There are two ways to reduce economic inequality—you can work to lift up the floor, or work to lower the ceiling.
(Notice the extreme streak of authoritarianism that often accompanies the latter.)
Said another way, you can either believe
1) the pie can grow a lot (and so, e.g. we should encourage trillionaires and the creation of far more wealth), or 2) it can’t (and so, e.g., we should abolish billionaires and divide up everything we have now equally).
The former leads to continual improvement in quality of life for most people; the latter is a one-time improvement for most people and then ongoing stasis where we sacrifice long-term excellence in the name of short-term equality.
The US has no good path in front of it other than growth. We are almost $30,000,000,000,000 in debt and have a forecast for much more debt. We can raise taxes, but what we really need is more to tax.
We have no other plan to address this.
If we want the American experiment to continue, we need a lot more Americans to create a lot more value.
Better technology, in particular AI, is the best way to sustainably grow the economy.
There is a sort of STEM vs. anti-STEM war going on. The STEM people have much better wealth-generating ability, but the anti-STEM people have much better rhetorical fighting ability.
We need to train people who are great at STEM if we want to have abundance for all of us.
And if we lose our edge in STEM, it is terrible for US competitiveness. We cannot forfeit this battle unless we are willing to cede our place in the world.
Tech will not solve all our problems, but I don’t see any way to solve all our problems without tech.
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No matter what you think about Worldcoin, I think some of the ideas in here are likely important to the future of privacy: worldcoin.org/privacy-by-des…
I think Worldcoin is more privacy-preserving than centralized services we use today. All Worldcoin, or anyone, could ever tell is if someone has already signed up for the service.
The hash is cryptographically decoupled from the wallet and all future transactions.
Experimentation with new approaches to privacy and identity seem good to me. Everyone can decide what they want to use and not use.
Imagining an AI future (with some amount of redistribution) is an interesting lens for the Great Resignation.
Less people will have to work in the traditional sense and people will be less willing to do jobs they don't like.
People won’t have to work to survive, and we will have to pay more for less desirable jobs, or automate them, which seems great all around.
I predict that it will turn out that, contrary to think tank wisdom, people can be happy and fulfilled without a "traditional" job. There will be plenty of new things to do and new ways to get status.
After 9/11 (3k US deaths), we got so much societal change and spent trillions of dollars.
After COVID-19 (700k+ US deaths), we seem to be getting very little change, and spending very little money.
I felt confident we'd get real change–competent planning for future pandemics, severe regulations on gain of function research, FDA reform, rapid-response vaccines for new viruses.
We are struggling to commit even a few tens of billions.
What's gone wrong?
I'm quite nervous about the next pandemic–it could be much worse and it doesn't really look like we're going to prepare.
Almost universally, they had a belief that climate change was an unstoppable disaster and the most pressing issue of our time.
The surprising thing was not one of them believed they could or should do anything about it; there seemed to be a total lack of belief in the ability to change the trajectory of the world.
Something has gone wrong here—these are the people who should be taking on the challenge, and they instead are declaring that they’re not going to have kids because the problem is so bad.
Technology is generally quite deflationary, and this shows up a lot of places. (I hope for a world where important things deflate massively, and NFTs suck up all the inflation.)
But housing, healthcare, and higher education have had massive inflation, mostly due to bad policy.
This is a high-flux moment in society where it seems like there could be major changes, at least for housing and higher education, and maybe we could get much more of the good kind of deflation.