I suspect you will find a lot less of these "bad things" than anticipated. That is why the model should actually be freely available rather than restricted based on pre-conceived notions that will, I am sure, prove inaccurate.
This is the point - a modern LLM "role playing" pre-1913 would only reflect our view today of what someone from that era would say. It woud not be accurate.
This is a brilliant idea. We have lots of erroneous ideas about the views and thoughts people had in the past. This will show we are still, actually, largely similar. Hopefully more and more of these historical LLMs appear.
Fantastic article. I am deeply convinced that despite what popular knowledge says, human taste for beauty does not change that much across time and distance.
Looking at it I see familiar elements, which are used by an artist going by the name Gossip Goblin to draw apocalyptic visions of a humanity far in the future that, for the N-th time, almost wiped itself out via increasingly invasive body modifications.
Why is AI limited to just a raw LLM. Scaffolding, RL, multi-modal... so many techniques which can be applied. METR has shown AI's time horizon for staying on task is doubling every 7 months or less.
Because all the money has been going into LLMs and "inference machines" (what a non-descriptive name). So when an investor says "AI", that's what they mean.
Because LLMs are just about all that actually exists as a product, even if an inconsistent one.
Maybe some day a completely different approach could actually make AI, but that's vapor at the moment. IF it happens, there will be something to talk about.
Because it very obviously isn't. For example (though this is a year or so ago), look at when people hooked Claude up to Pokemon. It got stuck on things that no human, even a small child, would get stuck on (such as going in and out of a building over and over). I'm sure we could train an LLM to play Pokemon, but you don't need to train a child to play. You hand them the game and they figure it out with no prior experience. That is because the human is intelligent, and the LLM is not.
100%. Slack does this annoying thing where I click a chat, which gains focus, but I actually have to click again to switch to the chat I want. Every now and then I slack the wrong person, fortunately not to disastrous consequences, yet.
If I had a moderately intelligent human who never loses focus looking over my shoulder, they might say something like "Hey, you're typing a Tailwind CSS issue in the DevOps group chat. Did you mean that for one of the front-end devs?"
Similarly, about once or twice a year, I set the alarm on my phone and then accidentally scroll the wheel to PM w/o noticing. A non-brain-dead human would see that and say, "Are you sure you want to set your alarm for 8:35 PM Saturday?"
When we have a digital assistant that can do these things, and not because it's been specifically trained on these or similar issues, then I'll start to believe we're closing in on AGI.
At the very least I'd like to be able to tell a digital assistant to help me with things like this as they come up, and have it a) remember forever and b) realize stuff like Zoom chat has the same potential for screw ups as Slack chat (albeit w/o the weird focus thing).
a recent example I came across was losing a single airpod (dropped on street) and getting a find my notification only when I was already several blocks away. Went back, 30 mins had passed, nowhere to be found.
This is the kind of thing that makes it really clear how far away we actually are from 'real world' intelligence or maybe better described as common sense in our devices, in the detail.
Obviously, the intelligent thing to do there would have been to spam me with notifications the instant my devices noticed my airpods were separated by > 10 metres, one was moving away from the other, and the stationary one was in a street or at least some place that was not home.
But although AI can search really well, and all sorts of other interesting stuff, I think we all have to admit that it still seems really hard to imagine it taking 'initiative' so to speak even in that super simple situation and making a good decision and acting on it in the sensible way that any human would, unless it was specifically programmed to do so.
And that's the problem I think fundamentally, at least for now. There's just too much randomness and too many situations that can occur in the real world, and there's too many integration points for LLMs to deal with these, even supposing they would deal with them well.
In theory it seems like it could be done, but in practice it isn't being done even after years of the tech being available, and by the most well funded companies.
That's the kind of thing that makes me think the long tail of usefulness of LLMs on the ground is still really far away.
An LLM is an algorithm. You can obtain the same result as a SOTA LLM via pen and paper it will take a lot of long laborious effort. That's ONE reason why LLM's do not have cognition.
