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@Greyparrot
Already addressed this. Resources are enhanced through innovation, that is: our finite material resources only have a value to "drain" ONLY when innovation is applied. And you do not dispute that innovation is an inexhaustible resource if properly rewarded and justifiably permitted.
I think I've done a good enough job explaining how massive the number 402 billion is. With that in mind, do you really think that that sheer level of excess is needed to incentivize innovation? Once again, Terence Tao has made a lot of major contributions to the math scene. Sure, they aren't nearly as valuable as Elon Musk's contributions. That's why he doesn't make anywhere near what Musk does. Even so, what he does requires the same level of skill and effort if not more, and it is well over the "bare minimum" that you are so convinced anyone paid by salary only will do. Humans are motivated by receiving a greater reward than the effort that we put in, not by receiving a greater reward than the value that we produced. For example, if I offered you $10,000 to push a button that would magically reduce the amount of food human beings need in everyone other than you, you probably wouldn't respond "Of course not! Pushing that button is worth way more than $10,000! Offer me $1,000,000,000,000 and then I'll do it." unless you were some kind of greedy psychopath. I am proposing that we use this fact about human psychology to save trillions of dollars. (Yes, trillions. We aren't only talking about Musk here, even though he's the prime example.)
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@Greyparrot
Why would you care if Musk receives 1.61% of GDP if he created > 1.61% GDP in value for millions of Americans?
Because I don't believe that what someone "deserves" is a good excuse to drain our resources for their luxuries.
You never did dispute the fact he created more value to the consumers than the money he received for compensation in trade.
That's because I don't deny it.
If Musk were to disappear, so would that 2% of GDP value he created.
Everyone needs to make money somehow. Unless you're concerned that people like him will stop working out of spite under the new system at the cost of being able to pay for their basic needs, I see no reason to believe that they would "disappear".
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@Mharman
You said this:
Value is subjective. If more people value your work, you will get more money. It’s really that simple.Do you really think the average joe could do Elon Musk’s job?
I felt that what I was saying also applied to the above, so I included you on it.
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@cristo71
It sounds as though your idea has the most in common, real world speaking, with China. No expert on China here, but it has companies which are run by non governmental employees, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) always has the right and authority to intervene in various enterprises as it sees fit.
Firstly, I am not proposing any government intervention in the enterprises of a business. That difference aside, I think it's important to note that I wouldn't trust the US government with this system, let alone the Chinese government. That isn't saying very much, though, because I don't trust the US government to do the things that the US government already does.
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@cristo71
If Musk’s net worth were to get cut in half or double, I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it either way. It is funny how so many people assume that Musk is merely a hoarder of wealth in a zero-sum game, as if he keeps shelves full of custom-made, million dollar bills in his own personal vault— maybe even with his own face on them?Instead, the reverse is true— Musk and his ilk are wealth/value creators. They bring value via creativity and innovation. For sure, there are CEO’s out there who are not worth their millions in salary (not that Musk receives a cash salary) and are pretty much guilty of corporate mismanagement or even malfeasance. But then there are CEOs who are worth every penny they get, and this is a concept that is foreign to many. There are CEOs whose success has become the success of countless investors, but they haven’t managed to create utopia, so they must stink.
The problem here is that 1.61% of our GDP is being used just to make sure Musk (not billionaires in general, Musk is sucking up this much wealth on his own) is being "properly rewarded" with needless luxury after needless luxury. Money is the method by which we represent material value, not the other way around. When we don't see the money, all we see is a country that imports its necessities, uses its own abundant resources on luxuries, and then complains that its citizens can't meet their basic material needs. Whether you agree with my proposal or not, there is surely a problem here.
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@sadolite
I figured as much. I just wanted to direct you to the right place.
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@cristo71
How is your prescription distinct from government ownership of what are now private entities?
I realize that a semantic distinction is causing us some problems here. If the government holding the value of a company's stocks while not actually directly controlling said company is government ownership of that company, then there isn't a difference. What I just described, however, is not the same thing as central planning, and I think that that's an important point.
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@sadolite
Contrary to popular belief you are not paid for how hard you work or how long you work.
I already addressed this point on page 1, especially post #7.
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@cristo71
Hmm… and if people like Musk don’t wish to be government employees?
Then instead of doing something that they are incredibly good at and therefore likely earning a very good salary they can get a job that they are bad at and earn a much smaller salary.
Where does the investment capital come from?
Taxpayers.
Would you be able to outline exactly what it is you are prescribing? I need more than “Musk can keep doing what he’s doing. He will just be accumulating wealth at a more humane and reasonable rate.” (Not an exact quote)
I said this in post #12:
I believe that people should be employed to make good investments, and the resulting large quantities of wealth should be controlled by the government and used for public interest. Is this fair to the investors? Well, they aren't doing anything more important than, say, doctors, so yes, it is absolutely fair, and the current "free market" system isn't fair to those who struggle to get enough to eat while Elon Musk buys private jets with money that could have fed hundreds of children for almost two decades.
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@Shila
But you said he was ahead by 12739 years.
This is blatantly false.
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@Greyparrot
innovation is never a limited resource. Ever.
