask me.
People do not understand subscriptions. I little a month looks cheap. They do not understand the technology or the economics.
If you are a landless peasant you know if you are being too heavily taxes - you can see how much the land produces. People have no idea whether they are overpaying for food at the end of a long supply chain, let alone for technology.
Another factor is when you are paying for many things, its only worth worrying about the most expensive as the others are relatively trivial. Compared to housing and utilities the rest is hardly worth thinking about.
I love open source as much as the next guy, but unless you consider mortgage or rent a subscription, then I don’t think that it’s really a primary issue for most people today.
That said, the subscriptions do keep growing. But, in fairness, most cloud services have ongoing cost to the business, so ongoing consumer costs make sense.
Global average age is higher than it has ever been and it keeps climbing. My stupid take is, we will continuously live in unprecedented territories for the foreseeable future, because needs, wants, abilities, thinking style of humans change as they age.
Think what your priorities were when you were 15, 20, 25, 30 and so on. Personally for me, my priorities have been different at each stage. As I got older, I had more things to lose, loved ones to think about, deeper connections and etc., which made me more mindful while making specific decisions. I’m not saying that at the age of 30 (current global median age), every one of the same age think the same way. But it is different than what one would think at the age of 20.
I’m sorry, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m sure if you look back, you can think of examples in your own life too. But again, it’s just a stupid thought that I live with, and try not to compare current affairs to something in the past for that reason.
I don‘t get which implications you derive from the changing needs over one’s life.
In all of those phases, safety and health of yourself and beloved ones are likely at the top of your needs. Is there a contradiction to your ideals when you were young (unless you went all in on YOLO)?
edit: Maybe it’s about the inclination towards uprise/revolution which might result in oppression and danger for those you want to protect. In that case: I don’t see why some kind of apocalyptic revolution must be part of the cycle mentioned in the top post. Maybe I’m still naive, but I still have hopes that we will get to sustainable terms on this planet.
> In all of those phases, safety and health of yourself and beloved ones are likely at the top of your needs
I don’t think any of them were my priority when I was under 20. Health of my beloved ones became more important only recently, as my parents are way older now as well. And older people, on average, are more likely to have significant others to care about and etc.
But yeah, less time and thoughts on how to change the world and etc. as well. I’m not really sure how to explain it, if I’ll be honest, sorry. Just 10 years ago I was a different person. 20 years ago, I was even more different than today.
The peasant had to pay 20% tax and had free housing and food and worked half the amount of hours / year that we work. And they got revolutions. What does it tell about us?
> Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life.
Whether or not people are in subsistence poverty is not the only measure of a functioning society. It's great that extreme poverty is going down, but let's not declare Mission Accomplished just yet. The existence of billionaires might not affect your running water, but it does distort the market and negatively affect how much everything around you costs, from housing to healthcare to groceries. The existence of billionaires also affects your share of power in democracy. A billionaire is right now, running amok, griefing workers and tearing down institutions. All because his billions bought him the power to do that.
You might change your "billionaires existing doesn't bother me" Enlightened Apathy if they one day kill a government service you rely on or decide your job must end because they need double digit stock growth again this year.
You are stating these things as facts, however I have not seen a single rational thought on why Elon/Bezos/... existing makes others suffer MORE, taking into account that the poorest now are objectively better off than in the past.
The delta can increase and QOL across all incomes increase (albit different rates).
If the people here just want 100% equality, just state it as intention.
The U.S. holds the top spot with 813 billionaires - there are 340 Million people in the US - I don't think their mere existence has any impact on weather my local grocery sells more expensive bread or tomatoes.
I think people should stop fetishizing billionaires one way or the other.
It’s different this time around. The sheer complexity of society makes it hard to ascertain exactly the true nature of the situation.
People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.
At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it the government? They may have a feeling "something" is wrong, but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, or they may think that nothing is wrong and life is just hard.
Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on.
