Both posts are important here, IMHO. We have two signals to arrive at economic and productive decisions in our society, which favors distributed decisionmaking: democratic votes and price. There are all kinds of problems with the former, as for the latter: we rely on individuals to make efficient decisions, however this requires some kind of scarcity. Scarcity which is largely in effect for the majority of the population that relies on income from work to survive. If individuals make decisions without constraints, they tend to go off track real quick. IMHO, this is the main problem of wealth inequality: rich people make stupid decisions. And stupid, in this case, means unproductive for the society/enviroment etc etc in general.
> If individuals make decisions without constraints, they tend to go off track real quick. IMHO, this is the main problem of wealth inequality: rich people make stupid decisions. And stupid, in this case, means unproductive for the society/enviroment etc etc in general.
i must be missing the point you’re trying to make, or the framing, or something. why would i want to be rich if not to direct more resources to achieving my own preferences? of course this is not maximally productive for society: if all money was required to be directed based on where it were maximally productive then it would no longer mean anything to own money; money would have no value to the individual.
> why would i want to be rich if not to direct more resources to...
These days, I think most of the motivation to be seriously rich (vs. mere "can afford two nicer McMansions, and your kids don't qualify for college financial aid" rich) is a humans-are-primates obsession* with being further up the pecking order.
But your bottom line is still valid. The rich are definitely not allocating resources in ways which are beneficial to society.
*Less-flattering terms, perhaps from the DSM-5, would seem applicable in many cases.
>rich people make stupid decisions. And stupid, in this case, means unproductive for the society/enviroment etc etc in general.
I completely agree but I think you've defined rich wrong. There's only so many multimillionaires and billionaires and most of their money gets plowed into business ventures (even if dumb ones), investments and other things like that that aren't too off the wall.
The economic volatility comes from the much, much more numerous hordes of upper middle class doctors, lawyers, techies and whatnot that are "post scarcity" enough that they can swing a fair amount of money around in pursuit of that.
When a large subset of them decides to do something, like buy toilet paper, or TSLA, or a second house or whatever, there's a huge effect and that's where you get bad tulip mania style volatility and economic patterns from. Nobody on food stamps and nobody with millions to their name lost their ass on beanie babies.
Disagree here. Some rich people make stupid decisions and get flushed out. It's very darwinistic.
But in general rich people are rich BECAUSE they are good at thinking about being rich.
Your point made sense until you mentioned wealth inequality-- but wealth inequality exists EXACTLY because rich people are good at thinking about being rich. These decisions may not be productive in terms of society -- but they generally favour growing or maintaining the status of "being rich".
I generally agree with you, and I could probably have chosen a better word than "stupid" (not a native speaker though). That's why I tried to clarify in my last sentence, that "stupid" in this context means that their decisions don't align with societies interests at large anymore. Kind of like "stupid" as in: a central planner would be stupid, if they applied those decisions when they actually had the goal of maximizing societies productivity and wellbeing.
> which favors distributed decisionmaking: [...] price
Seeing as the top 10% hold over 60% of the wealth (in the US, globally we have a dozen people with as much wealth as the bottom 50%), I don't see how this follows.
We still arrive at concensus based on a (more or less free) market. Weights on this market are heavily skewed to the top, that's true. And as I said, democratic votes also don't exactly live up to the cultural standard that we at least say we have. But in general, we're very far away from a planned economy.
The market may be more or less free, but the distribution of information is not equal or even. That is one of the most important factors that prevent actors from making efficient decisions.
If the trend is more and more concentration of control then that can be concerning. And concerning even if still technically distributed until the moment when there are only 2 people controlling 100% of the resources, in a world of billions of people.