I was not referring to innovation. I was referring to material resources.
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@Shila
So he cannot add 402 billion seconds to his life even though your calculation says it’s possible to convert his billions into years.
My calculation says that 12739 years is 402 billion seconds. It also says that you would therefore need 12739 years to reach Elon Musk's net worth if you theoretically made one dollar every second. It does not say that Musk can buy additional seconds to add to his lifespan.
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@Shila
What is the significance of that 12739 years when he will only live the normal lifespan?
12739 years is 402 billion seconds, and Elon Musk's net worth is 402 billion dollars. This isn't about his lifespan.
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@Shila
If you are comparing scale of wealth to scale of time. How much time does Elon Musk have when you compare it to his scale of wealth?
Your wording is a little strange, but I'm assuming that you are asking what amount of time corresponds to Musk's quantity of wealth in my chosen scale. The answer to that is 12739 years, which was included in the original post.
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@Greyparrot
There's no reason why we can't allow both individual success and collective well-being to coexist.
Limited resources. This is my entire issue with the current state of our economy: We have limited resources, and yet some people get to have private jets, and others, possibly of equal or greater intelligence, never even have the chance to get of the ground. Statistically speaking, of the 38 million Americans under the poverty line, at least one of them has the innate intelligence necessary to make some incredibly good investments, and yet you suggest that we shouldn't redirect the giant flow of wealth that billionaires have at their disposal to those 38 million Americans. You talk about the need for a strong incentive, but having the resources necessary to do something is a prerequisite for being motivated to do it.
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@Shila
How long will Elon Musk live with all those seconds added to his wealth?
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. This was just a thought experiment comparing scale of wealth to scale of time. I'm not sure what Musk's life span or "adding seconds to wealth" has to do with this.
But Elon Musk did not buy Tesla orSpaceX. He created those companies.
You have made a true statement. It is beyond me how said statement is intended to counter my argument, though.
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@cristo71
You continue to make contradictory prescriptions:“Only the government would make investments.”“We would still have people like Musk making investments.”Would you be able to outline exactly what it is you are prescribing? I need more than “Musk can keep doing what he’s doing. He will just be accumulating wealth at a more humane and reasonable rate.” (Not an exact quote)
The underlined quote is not direct, and is misleading, since it implies that I would have only politicians be able to invest, something which I never said, so before I proceed, I will replace this with a statement that actually represents my beliefs:
"Only government employed professional investors would make investments."
"We would still have people like Musk making investments."
These statements aren't contradictory if people like Musk were government employees.
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@Greyparrot
This is a linear function. Can you use a realistic function and calculate wealth generation with an exponential function?
This wasn't intended to be a realistic way in which one might accumulate wealth. No one magically gets a dollar every second without doing anything. Also, the "dollar a second" thought experiment aside, the following are facts: one million seconds is about 11.5 days, one billion seconds is about 31 years and 8 months, one hundred billion seconds is over the length of the human era. I am not going to distort those objective facts by putting them on a logarithmic scale. I might also add that buying power does not function on a logarithmic scale. Ten times the money has ten times the buying power.
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@Greyparrot
Well I would hope mathematicians wouldn't be saying arbitrarily "this number is too large" without proofFor a non-mathematician, the concept of wealth generation being an exponential function is like speaking a foreign language.
Math is a very abstract and rigorous field that doesn't generally deal with political questions. We are talking about a significant impact on the quality of people's lives while you are effectively asking how many grains of sand must be collected to mathematically constitute a "mound". "Large" isn't a well-defined term, and it doesn't need to be for one person having 1.61% of the US GDP in their hands to start having a significant negative impact on the rest of us.
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My proposals of professional investors aside, I think it's important to highlight just how massive 402 billion (Musk's net worth) actually is. A lot of people don't seem to understand just how much bigger billions, let alone hundreds of billions are than mere millions. Let's start with this:
- One thousand seconds is 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
- One million seconds is 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds.
- One billion seconds is over 31 years and 8 months.
- One hundred billion seconds is 3169 years.
- Elon Musk's net worth, 402 billion dollars, in seconds, would be 12739 years. The human era–the period for which humans have been the dominant species on Earth–is estimated at around 12000 years, with the holocene calendar putting us in the year 12025.
This means that if you earned a dollar every second it would only take you 11 days to become a millionaire, you would make a few billion dollars in your lifetime, but to reach Musk's net worth you would have to be some kind of immortal being who started earning one dollar every second before mankind was even the dominant species on planet Earth, certainly long before those dollars that you were earning even existed. I really want to emphasize those numbers: 11 days to become a millionaire, 31 years to become a billionaire, 12739 years to match Elon Musk.
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@Greyparrot
You must be familiar with a normal distribution curve.How would you flatten that curve? Mandatory eugenics so people have the same ability and same ambition and same autism and other disorders that put people like Musk at the extreme ends? Or worse, eliminate the extremes through genocide like Cambodia did with their Marxist killing fields pogram?
I would propose that we don't.
As a math enthusiast, you should not see large numbers and think "I can't imagine such a large number"
I don't. This is actually remarkably ironic as I was just thinking of making a post describing the scale of numbers in the hundreds of billions, something which I feel pretty comfortable with, but is often misconceived by others as smaller than it actually is.