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
- People who are cruel are not fit to make important decisions in human society
- The most important quality in a human's life is dignity
- There needs to be a return to spirituality and philosophy, away from religion and tribalism
These ideas if contemplated and thought through on an individual and collective levels would undo much of what makes modern living unpleasant and bring about some wonderful new perks :)
It’s possibly a clear strategy (“flood the zone”) by some people to cause the conflict and confusion. I read recently a comment that in media “sex used to sell but now rage and outrage are more effective”. Start the fire and exploit the situation for their own benefit.
So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and dispute ( even without bad actors tweaking the algorithms), there seems very difficult for the sane rational voices to gain attention.
I think it can be both, a strategy but also an emerging property of social media. In "In the Swarm" he talks exactly about the outrage-driven engagement when calling it out as "shitstorm":
> "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication."
This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about.
The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure.
> "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
Thanks for the links to the books, I'll definitely read them as they seem to perhaps describe the feeling I've been feeling. I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate.
> I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate.
That and red states having an aversion to education.
The memecoin stuff is just chefs kiss. Now he wants to impose tarrifs while not having the local production capacity. The citizens will pay for that. The rich will get the tax cuts and funding while everyone else will get austerity and be required to pull up your bootstraps.
At this point, the results clearly show it doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or Democrat regime. They both cannibalized the middle class and all this drama between them are effectively for show. Both parties and their donors benefit very well regardless of their party, particularly the defense, finance, pharma, and tech industries.
When a poor person votes for a ultra rich person that it is completely against the poor persons self interest because the rich person will make policy to favor himself as a rich person rather then others as poor people.
I hate extremist liberalism too and this is completely orthogonal to that.
Of course it is. But the instinct from those who voted this budget through, will be to blame The Other, doesn't matter much who or what or even actually existing.
I can't believe that people still parrot this take. This is exactly why Democrats lose, the attitude that "we know whats best for you" will always lose. You should just stop it.
> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.
"Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it.
"Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens:
When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries.
Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up.
But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years.
His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years.
And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine).
From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.
I think the competition idea works at the level of a country if people by and large play by the rules (a big if).
It does not work at the level of macro economics.
If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose.
Thus in a world of competition, every country will strive to get nuclear weapons to be able to compete militarily and then given that we're human, we will have conflict sooner or later and it will result in nuclear holocaust.
If you think fair enough but nuclear holocaust is just the price we pay and it's worth it to continue doing competition, then alright.
I don't think it's worth it, so there needs to be a fundamental re-think how we approach these problems.
---
Regarding wealth inequality specifically - I agree with Aristotle who made the distinction of Aristocracy vs Oligarchy. Aristocracy being the rule of the few for the common interest and Oligarchy being rule of the few for the interest of the rulers.
Somebody will rule, it's the intention and overall direction that matters. I'm not sure that just re-distributing wealth addresses the problem - it does strike me as something an Aristocracy would surely do if one were to appear, so that much is well and good.
> If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose.
The assumption here is that megacorps are a competitive advantage. Let's look at a counterexample.
Suppose solar manufacturing is a growth industry. China wants to dominate it, so they subsidize it. Is there now a single megacorp in China that makes all the solar panels? No, it's a competitive industry there, but because of the subsidies that industry outcompetes the industries in other countries, with the result that China as a whole makes 80% of the world's solar panels. Others can't compete because of the subsidies, not because of a monopolist. Or, after the subsidies have existed for long enough, because the whole supply chain ends up in that country and other countries don't have the local knowledge or infrastructure to even do it anymore. So that kind of subsidization is a problem, but it's a different problem and "you need your own megacorps" is no solution.
Now let's go back to Oracle. How is it that they make so much money? The premise of copyright is you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for creating something and that allows you to recover your costs. Originally this was 14 years; it's not so temporary anymore. Also, the premise was that you sell a copy and get money and then if you want more money you need to create more works.
