I’m not particularly bothered by high inequality per se. But the warping it causes in the top levels of society is really unpleasant to see close up. This last year or so has been particularly rich in such odious spectacles, and it has sharply accelerated with the pandemic.
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It is programmed by the stewards of the largest, slowest piles of money. Each dollar you hold is like a right to one cpu cycle. Even governments can’t alter this landscape wholesale. Only reshape it in certain known ways.
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It’s like if your family had one tv and the tantrummy 5 year old insists on controlling the remote and will only allow the tv to play his favorite kid cartoons on endless repeat. It’s a powerful device but can do only a fraction of what it is capable of.
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That’s what even an ideal efficient market controlled by large capital piles is like.
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I don’t mind spending a reasonable fraction of my time thinking about my personal finances. Cost of doing the business of living life. But i grudge every minute I have to devote to modeling and predicting consequence of existence of large piles of tens/hundreds of billions.
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If I’m consulting for a company that makes widgets its because I am interested in widgets. Not in the psychology of a dozen bores who own the PE company that bought the widget company and don’t give a shit about widgets.
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I hate that any sufficiently important and interesting project turns into a “money psychology of boring people” project if you give it long enough. Kinda like how any social media product turns into a messaging app if you give it enough time. So everybody has to think about that.
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One of my weird influences is Alberto Moravia’s Time of Desecration, which I randomly read as a teenager because it happened to be around. Not the sort of book I’d pick myself. But the theme of desecrating money stayed with me. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/08/14/moravias-victims/ …pic.twitter.com/htlluIydMV
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Libertarians sometimes talk about markets serving the wishes of the most people. But they actually serve the wishes of the most money, and when one jerk can “want” a yacht more than many many thousands collectively can “want” basic necessities, society gets badly warped.
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This is why I’m annoyed by the “AI will kill us all bc one day we’ll create a system bigger than anyone can control or understand and it’ll optimize to extremes for something other than human well being” We have that already, it’s: capitalism
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