That is what math is for, to explain why those large numbers exist, despite what you feel.
Is this actually what you think mathematicians do? Believe it or not, one does not walk into an advanced math class to see "1,000,000,000,000,000" written on the board, followed by the professor saying "Alright, today we will be explaining why this number–even larger than our number from yesterday–exists." I must say, it's really funny to imagine math journals filled with articles titled "On the Number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000", "On the Number 2,000,000,000,000,000,000", and "On the Number 3,000,000,000,000,000,000".
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@Savant
I concede my attempt to compare professional investors to preexisting government jobs. Even so, I still don't believe that the ECP would be a problem here for one simple reason: The government wouldn't be trying to "calculate the value" of anything here. Like any other organization, they would simply be trying to find the lowest price for which they could still get high quality work. Like other organizations, pay would probably vary. Elon Musk would still be making a lot of money, but not nearly as much as he currently does. It's also important to note that we already know the value of what Musk does, and it probably is at least somewhat in range of what he actually makes. As I've said before, I'm not trying to pay people the "value" of their work. We know how well that turns out. I'm trying to pay people enough for them to still be productive while not giving one single person 1.61% of the US GDP. Maybe even a high six figure salary underestimates the ideal pay for top professional investors, but even something in the tens of millions would be a lot more reasonable than the situation we have right now.
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I would like to emphasize this point that I made to cristo71:
I'm glad I chose professors as my example. After all, many of the best professors and teachers more generally put lots of unnecessary unpaid hours into what they do. The fact is that if fixed salaries didn't sufficiently motivate people, if anyone who wasn't being offered billions of dollars wouldn't put enough effort into their jobs for the surrounding industries to survive, and if education and application processes weren't at least a decently effective way to sort for the most competent individuals, our economy would have permanently collapsed a very long time ago.
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@Savant
The ECP doesn't really apply here since as I have clarified a couple of times now, I am not proposing a centrally planned economy. These professional investors would be paid a salary set by their employers, just like the rest of us. Also, if the fact that the government happens to be the specific entity employing them is enough for the ECP to come into play, (it's definitely not) why shouldn't we get rid of the government jobs that already exist on the same grounds?
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@cristo71
Professors are not paid commission. Professional investors are. If professional investors are paid only a base salary, they won’t be putting in any extra hours away from family they otherwise would (which is good) and achieving the better results those efforts would enable. What’s worse, there wouldn’t be many good investments at all under your system. So, you would get mediocre investors dealing in mediocre investments.
I'm glad I chose professors as my example. After all, many of the best professors and teachers more generally put lots of unnecessary unpaid hours into what they do. The fact is that if fixed salaries didn't sufficiently motivate people, if anyone who wasn't being offered billions of dollars wouldn't put enough effort into their jobs for the surrounding industries to survive, and if education and application processes weren't at least a decently effective way to sort for the most competent individuals, our economy would have permanently collapsed a very long time ago.
You made a claim about the stock market, and I asked you about your claim to see if you have any idea what you are talking about. Your non-answer actually is an answer to that.
That claim was intended to be a small, preemptive concession. Why on Earth would I back up a claim that I believe supports your argument better than it supports mine? I certainly don't intend to do so simply to prove my knowledge to you.
The bolded involves contradictory claims. It’s as if you are saying, “No, the government is not taking ownership of your lemonade stand, you just can’t continue to profit from it, and only the government can by shares of its stock.” Your idea lacks coherence and understanding of how businesses are owned and financed.
This is my mistake. The word "nothing" in "Nothing would be confiscated." was too strong. After all, taxes exist, so I doubt that any reasonable person would expect a government not to "confiscate" anything. As to my suggestion of Elon Musk maintaining ownership while the government holds the funds, this is another situation where my choice of words may not have been ideal, but my main intention here is to differentiate between my concept and the idea of central planning: Elon Musk could still call the shots for his own companies, and he would be compensated for doing so. The key difference between this and the current state of things is that this compensation would be orders of magnitude smaller than his current resulting income.
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@Greyparrot
@Mharman
@cristo71
@Savant
What Elon Musk does requires a lot of work and could not be done by most people. I do not deny this in the slightest. On the other hand, we have positions like doctors, professors, and even professional athletes of which something very similar is true, and yet people still take these jobs. My question is this: If we know that people will take jobs like these for orders of magnitude less than what Elon Musk makes, why shouldn't we expect people to take jobs as investors when they no longer have the option to privately invest? Also, before you claim that what Elon Musk does is far beyond what anyone in these professions does, I would like to bring Terence Tao to your attention. Terence Tao is considered the world's greatest mathematician, and has the highest recorded IQ in the world. Between total pay and benefits he makes just over $700,000 a year. The research that he does is incredibly important to the field of mathematics, (for example, the Green-Tao theorem) and is certainly way out of Elon Musk's wheelhouse. The University of California didn't have to offer him a salary of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, so why should investors need an equivalent incentive? Let me also remind you that under my system these investors would not have to worry about financial risk in the same way that investors currently do. Just like other professions, the worst of their fears would be getting fired, not losing everything.
