Steve Jobs stepped down from his post as CEO of Apple yesterday. The internet instantly erupted in adulation. … Mr Jobs’s wealth … was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress. … Bill Gates used to get plenty of heat from the class warriors, but some time after … [he] devoted a huge portion of his fortune to his charitable foundation, he ascended to a sort of philanthropic secular sainthood. … But Mr Jobs has eschewed charity. …
One question: How is what Steve Jobs did worth more then thousand times what anybody else in his enterprise did? Seriously, maybe *doubly* so, but a thousand times and more? How is that only through hard work. If he had worked so hard as his wealth implies, he would be dead from exhaustion.
I don't quite buy the reasoning that wealth was a vastly greater threat to our ancestors than more artistic traits. It may have a bigger effect, but someone with enough charm and sex appeal to steal your mate can screw your chances of reproduction almost as much as lack of food can. I would guess the divergence in reactions is probably more due to the fact that trying to take power from the powerful was a more effective strategy than trying to take talent from the artistic.
My impression is that social conservatives are better modeled by seeing them as more interested in sex's function as a process of reproduction rather than a source of orgasms. Further, I think they have an interest in everyone having relatively equal "access" to "reproductive success" (possible to the point of being *compelled* to breed). Compare and contrast with liberal attempts to pull people out of poverty with minimum wage laws that are technically coercive but pragmatically function to signal emotional affiliation with poor people.
In the same vein, social conservatives seem to see it as proper for people who disrupt their social-norm-based sexual regulatory systems to be deprived of parenting rights as a punishment. A glaring example would be their desire to deprive gays and lesbians of the right to adopt. My guess is that a nontrivial number of social conservatives are gay by inclination but behaviorally straight, and see homosexual behavior as "defecting" from prioritizing reproduction over romantic satisfaction.
Or more simply, when higher real prices lead to more production and falling real prices, we are enriched. When higher real prices do not lead to more more production and instead only to higher real prices, we are impoverished. Levies on the latter are not about bashing or envy but about the most appropriate use of resources and how we can all become better off.
Of course oil was a great innovation in its day, but is that day now? Yet they are being rewarded for nothing. How much better to levy taxes on it and use that to displace it. We could become the entrepreneurs, the innovators, and increase everyone's wealth, not just those who have a resource monopoly. That is why it is at our expense, because it does nothing to increase our wealth, only deplete it. It is the innovators that will increase it but that will only occur afterwards.
If your hypothesis holds, the existence of copyable porn, prostitution and future VR sex should reduce the popularity of conservativism. Furthermore, these alternative outlets should be welcomed by conservative forces, as the reduce the inequality of access to sexual gratification. This does not seem to have much face plausibility.
Lord, Koch Industries does a lot of stuff, not just energy. I don't really understand how one product makes us wealthy but the other one is "at our expense". Even if we reduced things to oil, that has fantastically increased our productivity. The Industrial Revolution could have hardly happened without fossil fuels, and oil today is essential for transportation. You could argue though that KI is replaceable and somebody else would have provided oil (though again I would say that is enabling our productivity and not "at our expense"), whereas Jobs is truly unique and without him certain products or acceptable substitutes simply would not exist.
Proper Dave, parasites and rent seekers do exist. Even if we were rich enough to "afford" them I would be glad if we strongly tried to discourage rent seeking. But that only justifies hostility toward parasites (which I expect Hanson shares in some form), and we haven't established that billionaires generally speaking are parasites or that "artistic" ones are not, which was the whole point of this post.
I would actually say that if we contrast them with other rich folks, "artistics" tend to be more in a superstar winner-take-all system (athletes as well). The individual winner is fairly replaceable and somebody else would fill their position without much loss in value. We could also tax them more without worrying as much about supply-side effects. If Harry Potter had never been created, there would have been some other books that captured our imaginations.
Wow. This is one of the most interesting comments I've read on a blog in a long time. To me, it puts both libertarians and social conservatives in a different light.
I think I'm going to have to out-contrarian you on this one, I think this intuition is good and productive!