Also they don't reason, or think or any of the other myriad nonsense attributed to LLM's. I hate the platitudes given to LLM's it's at PHD level. It's now able to answer math olympiad questions. It answers them by statistical pattern recognition!
A brain is an algorithm. Given an unreasonably precise graph of neurons, neurotransmitter levels at each junction, and so on and so forth, one could obtain the same result via pen and paper. It will just take a lot of long laborious effort. That’s ONE reason why brains do not have cognition.
My claim is that an llm acts the same way (or superset) to how a person with short term memory would behave if the only mode they could communicate with was text. Do you agree?
And I do not agree. LLMs are literally incapable of understanding the concept of truth, right/wrong, knowledge and not-knowledge. It seems pretty crucial to be able to tell if you know something or not for any level of human-level intelligence.
Again, this conversation has been had in many variations constantly since LLMs were on the rise, and we can't rehash the same points over and over. If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition, they should offer formal proof first, otherwise we're just wasting our time.
That said, I wonder if there are major differences in cognition between humans, because there is no way I would look at how my brain works and think "oh, this LLM is capable of the same level of cognition as I am." Not because I am ineffably smart, but because LLMs are utterly simplistic in comparison to even a fruit fly.
>And I do not agree. LLMs are literally incapable of understanding the concept of truth, right/wrong, knowledge and not-knowledge. It seems pretty crucial to be able to tell if you know something or not for any level of human-level intelligence.
How are you so sure about this?
> If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition,
honestly asking: what formal proof is there for our own cognition?
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income.
As inequality has increased, life has become more uncertain for those towards the bottom, because the cost of recovering from adverse life events (health crises, unemployment, etc) has become increasingly unmanageable.
The switch to the current monetary system, followed by the elimination of taxation for rich people created this. You can only prosper with compounding.
People on the bottom are just as helpless as they were before. They carry on with benefits and modest income. They get (shitty) healthcare fit free. The next two tiers of working poor are the ones that have gotten screwed.
I disagree, high degrees of wealth inequality result in manipulation of our society to act against the best interest of the common man. Unfortunately, this article seems to be more inline with quantization for the sake of navel gazing.
Though I agree that inequality is less important than the quality of life of the poorest people, this article explicitly tries to characterize the latter, so even though this is done in the name of discussing wealth inequality, I'm not sure your comment applies here.
Yes, and also numerical "wealth" is not the same as stuff. Rich people often have very high numerical wealth, but actually don't have so much more "stuff" - houses, medicine, food, etc. They will certainly have more of these things, but maybe 100x not 1Mx.
For example, let's say that Musk is 250k times wealthier than I am. Does he have 250k shoes? Houses? Not really.
And it's the consumption of stuff that is really the share that one takes from society, not "wealth." Having $1 might be wealth, but it is not until I spend that Dollar on an apple that I have taken something from society.
This is contradictory to how I understand economics. The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life.
Also, spending money and the consumption of stuff isn't "taking something from society". It is someone's job to grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell apples. Spending a dollar to purchase an apple supports all of those people directly. Those people spend their money on stuff and it circulates. Nothing is being "taken" things are bought and sold on a free-market.
I am arguing that hoarding wealth is the share that one takes from society. You are right that Musk doesn't have 250k shoes or houses, but that's why its problematic, it is wealth that could be spent circulating through the economy, it is wealth that is a claim on future labor and resources, it is the power over his companies, employees, industry, and society. All of these are a much larger "take" from society than buying an apple, a pair of shoes, a house, or any other good or service.
> The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life.