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@Greyparrot
So economic fascism. Government control over private property. We have a record of history to show exactly why that system fails.
What I am proposing admittedly takes a few things from the communist playbook, but I consider it a far more balanced approach than putting absolutely everything in the government's hands. (Keep in mind, I am not getting rid of private property, nor would the government have control over private property beyond company funds and investments.) If you could point out where specifically my concept would fail rather than pointing to historical examples that it vaguely resembles then I will hopefully be able to supply you with a proper response, rather than this admittedly vague one.
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@Savant
The obvious trade off here is freedom. The government could choose what clothes people wear, what food they buy, etc. But to some extent, we let people make their own choices. And it's not like politicians are known to be super ethical where the stock market is involved.
Who says that we're letting politicians decide which companies stay, which companies go, and what to invest in? We could have rules in place that protect investors from being fired on the grounds of making investments that their superiors simply don't like.
How do you know which people are good at investing or running companies? Really hard to tell until it happens. Is everyone given practice money to invest? How do we know the "good" investors will bother to work hard if they don't have the chance of becoming super rich?
Since I am proposing that people would be educated in investing, presumably this could culminate in some kind of test to prove their ability to make fruitful investments.
Would Elon Musk work that hard to invest without the incentive of being a billionaire? That prospect clearly does motivate some people. And while it's a lot of money to one person, it's pennies compared to the value of his companies. If Elon making millions instead of billions makes his companies 10% less efficient, that tradeoff isn't worth it. Talent or no, slight differences in the performance of a few people has a huge impact on their companies.
I will get to the incentive argument in a separate post momentarily.
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@Greyparrot
Because there's no substitute for Musk, and removing the incentive to create wealth for millions of people with a product they pay Musk less than it's worth would impoverish millions with the removal of the product Musk created. Killing geese that lay gold eggs makes everyone poorer.
Once again, there is a substitute for Musk. A Musk who is still investing, still running successful businesses, but isn't making hundreds of billions of dollars anymore. Right now, geese that lay gold eggs get all of the bread. We don't have to kill them, but we don't have to give them quite so much bread that could be given to the other geese. As for the "removing the incentive" argument, that is being used by basically everyone right now, so I am going to save that for another post which replies to multiple people at once.
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@cristo71
There are already people— fund managers— privately employed to do that. Would you prefer that only government could employ fund managers?People get into investing chiefly to accumulate and control wealth. If you take away that control from investors, they are then disincentivized to put as much money, time, and effort into investing.
I'm not going to attempt to deny that hundreds of billions of dollars is a far greater incentive than hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even so, we don't offer people billions to be professors and yet they still are. (I choose "professor" specifically because it is a position that doesn't pay any ludicrous amount of money yet requires a lot of background knowledge. Once again, people still become professors.) No, being a professor doesn't require you to risk your own money, but in my proposed economy, nor would investing.
How do you believe, say, Tesla stock tanking negatively affects the rest of us?
Oh, would you say it doesn't negatively affect us in any way? Sure. We can go with that. Tesla stock tanking does not negatively affect the rest of us. This supports your argument how?
You think that a person’s stock shares should be confiscated past a certain point? Musk is not even a stock investor per se. He is an entrepreneur and innovator and hence a creator of wealth. His investments are mainly in companies which he has created and led. Do you think the government should take over ownership of his companies?Realize that Musk wouldn’t even have attained such wealth in the first place under the confiscatory system you suggest. Your system only has large amounts of wealth to confiscate because it was accumulated up until now under a totally different system. Your system will not accumulate much wealth going forward from the time it is implemented. The government’s share will then get smaller and smaller over time. This is a huge flaw in your suggestion.
I am not suggesting any such thing. Nothing would be confiscated, because no one would be privately investing in the first place. This system in no way relies on taking money from the already rich as you would suggest. Elon Musk could keep the hundreds of billions he already has, he just wouldn't be making hundreds of billions anymore. I also do not believe that the government should take ownership of his companies. He would retain full control over said companies, but the government would have control over the massive funds for those companies. My concept is effectively to leave as many parts of the economy intact as possible while reducing everyone to a reasonable fixed salary and using the excess money that they would have been making to improve government services while lowering taxes at the same time.
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@Savant
And where are you getting that money? From taxpayers. So you are forcing people to invest, just indirectly.
I suppose you could consider this to be forcing taxpayers to invest. I'll grant you that one. I don't think that those taxpayers who would now have to pay less in taxes while still getting more government benefits would care very much though.
Why not? Additional money being invested is good.
Because we would already be getting that "additional money" that you're after from taxpayers, but it would be invested responsibly on their behalf, rather than us trusting ordinary people with the weapon of potential mass financial destruction that we call investing. Roughly the same amount of money gets invested either way, but in the current world a lot of it gets invested into terrible business ideas or outright scams.
Someone like Musk is doing more than just investing, they also make high-stakes decisions on how companies are run. I suppose you could replace that with central planning, but then you just reinvented the Soviet Union.
