I hate this argument, which is more often applied to the space program or other science research. That $80 million went to architects, contractors, builders, skilled workers, landscapers, suppliers, and all the other people necessary to build a super luxury house. We could only hope that he went on to build a dozen more $80 million dollar houses around the country to spread out the bounty.
This is a more serious and valuable argument. I’m of several minds when it comes to UBI. Back when I was on food stamps, $1000 would definitely have been significant. I do understand.
When I look at UBI programs, which no doubt have been successful in the United States, there’s a recognition that to make permanent changes a one-time gift of $1,000 is insufficient. That Denver program with good results from $600 per year is an outlier. Most programs show better results from $500 to $1000 per month. Suddenly that’s $12 billion per year. Every year.
Politics and math have prevented even the best programs from continuing beyond a pilot period. Giving the poor money without strings falls somewhere between welfare and charity in most people’s minds. A squad of billionaires might be able to rotate $12 billion per year among themselves but getting the money to 1 million people would require a gigantic bureaucracy. Forty years would be needed to hit all those under the poverty line. And also social media would be overtaken by the screams of those who were not selected.
Some UBI programs want to get around that by giving money to everybody. That’s for the government rather than private individuals and would cost trillions. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates would get the money too, and that’s politically undoable. Even the most basic programs, like the extension of the Child Tax Credit post-Covid was opposed by all 50 Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin.
A UBI could only be possible in a world that has abandoned predatory capitalism (and the Prosperity Gospel) in recognition of needs of the poorest. It’s a good idea, it manifestly works, and it’s not going to happen. Breaking the tyranny of the billionaires is actually more feasible, because it’s merely next-to-impossible.
Yet Google search has consistently gotten worse over the last few years. This was a deliberate move, because they thought it would increase whatever metric was the hotness of the day. Similar with Facebook. It used to be a great way to stay in touch with friends and family. Now it is a disaster.
The original Google search was revolutionary, but all of their wins since, they bought: Android, Youtube, Docs.
Tesla did amazing things. I own one. Tesla started with a 10+ year lead in EVs, and has squandered almost all of that. My 6 year old Tesla is still better than many other companies’ 2024 EVs. The new version of my car Tesla sells today is incrementally better than mine, but not dramatically better than mine. They fixed some design problems, maybe it’s a bit cheaper to manufacture, but it isn’t a revolutionary change.
Sure, they’re fine. Yes, the iPhone 16 family is the best iPhone ever made, and the M4 will be better than the M3, but so what? That’s just incremental improvements. When Apple release the next thing as revolutionary as the original iPhone?
Revolutionary products like they want rarely come from large established companies, and they know that. Instead of trying to foster an environment that might provide the next great thing, they hype whatever they happen to have as the next great thing. It will be great (for them) if it turns out to be true, but that barely matters. As long as they can keep the hype going, and transfer the FOMO from, say VR to AI, then the billionaires can keep fleecing the millionaires.
Billionaires do not create jobs - or, to be more specific, create fewer jobs per unit wealth than pretty much anyone other than the desperately poor (and possibly not even them).
Jobs are created by demand - demand for goods and services that require labor as an input. And billionaires do create demand - household staff, security, yacht crews, wealth management, event planners and performers - but different demand, and less in the aggregate than if their excess wealth had been spread across thousands of people, each of which had rather more to spend and invest themselves. So it could be said that the demand created by billionaires does create jobs.
But if you work for a company that billionaire owns, the owner has not created your job. Your job has been created by the demand generated by your company’s customers, present and prospective. Don’t believe me? If those customers go somewhere else, and demand drops for what you do or make, you will find your job un-created very quickly.
The “job creators” meme is a pernicious trope, a thought-destroying cliche designed to build grtitude and teach helplessness among those whom it targets, to benefit a class of people who - while hard workers - willfully refuse to understand that so much of their fortune is due to 1) the luck of being in the right place and at the right time, and 2) the accumulated public investment of the many people whose hard work before them have made what they do possible.
Relevant quote I came across last night: Money is not like water. It moves uphill instead. It flows from people who have too much of it, to people who have even more of it.
Since I took part in derailing this good question in FQ, I’ll address straight on.
Economic inequality leads to fewer and fewer people having greater and greater control over your life, and, it leads to a less democratic process. Conversely, less inequality would have a smaller affect.