It's one of the first things governments use to correlate to quality of life, and imo it's a good way to get away with papering over inequality. A country's GDP can be stable or slowly growing and it won't be in recession, and yet much of that GDP can be produced by one generation of people who are in a class that's multiple orders of magnitude wealthier because the newest generation of people has to pay them to have a roof over their head and subsidize their retirement. The GDP comes from the appreciation of their property value and the rental income, while a massive proportion of working age people are just able to consume and work, largely for those same people. Very wildly different qualities of life even below what Mag World would consider Rich, maybe not in the moment when someone can but themselves some literal or metaphorical candy, but in terms of viable upward mobility and precariousness long-term.
In order to buy the house I live in the basement of, not even owned by a much older generation person in this case (seemingly a single mom, but an investment banker afaik), I would need to be able to sustain a $2m+ mortgage and come up with a $400k+ down payment, it will never be possible, and even though I never wanted that for my future, it's depressing that it's just laughably and insanely out of reach, GDP kind of hides that this is the case for many.
Agreed. I know GDP is not the strongest signal for high quality of life, but its easy to calculate. My point wasn't that a high GDP means that the people there will have a high quality of life; it is easily manipulated with rents like you bring up. Thank you for adding the nuance that I did not include.
You’re slipping into a version of the broken window fallacy here. Consumption isn’t automatically good for society just because it “creates activity.” When you eat an apple, the apple - and all the labor and resources behind it - are gone. Same with luxury goods: the more resource-intensive they are, the more real wealth they permanently use up compared with simpler alternatives.
What actually increases long-run prosperity isn’t consumption itself, but efficient use of resources and investment - choices that expand the stock of tools, knowledge, and productive capacity in the future. New wealth is created when resources are not immediately consumed, but are instead used to boost productivity.
That’s why wealthy people who don’t spend all their wealth aren’t “hoarding” in the economic sense. Their capital is usually invested - financing factories, startups, research, tools, and infrastructure that generate more output. And when they die with wealth still invested, the state captures a chunk through estate and capital-gains taxes.
A better way to think about wealth is as decision-making power over how resources are allocated - toward current consumption (including luxuries) or toward future production (investment). Capitalism tends to concentrate that decision power in the hands of those who are best at growing capital, which raises total prosperity but also increases inequality.
Consumption uses up wealth; investment grows it. People like Musk have a lot of wealth because they’ve been good at growing it. We should absolutely guard against wealth hijacking politics - but it would be shortsighted to treat their continued investment as a net negative for society.
You're misapplying the broken window fallacy. I'm not arguing consumption is good because it creates value, I'm arguing that it is not "taking from society" as the OP claimed. Consumption is the entire point of production.
Wrt your points about wealth holding and investment, you're assuming the allocation of a billionaire's wealth is efficient and productive. This ignores that private returns are not social returns, it assumes that growing capital is what is best for society, and frames the question as investment vs consumption, when the question is "who controls investment decisions?" Your argument smells very similar to Reagan's trickle-down economics which has been disproved through decades of data showing tax cuts don't generate promised growth. Inequality continues to increase, while median wages stagnate.
I agree invested capital finances production, but I disagree that extreme concentration optimizes for this. Broad and diverse investment mechanisms would allocate capital more effectively than a small number of individuals basing their decisions on private returns.
Consider the equation of exchange: MV=PQ (money supply x velocity of money = nominal GDP). As wealth concentrates, velocity in the real economy decreases. Billionaire capital cycles through financial assets instead of cycling through the real economy (wages buy goods and services which pay wages). A lower velocity means either lower GDP or central banks must increase the money supply, risking asset bubbles (hmm, sounds likes whats happening right now ). Evidence suggests a dollar is stronger in the hands of the working class creating immediate economic activity and supporting local businesses, compared to a dollar in an asset portfolio.
I agree that consumption is the point of production in the long run, but that does not mean consumption is neutral in terms of tradeoffs. When someone consumes, the underlying real resources are gone and cannot be used for other purposes. That is the core of the broken window point: activity can rise while net wealth falls if resources are used in less productive ways than the alternatives. Saying consumption is not "taking from society" skips over the opportunity cost of what could have been built with the same labor and capital.