There are many rent seekers and plain parasites in the real world. And the world is not as a whole rich, being a rent seeker or parasite may be "tolerable" in America (but not sustainably), but deadly elsewhere.
So I think this "bias" is a good thing in contrary to your believes.
We celebrate that which enriches us and decry that which impoverishes us. Is that so hard to understand? Jobs may have gotten wealthy, but so have the rest of us who get to use his products. The Koch brothers may have gotten wealthy, but at our expense, for their rewards are not yielding greater production. Eventually alternative energy sources will grow and displace oil and this will be real creation, and one can say it is the result of those higher costs, but it is innovation that is celebrated, not rent seeking monopolies, even if innovation leads to temporary rent seeking monopolies. The real reason to decry those rent seeking monopolies is they last much longer than patent derived ones. Yes, higher oil creates jobs in this country, but sadly, fewer than it destroys, and it does so by imposing external costs on all of us.
>However, foragers worried far less about unequal capacities for art, music, conversation, charm, social popularity, or sex appeal.
The three main political factions are aligned with a particular type of inequality about one of the three dimensions - money, sex, and power - of fundamental, visceral concern to men. The liberals want to minimize wealth inequality. The libertarians want to minimize power inequality. The social conservatives, with their emphasis on monogamy and marriage, want to minimize inequality of sexual access.
Hah. Let me get this straight. Literally advocating violence and theft (as done by mjgeddes) is "on the side of angels." But simply expressing contempt for the thinking of leftist "credentialed elites" means that I am necessarily "advocating use of the guillotine" on them. And then, to top it off, you attempt to rationalize mjgeddes' outrageous stance by implying that such violence and theft could be important to "civilizational survival." Sure... do it for the children, no doubt! Of course, you may have to kill some of their parents, but hey, it's all for the greater good, right? (Hmmm. May I suggest that for your next scathing attack, you call me a racist?) Sigh. C'mon man, you're smarter than that (and I mean that sincerely, based on your often sophisticated comments on this blog). Consider using that quite-decent brain of yours to reevaluate your assumptions here. Best regards.
One question: How is what Steve Jobs did worth more then thousand times what anybody else in his enterprise did? Seriously, maybe *doubly* so, but a thousand times and more? How is that only through hard work. If he had worked so hard as his wealth implies, he would be dead from exhaustion.
I don't quite buy the reasoning that wealth was a vastly greater threat to our ancestors than more artistic traits. It may have a bigger effect, but someone with enough charm and sex appeal to steal your mate can screw your chances of reproduction almost as much as lack of food can. I would guess the divergence in reactions is probably more due to the fact that trying to take power from the powerful was a more effective strategy than trying to take talent from the artistic.
My impression is that social conservatives are better modeled by seeing them as more interested in sex's function as a process of reproduction rather than a source of orgasms. Further, I think they have an interest in everyone having relatively equal "access" to "reproductive success" (possible to the point of being *compelled* to breed). Compare and contrast with liberal attempts to pull people out of poverty with minimum wage laws that are technically coercive but pragmatically function to signal emotional affiliation with poor people.
In the same vein, social conservatives seem to see it as proper for people who disrupt their social-norm-based sexual regulatory systems to be deprived of parenting rights as a punishment. A glaring example would be their desire to deprive gays and lesbians of the right to adopt. My guess is that a nontrivial number of social conservatives are gay by inclination but behaviorally straight, and see homosexual behavior as "defecting" from prioritizing reproduction over romantic satisfaction.
Or more simply, when higher real prices lead to more production and falling real prices, we are enriched. When higher real prices do not lead to more more production and instead only to higher real prices, we are impoverished. Levies on the latter are not about bashing or envy but about the most appropriate use of resources and how we can all become better off.
Of course oil was a great innovation in its day, but is that day now? Yet they are being rewarded for nothing. How much better to levy taxes on it and use that to displace it. We could become the entrepreneurs, the innovators, and increase everyone's wealth, not just those who have a resource monopoly. That is why it is at our expense, because it does nothing to increase our wealth, only deplete it. It is the innovators that will increase it but that will only occur afterwards.