How does Oracle actually work? They don't sell you a copy, they sell you a license. The law allowing this was a choice, and a bad one. Having a monopoly isn't illegal under the antitrust laws; abusing one is. But doing that with the copyright monopoly is largely ignored, which is what license terms more restrictive than the copyright statue do. So instead of buying some database software for a one-time fee and then being able to use it as long as you're satisfied with that version of it, you get a temporary license that expires if you stop paying a recurring fee. Meanwhile your data is now in a proprietary database with high costs to extricate it, so you're locked in.
Is Oracle then out-competing all of their smaller competitors? Not really. Tons of people use Postgres or MariaDB or SQLite, and there are several other proprietary databases as well. But Oracle still gets to stick it to all the organizations that are locked in to Oracle, because the industry lobbied for laws that allow them to.
And then you also see Oracle sticking it to organizations in e.g. Europe. Is that because Oracle's size allows them to outcompete smaller companies this time? No, the same competitors are still there, it's because Europe has similar laws that allow the company screw their customers in similar ways, instead of limiting copyright to the selling of copies.
By contrast, if you look at something like Visa and Mastercard, that's a major duopoly in the US. And those cards are accepted in many other countries, but they often have competitors there, when those countries have laws that facilitate competition. Because the companies get big by laws that thwart competition, but when that's their advantage, the advantage doesn't stick where those laws don't exist. If anything it puts them at a disadvantage because being insulated from competitive pressure domestically makes them unresponsive and inefficient.
Which is why corporations are always lobbying to have the laws that prop up their concentrated markets enshrined into international treaties.
> Somebody will rule
This is the assumption most in need of being challenged. "There must be a king" is a fallacy. There will either be a king, or there will be a population of people dedicated to preventing anyone from establishing a throne.
The latter is what you get from a system of well-devised checks and balances, one of which is competitive markets. Emphasis on competitive.
I think it'd be helpful to stick with just the military example. (Your comments re Oracle are well taken and I agree)
I don't think you've tackled the problem of if we're playing competition and they build nukes, we need to build nukes. It's a zero sum game and the result is nuclear holocaust.
Do you disagree with the premise and if not, what is your proposed solution?
Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be helpful if you could summarize your political stance in a few short sentences. I'm worried that we'll be hopelessly lost discussing minutia otherwise.
ps. I've been here a while and always been a fan of your comments :)
I don't think nukes are a valid analogy. With literal nukes, if they build them and you don't, you get conquered because you have to surrender or be vaporized. So the US needs to have literal nukes and then so do Russia and China and members of the EU, at which point nobody uses them because of MAD. Megacorps don't work like that.
The premise that they did would be something like, Android. Google has 90% market share in search and makes their money from cloud services and ads. They give away Android for free and then tie it to their services through the network effect of the Play Store and remote attestation. Competition for mobile operating systems is thereby destroyed because to compete with Android you'd have to compete with something free while overcoming a strong network effect, and if you somehow started to then Google has billions of dollars to pour into Android to make sure you can't succeed. Therefore their only competition is from Apple, another megacorp. How is your local market for competing operating systems supposed to thrive in this environment? You're screwed.
But you're not vaporized, you're still allowed to have your own laws. So suppose you're the EU, or you're the US and Google is hypothetically a foreign company, but you want to respond in a way other than just getting your own megacorp.
You would have stronger antitrust laws. Contracts to enforce the business models of these companies would be totally unenforceable in your jurisdiction. App store can't be tied to the device or the use of any other services, remote attestation is forbidden because it prevents the user's bank app from working on a competing device, etc. Absolutely no respect in the law for any attempt to enforce vertical integration. Copyright laws that require source code to be distributed to the customer with any software, to aid in reverse engineering and adversarial interoperability. Violations have penalties with teeth, like invalidating the company's patents and copyrights.
Then the small competitors in your jurisdiction have a chance. Someone can make an Android fork that can use any app in the Play Store and fund development by auctioning off the defaults for search engine or cloud services. Android forks which are actually developed as open source instead of just having the code thrown over the wall start to become popular there, and support multiple app stores which also start to become popular. Once they build enough of a network effect, people outside your jurisdiction start to use them. Meanwhile the people in the other jurisdiction(s) still beleaguered by the oligopoly start to look at your market with jealousy and erode support for the status quo there too.