On who controls investment, it is fair to worry about political influence, but it does not follow that highly concentrated private wealth is mostly idle or socially useless. Large fortunes are usually claims on productive assets that employ people and produce goods and services. Capital markets already involve broad and diverse mechanisms like index funds, pensions, and institutional investors that pool the savings of millions of non wealthy people and allocate them based on expected returns. That is not perfect, but it is not simply a handful of billionaires directing everything according to whim.
The equation of exchange point also overstates the role of velocity in judging what is good for the economy. A dollar that flows into an asset is not disappearing from the real economy. It is funding someone else who is selling equity or debt and who will use that for wages, R&D, or capital spending. Lower velocity at the cash register can be consistent with higher long run output if more of today’s income is channeled into projects that raise productivity tomorrow. High velocity tied to fragile consumption and low investment can look good in the short term but leave people poorer over time.
But the focus on their personal consumption is not the most important. There is a limit to how much ice-cream a person can eat, and at some point the money is no longer used for direct personal consumption. But rather to influence the world in whatever direction they want.
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
Yes, "don't look at wealth inequality" boils down to an argument for shifting political power to the wealthy — which I'm sure its proponents genuinely believe is for the best.
Of course Sam Altman doesn’t want to hear about eliminating billionaires, because he’s a fucking billionaire.
Not everyone can be a billionaire, when it’s based fundamentally upon having exploited the have-nots. You’re always going to need a wage-slave class, if not a class of slaves proper. That money doesn’t come from nowhere - it’s drawn from those least able to afford it, and therefore least able to resist exploitation.
If anything, that should be all the more reason to do it.
Give the poorest more money. It’s the complete opposite of our current approach.
Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.
More to the point, he has the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else. His money lets him do different things with those 24 hours than you and I, but he still only gets 24. (Until he gets to Mars, then it's 24.66.)
Between Bryan Johnson, and then also Xi and Putin getting caught on a hot mic discussing how they're going to live to 120 or 150, I wouldn't be so sure.
Eh, even the ‘taking’ in this example isn’t so simple.
By spending that $1, you’ve also given a farmer (plus middle men, plus a retailer) $1 they otherwise wouldn’t have had - and relieved them of an apple they already have too many of.
The big ‘taking’ events are when things are destroyed without an exchange of value (aka if those farmers can’t sell the apples because a new law passes, or there is a disease event, or the like), or where a market is cornered/controlled/manipulated to the extent someone is forced to sell for an artificially induced (lower) price, or sell at an artificially induced (higher) price.
Smaller ‘taking’ events are when something is actually consumed, but that has to happen eventually, and someone paid for it to happen. Which means they also traded something else for that money (time, work, whatever).
Otherwise, it’s numbers moving from one side of the book to the other. Things aren’t lost/destroyed, but are moving around.
Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have.
So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.
Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".
Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.
Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.
There would not be so many orchards or apple farmers growing apples if they could not exchange those apples for goods and services they wanted effectively.
At the level of a large scale apple orchard, money is the only thing that works effectively for that.
If people only grew enough apples that they wanted to eat, most people would be unable to get apples, and most apple lovers would be spending a lot of time they could be doing something else trying to grow apples. Overall edible apples would be dramatically lower, even non-existent at some places/times.
For example, imagine the shitshow if people had to refine their own gas, or barter/trade for it directly. Zero chance 99% of society would be able to do that.
Same with miners and raw materials, machine manufacturers and machines, solar panel manufacturers and solar panels, etc. etc.
Money itself isn’t a good/service, but it makes the act of making/exchanging/selling/etc. easy and possible at scale. Which is valuable on its own. And since it provides a generic ‘value’ proxy for all goods/services within the economy, if anything it is the most consistently valuable thing in a functioning economy - it’s a wildcard for value.
