Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Confusing income and wealth is pervasive (particularly among the left, whose leaders I strongly suspect of deliberately confusing people about the distinction).

One of the reasons pg's essay on it is my favorite thing he's ever written. You don't have to be gratuitously uncurious to end up with the mental model "wealth is something that you're given"; that's the baseline for our culture. "Wealth can be created by a ten year old" radical.

I think our cultural baseline is 'wealth is taken away from others—fixed pie; exploitation'.

People's economics education begins and ends when they fight another pre-schooler over a toy. The world is viewed as a zero-sum game. You win, I lose.

That's certainly true for a lot of people, but you can believe in redistribution without believing the economy is a zero sum game. You can grow the pie by aligning incentives (I'll get rich!) AND by creating opportunities for people who don't have it (education, healthcare).

It's the rule rather than exception to otherwise pedestrian seeming concepts. Digging a little, prevailing conceptions of anything turn out flawed: "knowledge", "belief", "choice", "suffering", "person" etc. People type on "computers" all day; I guess few could say what one is.

I suppose that is true. Though the definition of knowledge as *useful ideas* has some similarities with some part of the common sense definition? (that is, outside academia)