If your hypothesis holds, the existence of copyable porn, prostitution and future VR sex should reduce the popularity of conservativism. Furthermore, these alternative outlets should be welcomed by conservative forces, as the reduce the inequality of access to sexual gratification. This does not seem to have much face plausibility.
Well, the obvious straw man here is the person who's bashing billionaires. Your PERCEPTION is thus.
You're describing your perception. And somehow this proves something to you.
Lord, Koch Industries does a lot of stuff, not just energy. I don't really understand how one product makes us wealthy but the other one is "at our expense". Even if we reduced things to oil, that has fantastically increased our productivity. The Industrial Revolution could have hardly happened without fossil fuels, and oil today is essential for transportation. You could argue though that KI is replaceable and somebody else would have provided oil (though again I would say that is enabling our productivity and not "at our expense"), whereas Jobs is truly unique and without him certain products or acceptable substitutes simply would not exist.
Proper Dave, parasites and rent seekers do exist. Even if we were rich enough to "afford" them I would be glad if we strongly tried to discourage rent seeking. But that only justifies hostility toward parasites (which I expect Hanson shares in some form), and we haven't established that billionaires generally speaking are parasites or that "artistic" ones are not, which was the whole point of this post.
I would actually say that if we contrast them with other rich folks, "artistics" tend to be more in a superstar winner-take-all system (athletes as well). The individual winner is fairly replaceable and somebody else would fill their position without much loss in value. We could also tax them more without worrying as much about supply-side effects. If Harry Potter had never been created, there would have been some other books that captured our imaginations.
Wow. This is one of the most interesting comments I've read on a blog in a long time. To me, it puts both libertarians and social conservatives in a different light.
How would I go about calculating how rich a given individual should be, exactly?
I think I'm going to have to out-contrarian you on this one, I think this intuition is good and productive!
There are many rent seekers and plain parasites in the real world. And the world is not as a whole rich, being a rent seeker or parasite may be "tolerable" in America (but not sustainably), but deadly elsewhere.
So I think this "bias" is a good thing in contrary to your believes.
The social conservatives, with their emphasis on monogamy and marriage, want to minimize inequality of sexual access.
That hadn't occurred to me before. It may be right, and if so, it puts social conservatives in a different light.
We celebrate that which enriches us and decry that which impoverishes us. Is that so hard to understand? Jobs may have gotten wealthy, but so have the rest of us who get to use his products. The Koch brothers may have gotten wealthy, but at our expense, for their rewards are not yielding greater production. Eventually alternative energy sources will grow and displace oil and this will be real creation, and one can say it is the result of those higher costs, but it is innovation that is celebrated, not rent seeking monopolies, even if innovation leads to temporary rent seeking monopolies. The real reason to decry those rent seeking monopolies is they last much longer than patent derived ones. Yes, higher oil creates jobs in this country, but sadly, fewer than it destroys, and it does so by imposing external costs on all of us.
>However, foragers worried far less about unequal capacities for art, music, conversation, charm, social popularity, or sex appeal.
The three main political factions are aligned with a particular type of inequality about one of the three dimensions - money, sex, and power - of fundamental, visceral concern to men. The liberals want to minimize wealth inequality. The libertarians want to minimize power inequality. The social conservatives, with their emphasis on monogamy and marriage, want to minimize inequality of sexual access.
Hah. Let me get this straight. Literally advocating violence and theft (as done by mjgeddes) is "on the side of angels." But simply expressing contempt for the thinking of leftist "credentialed elites" means that I am necessarily "advocating use of the guillotine" on them. And then, to top it off, you attempt to rationalize mjgeddes' outrageous stance by implying that such violence and theft could be important to "civilizational survival." Sure... do it for the children, no doubt! Of course, you may have to kill some of their parents, but hey, it's all for the greater good, right? (Hmmm. May I suggest that for your next scathing attack, you call me a racist?) Sigh. C'mon man, you're smarter than that (and I mean that sincerely, based on your often sophisticated comments on this blog). Consider using that quite-decent brain of yours to reevaluate your assumptions here. Best regards.