This does have a limit of course - too much money in too short/concentrated an area causes all sorts of crazy things to happen, as the induced effort/incentive to produce something outstrips the realistic ability to do so, causing escalating ‘money fights’ for the same goods, as the value of the goods starts to dwarf the perceived value of the money itself. (Inflation)
Just like too little money in too concentrated an area/time causes crazy things to happen because the perceived value of the money itself starts to outweigh the actual value of the transacted goods, and transactions can start to grind to a halt in an effort to conserve the increasingly valuable money itself. (Deflation)
All you say is true. I never argued for the irrelevance of money. The voting power into the economy is extremely important, and it plays a vital role in the orchestration of the real economy (the part actually producing stuff and services).
But it is not such that billionaires provide some value with their consumption (they can provide value in other ways though). Yes, for the individual Yatch-producer (or farmer) is it nice that they get to sell their product, but for the economy at large all it does is move production-resourced from other things which could otherwise be produced to the production of yatches(or whatever the billionaire wants).
So yes, the billionaire does not take from the farmer. But he does take from the economy at large (in the same way as my consumption does, but to an extremely different degree).
Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like.
They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes.
The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc.
It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time.
In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people.
Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot.
That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process.
If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most.
It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen.
And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing.
For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.
I dont want the USSR, and I don't see the relevance. For me this is a discussion about the role of money and wealth in our economic system, I am not arguing for plan-economy. The dynamic allocation of resources provided by a market based economy is great. But there are many ways to run a capitalist society, I certainly don't belive we are at the end of history here.
Billionaires certainly CAN get more wealthy by a process as you describe. They can also get more wealthy by just owning stocks and do absolutely nothing. Last 20 years the S&P 500 has increased 8-fold. That means 64 times over 40 years, 512 times over 60, 4096 times over 80 years. With the s&p average since 1926 of 9.8%, the numbers are 42-fold after 40 years, 272 after 60 and 1770 after 80. Salaries has certainly not risen at the same rate.
My views are probably shaped by coming from a place with more old money, where more people are rich from inheritance than their own creation. And their share of the totalt wealth of the society increases even when they are just passive owners. For me this is a reinvention of Feudslism, where the owner class controls the economy because they inherited it.
Now, this is a bit of a tangent to the original discussion though. What I had been trying to say is that independently of the reason for why the billionaire has the money, the spending on that apple is not providing value to the economy. In your original post I read you to mean that, and that the billionaire provided value by buying that apple. Of course he did on the micro scale for the farmer, but not at the macro scale. All he is doing is slightly shaping the economy to provide what he wants, using money as the lube.
So billionaires can be so for a lot of reasons. They can have stolen the money, passively gained them, gained them on the back of others creating value, or they could have created the value themselves. Independently of the source, they now have power over the economic machine. They might use it to improve the machine (good) or they can make it create things the billionaire wants in place of things other people wants (less good).
The original comment I replied too was how a billionaire buying an Apple was destroying/taking things from the system - when the reality is that the billionaire traded a bit of value, and so it’s just changing ‘columns’ in the system, not being destroyed in the process, but rather now the farmers/retailers/middlemen now have some cash instead of too many apples, etc.
What is the better alternative?
Because it’s actually in their interest to buy fewer real goods, and more ownership - assuming the ownership is of productive assets. That’s how they became billionaires in the first place. By using their Capital (literally excess assets/buying power) to acquire more assets/buying power, or grow the value of their assets/buying power. Yes, that includes the orchard example above.
In the USSR, you could only buy things approved by bureaucrats who ensured the ‘right things’ were available for sale, and people didn’t get jealous, and ownership of most classes of assets was restricted to the state.
There were no private billionaires in the USSR, but a lot of administrators that had to play political games - with those on the bottom being stuck with the leftovers.
Notably, for those complaining about the US military industrial complex - military spending in the USSR as a percent of GDP dwarfed even the US. (Albeit much lower in actual value, because the USSR’s economy was relatively tiny)
One could easily argue that the biggest priority of the USSR was in fact military spending - far more so than the US even at its peak, and they happily threw everyone else but the elites under the bus to afford it.