You and the others on your side in this issue seem to continually overestimate how much I am actually proposing that we change. We would still have people like Elon Musk making investments and independently deciding how companies are run. They just wouldn't be making billions anymore. I am not suggesting that we completely replace our economic system with a new one; I am simply suggesting that we take the giant flow of resources that currently goes straight into the hands of CEOs and other big investors and company decision-makers and redirect it to something more helpful. The way that I have proposed that we do this also has the nice side effect of potentially making this giant flow of resources even bigger by making investing something you need actual qualifications for while giving the investors the opportunity to invest far more money than they would have been able to otherwise.
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@Greyparrot
That premise of outsourcing investors assumes there is no long tail on a normal distribution curve, where Musk lies at the far tail. You can't replace Musk with multiple inferior investors and expect the same product value.
No, but I can replace an Elon Musk who makes hundreds of billions with an Elon Musk who makes hundreds of thousands.
Even if he takes the money the people willingly gave him and spends it on all on Jets, not only did he make the millions of people wealthier by trading a more valuable product than the money they gave him, but he also helped the jet manufacturers.
Yes, he is helping jet manufacturers. I would be quite happy to see jet manufacturing scaled back such that the same resources which would have been used for some billionaire's private jet goes to something like feeding people instead. In the world that I am imagining, there would unfortunately be a lot of people who currently work towards producing luxuries for billionaires who would need to go find a job doing something which actually helps the world.
That's a double win for everyone, so you should encourage more of what Musk is doing. And also objectively realize that Musk is undercompensated for the wealth he created due to the fact people gave him less money than the product was worth.
Once again, I don't care about giving him his "objectively accurate" compensation. I care about maximizing the well-being of as many people as possible, and I would hope that you do too. As for the people buying those products, what part of my proposal would stop them from buying the same products at the same prices? The only difference is that a lot of that money would now end up making its way back to them in the form of government services and lower taxes. Which would you prefer: You buy a product for a bargain price and the money goes towards some billionaire getting a private jet, or you buy a product for the same bargain price and only some of the money goes to reasonably compensating those behind it while the rest is contributing to you paying lower taxes while your children get free lunch at school?
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@Savant
This is basically what index funds and mutual funds are. However, (a) Most investments will go up anyway, and (b) investments from a lot of people are needed to determine the value of a company in the first place. 1,000 investors is better than 100.
Okay, so we would have a lot of investors. There is no reason to believe that these investors would be any less capable of determining the value of a company. In fact, they would likely be more capable.
The current system allows a lot of money to be invested while also not forcing people to invest anything.
When did I suggest forcing people to invest? I wouldn't be requiring everyone in the entire country to invest. In fact, most people wouldn't be allowed to invest. Meanwhile, as I already pointed out, we would actually see an increase in the amount of money which could be invested since these people would be investing government money, of which there is a lot, rather than their own money, of which there is relatively very little.
Also Elon Musk would clearly be one of these "qualified investors" since he became the richest person in the world, so you shouldn't have a problem with him making that much money.
Okay, so he would be one of the qualified investors. He has quite the resume, so I'm sure he could easily get the job with a great salary right off the bat. A "great salary" would be six figures, though, not twelve.
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@Greyparrot
You are basically telling millions of people what they should trade their money for. Ethically, that's highly immoral.
I must say, I'm a little confused here. I am telling millions what they should trade their money for? Like I'm forcing them to buy certain things? Maybe that's not what you were trying to say, but it sounds like you think I want the government to be able to tell people what to buy. I don't.
Every single person purchased the goods and services for what they felt was a bargain or else they would not willingly trade.
I don't deny it.
Every single person would be that much poorer without the goods or services worth more than the money traded. You are advocating for the decrease in the standard of living for millions of people by saying Musk should not accept their money and provide a better value in exchange.That's also immoral.
I'm not saying that these trades shouldn't be happening. I'm saying that we have a system where amounts of wealth orders of magnitude larger than any individual should ever have their hands on are being entrusted to those who make these trades, and I am suggesting that that money be handled by a third party that won't spend it on private jets, mansions, and movie set pieces. Yes, stopping these investments from happening would decrease the quality of life of millions, but I'm not saying that they should stop happening. By keeping these undeniably economically helpful investments in place while not giving all of the resulting wealth to just a few people, we could improve quality of life for millions.
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@Greyparrot
Is the total value of the goods and services created indirectly by Elon Musk greater than the money that he has? Yes. Does that mean that he should have that money? No. As I mentioned in post #7, if your goal is to maximize the well-being of everyone then giving people an amount of money equivalent to the value that they produce is not necessarily a good system, as intuitive as that system may initially seem. If your goal is not to maximize the well-being of everyone but instead to give people the money that they "deserve" then our disagreement lies not in how our society should meet its goals, but what those goals should even be.
Regarding this idea of selecting the "best risk taker", do you have any thoughts on my concept of employing investors? As I pointed out to Savant, it could quite effectively sort for good investors while not draining the economy just for the sake of incentivizing them to invest.
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Posted in:
I suggest this video. There is no good reason to believe that the salute wasn't a deliberate signal to the far right.
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The recent auditing by Doge, shows why trusting the government to spend money wisely is retarded.
I hope you don't think that I would trust our current government with this. Government competence is one issue. Having a fair and effective economic system is another. The latter is what we are currently discussing.
