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by lifeisstillgood
3810 days ago
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"The existence of a billionaire is a clear indicator of one or more market failures" I have been banging this around my head for a while since PG's infamous essay. There are plenty of reasons to see wildly successful people as talented, special etc. But nowhere near enough to believe them to be superhuman. Nor as rare as might be expected. Becoming a billionaire (or member of top 1% or what have you) is not something that can only be achieved by a certain fraction of the population, like being over 6'6' There must be market distortions that fail to share out the vast wealth of the Russian oilfields? Similarly for not sharing the license fees of MSWord or the markup on Amazon books. Maybe PG is right and we need thousands more entrepreneurs out for themselves, and we shall see the inequalities of the world sort themselves out through "market" action. Which would mean still we need politicos action (why not more female entrepreneurs? What about highly regulated industries?) |
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In the end the inequalities of power destroys any linear correlation between skill and income that might otherwise manifest.
Traditionally we've been looking at the lower end of the power distribution to mitigate this (unions, minimum wage, micro loans and so forth) it might be prudent to look at the other end (property laws, corporations, finance and so forth) with similar intentions.