1. Greater disparity of economic inequality can give the billionaires too much control over your life. For example, think of Bezos “side-project” the Washington Post. Or Musk side-project Twitter. It’s how people get information/news and individual billionaires are in control and can decide what you get to see/read about. Or Amazon itself, it is big enough to dictate what a lot of people are able to buy, or not. If you’re browsing for a book online, it’s not hyperbole to say it’s up to Bezos which ones are available/you see. Overall, inequality gives billionaires more control over your life as they start to own more and more and more, of the things that affect your life. Maybe that control turns out better, or worse, or the same. Regardless, it just shouldn’t be because a fewer and fewer people deciding that stuff will at some point in the future, inevitably, not be healthy for society.
2. Another, and we can use the true 1% ( > $400k’ish/year), affect who gets elected, candidates, and candidates policies. Through donations. Moreso than the general voting class is able to influence those things. So the 1% are able to control/influence the entire democratic process to some degree that is not that democratic. Not completely, but more than you might appreciate. I’m a bit ignorant here, or it may not exist as clean as I’m wanting, but I’d love to know the tipping point for donations - at what dollar point is the donation worth more than an actual vote (e.g., $30k donation typically equals two votes). Regardless, who the candidates are, what they stand for, and how many votes they get are very influenced by donations - which largely come from the 1%. This is why candidates are quick to let you know about “grassroots” donations or “$20 average donation” to distance themselves from the idea they are just being bought off from the wealthy.
So that’s two good reasons how the economic disparity is manifesting itself and why it’s not healthy.
Since you edited down my post to remove almost all context, let me provide it for you in its entirety with pertinent passages highlighted:
Note that I did not say that “Bezo’s control of billions cause ,say, Oklahoma State University to charge 20 times more tuition than it did when you and I were college aged ?” or “Bezo’s wealth cause the price of housing to increase?”, and in fact never reference Jeff Bezos (or any other billionaire) specifically. What I did note is that when wealth becomes so concentrated those holding it become focused on perpetuating their wealth at the expense of everyone else; directly, by using various legal and quasi-legal mechanisms to avoid paying a fair share of taxes; and indirectly, by buying up competitors, undercutting small businesses and entrepreneurs (unless they can co-opt them to enhance their own profits), and lobbying for exclusions and carve-outs to benefit themselves legislatively (or sometimes effectively buying up the courts as we have recently seen on display) which even large coalitions of middle class citizens cannot compete with or influence. The disproportionate rise of costs of education and housing compared to wages and general inflation are just attendant factors that are secondary to wealth concentration and result in greater numbers of people, even those who are ostensibly “middle class” to struggle in having stable employment and invest their future.
This is a facile argument; certainly, by those measures all but the 25% lowest wealthy people on the planet live better than the entire pre-Industrialized world, which in no way justifies why today, in 2024, such massive amounts of wealth, and the associated political influence, should be concentrated in the hands of a very few, many of whom are actively making decisions which compromise the health, safety, and security of national populations and even the planet as a whole. “Quality of life and creature comforts” are far from the best metric for how well people are able to participate in their societies and provide a good future for their children to live as well or better than they do.
There is an even bigger problem that people don’t often talk about which is the way that these companies and their major stockholders achieve such great wealth is by inflating valuation via speculation and market manipulation (e.g. pump & dump schemes, producing exaggerated baseless revenue forecasts, disguising costs by dumping losses on special purpose entities, et cetera) far beyond the value the company could ever generate in actual revenues.
By that ‘logic’, Russia has a very strong economy based on the slews of billionaires it produces.
The reality is that billionaires are far from the best job creators because most of their wealth is not tied into making things or providing services, but in speculation on various markets, nor do they have any particular interest in providing a “living wage” or retaining valued employees because they basically see workers as fungible units (hence, why we have corporate “Human Resources” departments) which can be acquired and expended as necessary to maximize net profits and reduce costs regardless of the impact upon the quality of the products and services their company might offer, or what stresses and harms it may place workers (especially contractors) under. Small and medium-sized businesses, on the other hand, largely produce jobs for valued workers which they are incentivized to retain because of the investment of skills and the value of experience, and try to compensate those workers fairly and competitively instead of hiring and firing to spend the absolute lowest wages while compensating managers at three or four orders of magnitude greater than their average worker will ever earn.