Once again, this was supposed to be a reply to Wylted, but it won't let me post it every time I put them in the mentions.
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@cristo71
It doesn't really matter whether the money is from a "salary" or not. Salary or not, Elon Musk can still buy the $75,000,000 private jet I've mentioned a few times now and not even notice a dent. In fact using the data from that website, even though, yes, these numbers may sometimes be negative, on average he makes up for that private jet 7-fold every single day.
Knowing the above, do you think that we would somehow make higher salaries if Musk and the like’s net worth remained static (no “income”)?
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here, but I'll answer both potential versions of the question that I see:
If Elon Musk's net worth were static, would that mean that the rest of us have higher salaries than him?
As you pointed out, he doesn't even have a salary now, so yes it would. I'm not sure how it matters though. He would still have hundreds of billions of dollars in his possession, which is easily enough to live in the greatest luxury that is possible at this point for the rest of his life and still have more money to spare than the rest of us could ever dream of.
If Elon Musk's net worth were static, would that lead to an increase in the salaries of everyone else.
If his net worth stopped going up because his investments were tanking, that would indirectly have a negative impact on the rest of us as well. What I would really like to see is people like him being reduced to the fixed salaries that the rest of us live on while the money from these investments goes to the good of the public. (See my current discussion with Savant for more details on this idea.) That might not raise our salaries directly, but it could substantially lower our taxes, thereby having that effect.
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@Savant
Your response seems to consist entirely of reasons that investments are highly important, which I do not deny. Do you have any problem with the idea of employing specific people to be investors? You didn't respond to it, and if your focus is on making investment as effective as possible, this would be the way to go:
- More qualified investors: Currently, anyone can risk their life savings on the stock market and other investments if they so choose. Wouldn't it be logical to require people to actually know what they are doing? It protects investors and boosts efficiency.
- Less risk: The worst case scenario for these investors would be getting fired, not losing everything. Furthermore, the government money being used would generally not be in too much danger given that these individuals would be well-educated on careful investments.
- Higher capitalization rate: The resulting decrease in poverty would give more people the opportunity to even get the necessary education, and people who are already decently well off would be able to invest far more money than they would have otherwise.
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@Savant
Saying any level of possessions is ridiculous is going to be arbitrary. Wealth is relative. Why isn't it ridiculous to make $100,000 a year?
I didn't intend the "ridiculousness" of this to be a statement of absolute truth. I was simply trying to explain why I brought these numbers up in the first place: To draw attention to something that is horribly imbalanced. What exactly is so horribly imbalanced here? Well...
It's better because it's unlikely anyone's going to assume the risk of investing if they get punished for it.
Thank you for providing a nice segway here. What is so imbalanced is that we consider a good investment valuable enough that we let some live in such extreme luxury while others starve. I don't care if it makes investing a little less appealing; no one should have a private jet. It's a waste of resources, and that is that. If you want to know what I would have us do instead, I believe that people should be employed to make good investments, and the resulting large quantities of wealth should be controlled by the government and used for public interest. Is this fair to the investors? Well, they aren't doing anything more important than, say, doctors, so yes, it is absolutely fair, and the current "free market" system isn't fair to those who struggle to get enough to eat while Elon Musk buys private jets with money that could have fed hundreds of children for almost two decades.
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@Savant
No. Not sure who is saying that he is though.
No one that I'm aware of. I just wanted to start the discussion off with that question. "No" is hopefully an obvious answer, but it's helpful to establish that we all agree on that right out of the gate. Beyond that, I wanted to throw some numbers down to give some perspective on just how ridiculous the volume of resources he has at his personal disposal is, regardless of what he possibly could have done to earn it.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but based on your response I will assume that your answer to my yes or no question is no. Anyway, to respond to the point you made, yes, it does often seem to be the case that pay is determined in this way. Assuming that pay should be determined in a way that maximizes total well-being of everyone, could you please explain how these spending choices fit that model? You are also of course free to admit that they do not fit into this model. Before you respond to this, I would like to address a few things that I feel might be relevant:
The concept of extreme wealth as an incentive for a higher "level of service": If these jobs that have a higher "level of service" don't require significantly more work, (as you seem to indirectly admit) than there needs to be some other justification for why this extreme incentive is necessary. I can understand possibly considering these jobs somewhat more important, but a ratio of over 4.5 years to one single minute is completely absurd. Also, let's imagine for a second that professional athletes and teachers had the same income as each other. Don't you think that if all of the teacher positions were taken and a large number of professional athlete positions were open, that people would be flocking to the athlete positions regardless of there being no difference in pay? This monetary incentive really doesn't need to exist, and even if there is going to be one, it should certainly be small enough that we don't have such a small percentage of people consuming such a ridiculously large amount of resources.
Elon Musk's philanthropy: I admit, Elon Musk doesn't just spend his money on private jets that cost enough to provide basic necessities to 321 children throughout their entire childhoods. (The link included earlier mentions a $75,000,000 private jet. I got the cost of providing basic necessities to a child through their childhood from this website, and then simply did some basic division.) He does make large charitable donations. My question is this: How is this better than a world where all of his unnecessary wealth goes directly to charitable causes? These donations aren't him being incredibly generous; they're him being at least decent enough to put some of his ridiculously excess unearned wealth where it actually belongs.
