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by mikkel
3315 days ago
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Capitalism can be thought of as a complex learning system. We, as a society, want people to contribute the most that they can to the overall goals of humanity and capitalism acts as a vehicle for that. Comparing it to another popular complex learning system, neural networks, might provide insight on failure conditions. Income taxes can be thought of as gradient regularizers.
Basically limit the amount of weights accumulated per training session (wealth per tax year). Estate taxes can be thought of as weight regularizers (that occur once per lifetime). Maybe it would be more palatable as a tax on wealth yearly. One of the ways that networks fail (and capitalism can fail) is with extreme values on weights (wealth) on small portions of the network. There are ways to counter this on a neural network - some are heavy handed (l1, l2 regularization), but some are just clever without direct analogies (dropout, batch normalization, etc). I wonder how the conversation would change if we had to calculate our income tax as a percentage of total wealth each tax year. |
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For the point of view that it's not a very good vehicle at all, it's worth reading Oscar Widle's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is free to read online (of course!)
Here's a quick excerpt:
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this.
If this is interesting, Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is also a really engaging read.