Why do you think Apple is so intent on fighting the Digital Markets Act? It's not a perfect law by any means but the thing it's attempting to do is valid and if it succeeds, Apple is going to have more competition, which they're worried about precisely because it's a thing that could actually happen.
> Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be helpful if you could summarize your political stance in a few short sentences. I'm worried that we'll be hopelessly lost discussing minutia otherwise.
There is always going to be a government, or something that acts like one. To prevent there from being a king, the government has to do two things: 1) Prevent competing governments from forming (of which monopolies or highly concentrated markets are an instance) and 2) Not Be a Tyrant.
The first one in terms of markets is a set of rules that keep market barriers to entry low and prohibit monopolistic practices etc. The second is a set of checks and balances within the government that constrain the thing with a monopoly on violence from itself being used for empire building or private advantage.
Designing this well is, obviously, hard, but nevertheless it's the thing to do.
> I've been here a while and always been a fan of your comments
Because the wealth is unequal, sure, but look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained?
Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
Its a matter of scale. Compared to medieval times, we are much better off. But if you shorten the scale to eg. younger generations and eg. home ownership, things point in the other direction.
And there are many more of such indicators!
This "we are all better off" is partially true but helps to neglect valid criticism.
Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality?
> look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
I don't think this is true.
There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc.
I admire your restraint while responding. Saying "at least you're not a feudal lord's slave!" is the most uninspiring argument by the intellectually lazy status quo apologists.
(I'm sure the parent isn't in this category, so I'm speaking in general.)
> Do you really understand just how unequal it is?
But the above blog post and study you linked to are misleading as well. For instance, wealth gets vastly skewed by age. The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1]. For anyone who knows anything about investing, this isn't very surprising. Steady investment will cause people's savings to grow drastically from when they start to when they retire. A vulgar look at the numbers can have people saying "person A has 10 times the wealth of person B!", without considering that person B will also reach the level of person A when they get to the same age.
That's not to say that age alone would simply explain all of the inequality in society, but it's a major factor and an example of why you need to actually dive into the data rather than running with the baseline numbers. When it gets ignored it's likely people are pushing a polemic and aren't genuinely interested in what's happening.
> The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1].
Is that because they're older? Or is it because when 70 yo's were young they could go through college on part time work, buy a house with an average wage, and then have that house skyrocket in value because housing was turned into an investment vehicle?
Dig into those statistics, and look at how much of the €400k net worth is tied up in their homes, homes which they owned outright at 25-27 years old. That's unimaginable today. People that age are living with their parents.
Look at those statistics and compare the median to the average - the distribution is extremely skewed - you could even call it 'unequal'. 'Record levels of inequality' even.
Age isn't as much of a factor as the 'nerdwallet' blog seems to think; and to the degree to which it is, is a natural consequence of having had more time to work and invest during a boom period, then having a certain generation and class of people 'pull up the ladder' after them.
Honest question, but do you know much about investing? The investment curve isn't linear. Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30 [1].
Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it. All of the data I've seen shows that it's extremely important, and people who intentionally ignore it are pushing a narrative that doesn't match reality.
> Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30.
What part of that justifies or explains away record inequality?
> Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
Hm - might that be because they live with their parents and can't afford kids? Or because they're sharing an apartment with 5 other people, and having a lot less fun in their life (aka, quality of life).
And are we ignoring the difference between average and median when cherry-picking statistics?
> If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it.
My argument isn't that we should ignore age. I never said that. No one said that.
It's that even accounting for age, however you want to do that, there's an extremely problematic level of inequality.
America has 10 million hungry children. Half a million people claim medical bankruptcy every year. There's no excuse for that - and now a cabal of billionaires is gutting Medicaid to help pay for a $4tn tax break mostly for the top 1%.
As of 2023, the top 1% of U.S. households held 30% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% possessed just 2.6%.
This is all deeply psychotic. It's perverse and abnormal in the extreme; and no, it's not explained away by age demographics. It's very intentional bipartisan policy, inflicted against the will of a large majority of Americans.