Note: This is intended as a reply to Wylted, but for whatever reason the site is not letting me make it one.
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Elon Musk makes $381,904.19 per minute. (I got his daily income from this website, and then divided by 1440, the number of minutes in a day, to get this figure.) The US census reports that the median household income (not individual, household) from 2023 was $80,610 per year. Elon Musk's income in one minute is well over four and a half times this. I'll reserve any political assertions for the discussion; for now I simply want to ask this very simple question: Is Elon Musk doing more work in one minute than everyone in an average American household combined does in 4.5 years?
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@Lemming
Sorry this response is so unbelievably late. I haven't really been active on this site for a while. I think Lockhart actually addressed the point of basic utility quite well. His thoughts on this can be found at the end of page 11 on to the start of page 12. Regardless, I think I'll make my own similar but not identical commentary on this point: No one is using algebra and trigonometry in their day-to-day lives any more than they're using the skills they learned in art class. Why are we even teaching these subjects if we can't teach them in a way that actually develops creativity and critical thinking? For those who will need subjects like algebra, trigonometry, calculus, and beyond for their careers, it is only more important that they learn math in a way that they will actually retain and that teaches them to problem solve in a mathematical context. Every high-school student I have spoken to can only solve problems laid out in exactly the way that they were taught. Not one of them can solve an actual problem that isn't just applying a prememorized formula, and there is no reason for this. Lockhart's example of the area of a triangle is a great one: The level of reasoning here is certainly accessible to your average high-school student, and yet they just chant "one-half base times height" to themselves over and over so that they'll be able to find the area of a triangle on their next test. It should be reasonable to ask them why this is the formula, given that if they are to ever actually use this math it would be incredibly useful for them to understand where area formulas come from, and yet I can only imagine the number of angry parents a teacher would have on their hands for putting such an "unreasonable" question that "the students were never told they needed to study for" on the test. To quote a math teacher I knew who understood the disaster of math education: "[Kids] remember, regurgitate, and forget."
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@FLRW
Saying things like "the Republicans are stupid" may seem harmless (and I'm not disputing its truth either), but it was the constant demeaning of the other side, among other things, that lost the democrats the election.
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@FLRW
No, Trump won because Republicans are stupid. Project 2025 will destroy the USA.
I agree that Project 2025 is a serious threat to our democracy, but my point is that this could have been prevented! Democrats simply were not smart about campaigning. Their advertising was an absolute disaster!
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I wouldn't normally solicit forum topics like this, but these topics have been rapidly buried under all the election chaos, so I figured I would post a link to these topics here in case anyone is interested in discussing something that isn't the election right now: Preserving the human condition, A Mathematician's Lament
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Maybe Kamala Harris could have won the election if the democrats had actually tried to win people over to their side by rational means. Instead, we saw claims of how stupid Trump supporters are, how they're all crazy, and how they support a madman. We saw ads that appealed exclusively to emotion with the only statistics being ridiculously exaggerated, quickly making democratic news sources seem unreliable. Moreover, they constantly doubled down on things like DEI which, as a democrat, I think is stupid and many other democrats also think is stupid. They refused to be flexible. They refused to read the room. They refused to be reasonable. Now they've paid the price.
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Paul Lockhart said it better than I ever could: https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf
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One of the best experiences of my life was a week-long camping trip. I am going to leave out any specific details of where it was, but all you need to know is that we spent a lot of time kayaking. Everything we had with us, which wasn't much because of the storage limitations, was in the kayaks in dry bags. Each morning we would wake up early, have breakfast, pack up the tents, put everything in dry bags, load them into the kayaks, and set out to our next location. We would stop for lunch at some point along the way, or have lunch at our final destination if we were kayaking a shorter distance that day. Once we arrived at our destination, we would unload the kayaks, set up our tents, and eat.
Depending on your idea of fun, my anecdote may have sounded very appealing to you. Even if it didn't, you were probably at least already aware that this kind of activity would be someone's idea of a good time. Why do I point this out? Because it doesn't make any sense. Well, not by the standard that most of us apply to our own lives and the lives of others anyway. This trip was hard work, and it was uncomfortable. None of us liked constantly packing and unpacking everything. Our arms were usually very tired when we had just reached our halfway point. My legs get incredibly twitchy when I don't move them for a long time, and keeping them under the spray skirt for hours and hours was far worse than even my exhausted arms. Many of us got sunburnt, making sleeping on the already hard, uneven ground with only the flexible bottom of a tent in between even worse. To anyone who enjoys camping and other challenging activities, this is just part of the experience, but even they will join everyone else in complaining that life is too hard, too stressful, and too annoying. Who wouldn't like to have a higher income to make their life more relaxed? Who wouldn't like to take some extra days off of work? Who wouldn't like to see technology continue to make our lives easier and more convenient? And yet we go camping. We train for and run marathons, requiring physical and mental endurance. We add extra work to our lives with passion projects, which are fun, but often leave us burnt out. We love to challenge ourselves, yet we wish our lives were less challenging. Why?
