🐈

Billionaires and the "rich and unfair cabals" they lead are the equivalent of nuclear weapons in a world where economic warfare is the main form of warfare. The resulting hierarchy of value IS tyrannical in various ways.

But so are the more meritocratic ones in the places like China and India. It's a huge pressure cooker, both socially, academically, and in the status signaling rat race. Being "better" than "them" allows "us" to *not* have to live like "them"

From a global perspective there is also probably a minor effect on slowing down market growth since market machinery has been turned into useless cash. e.g. the mechanism that makes (life saving?) goods cheaper across the world slows down a bit.https://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1341269410686726144 …

again, probably a very small effect since even billionaires are small relative to the size of the entire system. all this implies that the super rich can't really solve said problems even if they have benefitted from the setup.

One can WIN at monopoly but be helpless to change the rules since everyone insists on playing it. Why? Because people care about WINNING and monopoly allows for easy constant winning once you have enough capital.

The board game is also entirely luck based so it's "fair" for all. High IQ can only get you so far! Many of the most successful wealth managers of the world are not quantum physicists. From a human perspective, this stability of "making it" is VERY tempting.

So aside from the problem of incentivizing risk exploration and innovation in the future there is still a *present* problem of how to fix the problem of people stuck in dead economic constant survival loops w/ no future.https://twitter.com/SylvanaquaFarms/status/1339876785962569728?s=20 …

This is *especially* true for the "complacent" people in rich societies. The cost of living is high and in a globally connected society where more and more work is information work, they have NO competitive edge.