[missosoup]

57% of all americans have less than 1 paycheck worth of savings in their bank. They don't have the option to shop around for other work or invest in personal growth to attain their 'true value'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

> We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.

And eventually revolutions topple the structures where value has concentrated when wealth disparity gets too big, and the cycle begins again. After several risen and fallen civilisations/empires, maybe its time to try something other than the one strategy that we for sure know the outcome of.

We don't need to be all equally well off, but we do need to compress the top and bottom 10% of the income disparity curve. No one on this planet should have billions of dollars in personal wealth, and no one on this planet should be too poor to afford shelter healthcare and food.

[divbyzer0]

You've changed your comment while I was typing: youu mentioned a delta between CEOs and average workers. But we're likely to share common ground. Your new comment regarding revolutions. Not so fast!

The Chinese sufffered the same problems of inequallity and the plebs made the same comparisons - for centuries.

So a delta is to be expected, the magnatude I'm not sure if that matters as CEOs are outliers. I think the point you are leaning to is:

despite working full time, the average US resident cannot afford what we perceive to be a 'good quality of life' (many people from developing countries will find that statement hard to believe). This is subjective, and not likely an issue of labour being exploitative.

It is a question on what type of a society Americans want (and vote for), which is an entirely different discussion covering taxation, education, health care, corpotate political donations/lobbying etc.

From a market perspective the delta represents supply and demand.

[missosoup]

I didn't change my comment. The only edit I made was to separate a para for formatting. Maybe you were reading something else.

From a market perspective the delta has nothing to do with supply/demand. Microeconomics and supply/demand theory doesn't really have any answers to the fact that wealth and power tends to acrete. The textbook answer will be along the lines of 'but then smaller more agile entities will arise that displace the incumbents' but the incumbents have long ago figured out strategoes such as rent seeking to prevent that.

Capitalism is fundamentally broken in several clear ways:

* It assumes that individuals are rational actors who are sufficiently informed to make generally optimal self-interest decisions

* It assumes that there's a force or mechanism to modulate or prevent acretion of wealth. So far the only such mechanism historically has been bloody revolutions

* It assumes that we know the 'true value' of things including externalities. The climate crisis is a huge example of how utterly wrong that is. If car and fossil fuel costs accounted for externalities, they'd cost somewhere in the vicinity of 10-100x more than they currently do. Would that have prevented the boom that led to current quality of life in the developed world? Probably. Would it also have prevented an existential threat to us? Certainly.

The pursuit of continuous growth has become clearly a self-terminal strategy that not only failed multiple times in history before, but is threatening our entire species via anthropogenic climate change now.

I'm advocating that we stop pursuing continuous growth and focus on collapsing the insane wealth disparity and dismantling the structures that have acreted unprecedented wealth and power into the hands of <100 people worldwide.

Someone who acreted sufficient wealth to extract profit from your labour more effectively than you can alone, is not doing you favours, is not being charitable, but merely exploiting you to acrete more wealth to exploit more people ad infinitum.

[kkarakk]

It's only threatening our species coz space research was quite purposefully stalled while old world global political tensions were simmering at their hottest.

Once there is an off-planet colony i expect the resource pressure that is starting to show will ease up considerably. Capturing asteroid/mining other planets for resources - there are a lot of ways for things to course correct. Everything we're facing right now is coz of an artifical bottleneck in our species expansion

It will also render existential threats moot coz there will be off planet resources to rebuild a civilization in case things do go catastrophically wrong.

[allenbrunson]

in my decade-plus on this website, i can't recall reading anything that i agree with more than your series of comments in this thread.

sure wish i knew how to exert force to make the kinds of changes you are proposing come to fruition in the real world.