We need some difficulty in our life, but not for the reason most people think.
A lot of people are aware that a truly "perfect" life, a life where you get whatever you want whenever you want it, isn't actually all that appealing. I hear so many people say that this is because without the bad moments of life, you can never appreciate the good ones. Often, people refer to the concept of hedonistic adaptation, where you get used to a better life such that it effectively becomes the same as your old one. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/690806/) By this logic, though, shouldn't a perfect life be equivalent to a normal one, and not outright nightmarish? Take this Twilight Zone episode for example. The episode follows Rocky Valentine as he finds himself in what he thinks is heaven. By the end of the episode, he discovers that this is not heaven, it is hell. According to hedonistic adaptation, shouldn't this just seem no better but also no worse than his life on earth? How does paradise become torture? I am aware that this is just a TV show, but it is valuable as a thought experiment, and I think most of us would share Rocky Valentine's feelings in this situation. Here is where I'm going to make a bold claim: The results of the study on hedonistic adaptation were misinterpreted, and there is a different, more accurate explanation for both why the lottery winners and accident victims were equally content with their lives, and why the lottery winners took less pleasure from the same mundane events as the accident victims. The amount of money you have, or the tragedies that you have experienced, while important, are not the primary factors in happiness. It is something much more abstract–fulfillment–that actually determines happiness. Fulfillment, at least as I mean it here, is fundamentally in contradiction with perfect ease of living. The simple answer to why we do the things that I described in the previous paragraph is because they are fulfilling. A fulfilling activity (Once again, at least as I mean it here. There are a lot of interpretations of this word.) is one you are motivated to do independent of anything else, not in spite of, but because of the challenge that it presents. This kind of endeavor plays a crucial role in our lives, and yet when talking about what makes us happy, we hardly ever recognize it. Rocky Valentine was robbed of any opportunity for this kind of fulfillment, and this was his hell. As to the lottery winners taking less pleasure in mundane events? Another one word answer presents itself: Boredom. Lottery winners have all of the material things that they could ever want. Whatever "mundane events" they could have been exposed to would likely have been something that they could experience whenever they wanted. I feel inclined to believe that the lottery winners would have enjoyed a camping trip just as much as the accident victims.
How much do we really want technology to do for us?
How would you like to live in a future where everything is done for us? No one has to write another song because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to draw another drawing or paint another painting because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to write another book because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to invent anything because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. You don't have to do anything! Just sit back and relax! Finally you don't have to do any work! Oh, you went out of your way to write a song? What a strange thing to do! What a waste of time! After all, all the AI generated music is so much better than human created music now. How unpolished your music sounds. No one will listen to that! Oh, you spent hours on a work of art? Why would you use such unnecessary effort? You could have gotten a far more refined image off of your computer in seconds! No one is interested in that silly picture you just wasted so much time making, they would much rather generate their own images! Is this the world we want to live in? Do we really want to become Rocky Valentine?
This isn't a problem of the future; it's a problem of the present. Artists who don't want their artwork stolen only to be regurgitated in one thousand different forms by an AI, all for free, are met with claims that they are simply afraid of the next step in our technological development. AI music is beginning to develop, and as someone who values music as a method of deep human communication, I am worried about the impact that this could have. Perhaps even more worrying is the areas that are left defenseless because they are not recognized as an art form. AI game development is becoming a very real thing, and while I think that this could reduce the tedium of writing tens of thousands of lines of code, making it an invaluable tool for programmers, I don't think it should ever take over game development completely. Games like The Beginners Guide and Pleh are, like other art, a powerful and unusual form of human communication. In a world of exclusively AI game development, these games may never see the light of day again. Another such area is math. If the concept of math as an art is alien to you, and you associate it only with grinding through complicated algorithmic processes in school which you never really understood, I suggest you read A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. We live in a world where the concept of mathematical creativity is not only bizarre to almost everyone, but where any natural intuition of it is crushed out of our youth. This makes me worried that the joy of math may become completely lost to time in the near future as AI solves the unsolved problems which humans once delighted in investigating. If math is seen as just a burden by the majority, then people such as myself (see my username) may be much more likely to suffer the same fate as I described for an artist and musician in the previous paragraph.
If this still doesn't feel very "here and now," let me bring social media to your attention. Less and less do people meet up with their friends at a coffee shop or a restaurant or simply take a walk together. I'm sure I sound old right now, but while I will not disclose my exact age, I think it is important that you know that I am most certainly not elderly. There is something so uniquely wonderful about just taking a walk through the woods with a friend, but now this kind of thing is often seen as too much effort. Why not just sit at home texting? Why not use Facetime? Why not just talk on Snapchat or look at your friend's latest Instagram post? Who wants to put in the time and effort to go for a walk? If you haven't noticed this is the exact mentality that I described a couple of paragraphs ago. If you thought that we could never fall into such a strange view of the world, you can now be quite confident that it can happen. That key phrase is repeated in so many places and in so many forms in the modern world: "I don't want to put in the effort." We are already forgetting the truest version of ourselves. We are already losing the beautiful parts of the human condition.
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