I have some problem with characterising Bezos and Musk as having brought us these things. Amazon came out of the tech boom of the late 90s, when there was a flurry of experimentation in new ways of doing things on the internet. Tesla came out of an era of vast increases in battery capacity and lots of people trying to apply it to cars. There were winners and losers in both realms, but absent both of these people/companies, there would still be an internet storefront and electric car line, just because the environment was right for it.
Like the Wright brothers and the airplane. Whether or not you accept the Wright brothers as the winner of the race to heavier-than-air flight, it’s clear that there were a lot of people working on it at the time and a lot of them were very close. An airplane was going to be invented around that time no matter which individual(s) crossed the finish line first.
Why do people think owning a billion dollars “on paper” doesn’t count, as if billionaires held their assets in gold bullion stored in some sort of Scrooge McDuck vault?
It translates to disposable income because the company owner can receive dividends from the company. They can borrow against the stock they own and just pay back the interest over time. They can use the money they borrow to purchase other revenue-producing assets. Or they can just sell off some shares every year and pay the capital gains tax on them.
The thing about having wealth is you can continue to purchase stuff that builds more wealth. You can’t do that if you are living paycheck to paycheck nor can you “save” your way to being rich.
I’d like to know this too, because we endlessly hear about campaign money influencing or even determining elections. Now campaign money certainly isn’t useless; and if you have zero of it there’s no realistic way to win an election. But can one really say that it is guaranteed– guaranteed– that a 1% swing in the polls can be produced for each x-amount of extra money spent?
At some point it sounds like the financial machinations are taking place on another planet, or in some currency– simoleons maybe– only indirectly convertible into money one can actually spend on things. This “beyond mere money” activity seems to be what’s taking place at the hecto-billionaire level.
Yes, the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and whoever the fuck founded MySpace and Friendster may be a matter of timing. But that doesn’t mean being right with the timing and figuring out how to grow a successful company isn’t important.
The engine of capitalism is what creates the billion dollar prize for all these people to race for. Ultimately it matters little if Bezos or Musk is the one who wins it.
He didn’t “throw it in a fire”, he stimulated the shit out of the local economy.
Who cares whether the rich billionaire is wasting his money or not? Each of those landscapers gets paid a salary, which he uses to feed his family, which means a shop owner makes a profit…
Unless he plans to sell the stock and cash out, how does he have a huge incentive to do that? Presumably he cares about more things than just today’s stock price, like next year’s stock price?
You don’t get 1000fold growth in investment by gutting your company and burning the remains to “save a bit of money”.
Russia has way fewer billionaires per capita then the United States, on par with Lebanon, so this metric is hardly a ringing endorsement of Russia’s economy.
No, they don’t. That is the very point critics are making, that the “rising tide” of billionaires does not “lift all boats”, a point that is very evident from the shrinking middle class and repeated catastrophic financial bubbles and corporate fraud. This Chicago School “trickle down economics” of the Reaganomics era plays about as well today world as do other ‘Eighties cultural touchstones like the Superbowl Shuffle, “The Cosby Show”, and Revenge of the Nerds.
Certainly I don’t mean to say that if Bezos had died in a freak accident in 1994 then everyone in the world would be just as likely to have launched the Amazon-equivalent. But there is certainly a “deep bench” of people who could have, racing for the goal.
True enough, but it does change the perception of Bezos and Musk from “unparalleled geniuses, without whom we wouldn’t have the modern world” to “the guys who got there first, with a bunch of other guys hot on their tails”.
Almost certainly there’s a better way to organize an economy than what’s produced multi-billionaires. And almost certainly every attempt we could make to rectify the status quo would be either useless or counter-productively harmful.
I’m reminded of the short ditty “The Trees” by Rush.
All good questions. I heard this on a political podcast an hour ago made in passing that really reflects the premise: “JD Vance was in real trouble when he was running for Senator, so much that he required Super PACs to come in and save him.”
Just basically saying, the voters didn’t care for him, so big money came in to prop him up and get him elected. And it’s not a Republican or Democrat thing, it’s just politics and what money can do to affect outcomes if they want a particular candidate to win.
Is it guaranteed? I’m sure you mean very high degree of confidence type outcome. I don’t know. I do know it helps a ton and I’m sure I can cite that easily (and common sense agrees).