Quality of life is about to take a very hard hit, directly because of the level of inequality [0].
You can't separate these things and expect the world to make sense. When the ultra-wealthy capture too much of the levers of power, and strip-mine all our potential just to get a bit more in a bid for total control, quality of life for humanity suffers.
We've been suffering for it, as I explained above, and we're going to see a lot more of the same. House prices could double in the next 5 years. Even if you own a house or 6 and think that's just great, society will suffer and quality of life will fall.
You might think that owning houses, starting families, clean water, living oceans, a habitable biosphere and healthy division of power don't affect quality of life, but I promise you, they do. And those things are suffering, because of the level of inequality we have reached.
... Let's say, being generous and ignoring a lot of negative externalities, that we actually have improved average quality of life by 10% over the last 50 years. Put that in context - productivity has doubled. Where did all the difference go? ... And what are the beneficiaries of this wealth doing with that money?
The level of inequality is huge, and rising rapidly. That comes with a very serious level of existential threat to life on Earth itself; not just its quality.
You make a lot of claims about the future, but you are guessing. We have no idea. All I hear is fear mongering and hate against people with more than they have.
Fwiw, I think there is a upper bound where inequality starts hurting the average (we aren't near it) however all the solutions I hear are worse than doing nothing. The government forcing equality by taking from one to give to another will never work. It's been tried and it fails horribly.
> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.
It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created.
> but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame,
It's impossible to acknowledge that both of you are most likely equally wrong but just in different directions? If you worked together you'd get much further yet you can't even grant them basic personal agency. What a bummer. Inequality abounds.
Wealth is mostly inherited, and amassed over generations. The wealthy become more wealthy because they already have wealth. If you take that away, all those wealth management skills matter a lot less.
Lots of rich people become poor as well, maybe its just that few people see a celebrity or multimillionaire going bankrupt and disappearing from the public view or their decedents blowing their inherited money on designer goods, cars, gambling alcohol or an expensive spouse who loves them for their money as particularly notable.
I highly recommend taking a dynamical systems class, if you ever get the chance. It's shocking how many seemingly unrelated things just "make sense" when you know what a limit cycle is and how bifurcations work.
To me the question now is rather individual level related, instead of mass organization and action: what is threshold beyond which one - while having lost job, health[care], housing, social services and maybe even family member(s) - decides that s/he won't have absolutely anything else to lose, to then "pull a Luigi" on someone who s/he may feel responsible for his situation? Then iterate from 1 to n -> where would "n" make a real difference?
Not saying that the ultra-wealthy have the right to be tyrants, but "peasants" of today's age have a quality of life that is orders of magnitudes better than peasants in the feudal age. This simple truth seems to get lost so easily when talking about inequality in a vacuum.
Then we might have reached the point to discuss whether it’s enough to lift the worst-off to some minimum where they can survive or whether we’re in a position now to also enable participation on broad scale.
Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherited it all from your parents. There are certainly prominent counter examples of people who crossed these thresholds with their own hard work. The majority of people does not.
There is reason to believe this time might be different. Individuals can't revolt. It takes a critical mass which is only achieved via organisation. Why do you think privacy is forever under attack? The way we are going, future generations won't even have this option.
What is a world war- then a flaring off of revolution. Send the peasants to fight somewhere, buy another 30 years of stability aka a generation of peace from the wheel of strife for the price of sacrificing all the people popping up everywhere.
Nowadays is different from the feudal times you referred to. Because the majority of us are brainwashed by the media. When the brain is chained, there is no hope for a revolution.
>Because the majority of us are brainwashed by the media.
I disagree, people were even more brainwashed in the past since their only source of information was what the church and the king would tell them (Plato's cave allegory) while now you have a plethora of independent unbiased sources of information plus leaks and whistleblowers out in the open to thanks to the internet and social media.