History rhymes for a reason, and people are similar all over.
Why is it "precisely the wrong approach"? And why does it have to be just one?
I agree looking at the quality of life of the poorest is a valuable barometer for the quality and success of a society to serve all its people. Similarly I think looking at the richest and what checks exist on their power also says a lot about the health of a civilization. It also makes perfect sense to me that we would look at wealth distributions as well. After all comparison and competition is core to the human experience, is entirely relative, and more visible than ever in the age of the internet and social media. These dynamics massively impact individual perceptions of success and political priorities, fairness being a deeply baked value in the human wetware (just ask any 5-year-old), so not sure why we wouldn't want to address them directly. Certainly there's more value than in the superficial tribalism and dog whistle culture that passes for political discourse today?
Agree. Focusing on the inequality bit feels closer to envy. But if the quality of life or something like inflation adjusted wealth is going up for everyone, or if it is above some acceptable minimum, then is it really a problem? Or just a reflection of how concentrated things can be in a technologically advanced world?
I’m from Europe, and that’s what I focus on when talking about inequality: even if everyone’s living standards are rising, extreme wealth concentration can erode social cohesion, limit access to essential services, and distort political influence. You seem to view this through an American lens, very focused on individual opportunity, while to me it's about fairness, shared responsibility, and the health of society.
I think it's not even the billionaires that are the biggest problem. It's more like the top 10-20% that are driving up housing prices and many other things. They are a large enough group that it makes sense to mostly cater to them which is something we already see in most new apartments being higher end, less and less cheap cars on the market, no small houses to buy, restaurant prices shooting up, concert tickers becoming crazy expensive and so on. Las Vegas used to be the place for the average guy to fun. In the last few years they have publicly stated that they don't want that population anymore but want more of the upper end.
All this leads to a system that favors the top 10-20% who can afford things, own assets like stocks and real estate, get better education for their kids and leaves the rest of the polulation out in the cold.
Is criticizing dictatorships just envy? Because wealth inequality is the same thing as power inequality. Wealth doesn't just mean more goods to consume, it means power, and that power is mostly used to gain even more wealth and power. Eventually we'll have power concentration similar to a real dictatorship. Opposing such a future is not envy.
So much so that even if the quality of life of the lowest improves greatly, if the quality of life of everyone around them improves even more rapidly, they will feel worse off, not better off
"You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you."
Because on one level, we are all just competing for finite resources - especially quality females - economics is in that context an ordinal competition, not cardinal.[1] But on another level, it's the mutual cooperation, wealth creation from nothing (making the "finite" a little less finite and a little more infinite), etc that allows us to advance both as a society and as individuals.
[1]There is an interesting tie into Mises here if I wanted to rabbit hole it (value is subjective, not measurable in cardinal units, and exists only in the mind as a ranked preference of options)
One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners possible in the first place.
When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one.
So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.
This is extremely reductionist of leftwing politics and ideas, and I sincerely hope you are not basing your political orientation from that. Wealth inequality is power inequality, which in a society leads to terrible outcomes for the majority.
But initial take is that some environments people trust each other more. Trusting intentions, actions, words, ability. For example, a low-trust environment would probably be most prisons. High-trust might be a neighborhood where people don't lock their doors.
I remember reading a World Bank economist saying that we might be able to explain the difference in GDP per capita between the US and a place like Somalia based on how much people trust each other. How mistrust can add so much friction to interactions.
Uslaner (2002) makes a distinction between moralistic trust ("Can people be trusted?") and strategic trust ("Can THIS person be trusted?") that you may find interesting.
There is also Yamagashi's Paradox: Japanese cooperate more, but trust less. Americans trust more, but defect more in specific situations.
Both are important. A lot of poverty is directly caused by having a class of rich people who seek to siphon away as many resources as they can. A society with only poor people would probably be a more cooperative one, which would help in raising the average standard of living.