Sure, you have a lot of fake news and propaganda today form the mainstream and social media, but back then it was all exclusively fake news and propaganda, as only the ruling elites had the truth and they'd never share that with the peasants, while any peasantry who dared speaking the truth that went against the official narrative would be punished for heresy. That's why Europe spent so much time in the dark ages and the advent of freedom of thought also brought in the Renaissance era.
>When the brain is chained, there is no hope for a revolution.
I disagree, people in the west today have a lot more freedom of information and freedom of speech than in the distant past. Well, unless you live in the UK or Germany where the police arrests you for posting a meme online about a politician, try to ban encrypted chat and sources of information they consider "hateful" in order to control the narrative and restrict the population to only vote for the entrenched establishment.
at no time has there been a good outcome from which this change made.
The people who applied the force merely swapped with those who had wealth. Essentially, they wanted the wealth, and co-opted the masses to enable themselves.
What we have today is relatively good. Just because you see some billionaire who have more yachts than you could ever hope to own, doesn't mean you aren't living a good life. At least the french revolution was in part about lack of food and starvation. I dont see america starving.
True, but starvation is a pretty low bar; obesity and all the related health problems due to an unhealthy diet (because garbage is the cheapest food and what the bottom 50% can afford in the US) is the modern version of starvation
> Hunger reached its highest point in the United States in nearly a decade last year, with 18 million households, or 13.5%, struggling at some point to secure enough food, a Department of Agriculture report released on Wednesday said.
Ah, the pendulum / cyclic metaphor. It gets trotted out way too often IMO.
The pendulum metaphor fails often; here are some examples where it cannot make sensible predictions: species level extinction; major technological shifts; the overall growth of economies (upward), the growth of attitudes around human rights.
Why does the pendulum metaphor fail? It has no explanatory ability to handle non-cyclic things. Mathematically, it has too few degrees of freedom and a poor functional form.
How often does the pendulum argument make a testable prediction? Is there a prediction of _when_ something will happen? Is there a scientific study (or even statistical analysis) of the underlying factors?
The pendulum argument often serves as some kind of wishful thinking; just wait, it says, and things will (somehow) “swing back” to the middle. For a while, at least, until there is some kind of overreaction.
Enough. Let’s call bullsh-t on this vague metaphor. There are better ways of thinking.
(In contrast, the statistical concept of “reversion to the mean” is a mathematical fact. Using it when observing real world data helps us assess the nature of the underlying statistical distributions.)
I'm pretty sure wealth doesn't follow an exponential distribution. Power law, log normal or stretched exponential or maybe some sort of generalized Zipf.
I disagree, if anything we need to know what the distribution is before we make such sweeping claims. While pretty much every country has an income tax, which means that we knows fairly well who makes what, there is no equivalent for wealth. Most wealth distributions are estimates which get progressively worse as we near the top percentiles, because really big wealth is very mobile and international.
So yeah before we say: "it always looks like this, it's just about what the parameters are", we need to measure it and have a clearer idea of what it looks like in different societies otherwise we won't be able to decide what the desirable parameters are like.
Just because there is a power law relationship doesn't justify having such a steep curve. Flatten the curve, the rich should pay more tax.
The alternative is returning to a feudal gilded age where there are a very very small cabal of asset owning lords, a very small class of scribes for the lords, and then a sea of serfs.
Inequalities by themselves are not really a problem. I don't care about other peoples palaces if I can live comfortably in my small house. In fact, if said palace is well maintained and tasteful, it can make for a beautiful landmark everyone can enjoy seeing.
It only becomes a problem if people are miserable, the palace stops being a beautiful landmark and becomes a symbol of oppression.
Back to stocks, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the top 10% owning 87% of the stocks (in the US, because apparently, the rest of the world doesn't exist...). The stock market is risky, that's really a thing for those who have all their basic needs covered and can afford to lose big. Owning stock i.e. investing in companies is also among the most best things to society the rich can do, compared to, say, building palaces for themselves.
All that to say that if some causes are worth revolting against, I just don't think inequality in stock ownership is one of them.
As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only solace is I'll probably be long dead by the time that happens.