For instance, shelter being expensive implies either that it's fundamentally difficult to construct shelter (which is not the case, as seen in every slum and homeless camp everywhere) or the existence of rich landlords.
>I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach.
Okay, so whats the argument? Wealth inequality and the QoL of the lowest wealth individuals are intrinsically linked, because we live under systems of government with powers of taxation and goals to increase the QoL of their citizens. At what point does the poorest become wealthy enough that immense levels of wealth-hoarding, especially by individuals, is okay? I cannot believe with a good conscience that at any point it becomes okay, unless we are all living in a utopia. If you don't agree with socialism, that is what it is, but to care about the QoL of the poorest without wanting actual support networks for those people isn't rational and seems more like moral posturing.
I don't think many look at wealth inequality in isolation, it's usually accompanied by how people are starving. E.g. "over 20 people die from malnutrition in the US but we have over 900 billionaire's" - e.g. each billionaire would probably only have to give $300k each (equiv to what the average tax payer gives to the defense budget each year) to prevent most deaths in the US due to lack of food - etc.
I get the feeling that you're winging the specific numbers because they're spectacularly incoherent.
But anyway, the United States is extremely rich and has essentially no big problems that can be solved by a small amount (say, a few billion) of money. The problems are either so big that it would take trillions to solve (supporting aging population etc), or blocked by something other than money (politics, regulations, etc). The big problems that can be solved just by throwing a few billion at them are solved quite easily by either the government or by private entities like the Gates Foundation.
In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve.
It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.
One of the things you learn quickly when you look at these kind of problems is that they’re not so easy to solve with money. The budget for SNAP, the US’s primary food benefits program, is about $100 billion; the additional $270 million you propose would be a tiny drop in the bucket.
In the US, the poorest people suffer from an obesity epidemic. Virtually no one is starving in the US anymore, besides mental health problems or other edge cases creating it.
Volunteering at a food bank in any large city will change your perspective.
If you’re not where the rubber meets the road your knowledge of a system will always be incomplete and inaccurate. Literal trade secret of S Class developers, you’re welcome.
The poor are food insecure. This leads to obesity not because they have access to an abundance of food but because their access to food is not stead, leading to over eating to compensate, and the food they can afford is not healthy.
Are you really claiming that it's cheaper to buy an appetite-satisfying amount of unhealthy food (chips/sweets/snacks/fast food) than fresh vegetables and staples like rice or potatoes?
Yes, both cheaper and more accessible and easier to eat without having to spend the time (which the working poor don't have) to then cook the raw foods. They're called food deserts.
Thanks for the link. I agree that preparation time is an important consideration. I do think that the food desert criterion (> 1.6km to the nearest supermarket in urban centres) seems very restrictive -- this would make half of most suburbs "food deserts" in the affluent western country where I live.
I find the more recent concept of "food swamps", also explained on that page, to be a (perhaps unwitting) direct challenge to the theory that absence of nearby healthy food is the root cause:
> A related concept is the phenomenon of a food swamp, a recently coined term by researchers who defined it as an area with a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants (and fast food advertising) in comparison to the number of supermarkets in that area.[13] The single supermarket in a low-income area does not, according to researchers Rose and colleagues, necessitate availability nor does it decrease obesity rates and health risks
If this claim is true -- that is, if areas with 1 nearby supermarket have obesity rates no better than areas with 0 -- then it's essentially impossible to blame health outcomes on the availability of healthy food nearby. If an area has nearby supermarkets, it is much harder to make the case that obesity is purely the result of external factors outside a person's control.
A fancy Nissin Cup of Noodle is $0.80 and 300 caloriesz. I just bought 2 lbs of hamburger meat for $15.
Food insecure people load up on cheap carbs. Most of them don’t know you to cook or lack gear and will buy a $5/16oz boil in bag rice vs. a 10lb bag for $6.
reply