[roenxi]

> If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?

Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues. Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome, but there isn't an issue with the idea in principle.

Besides, the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away. That is the most practical aspect of wealth control and there is still a small number of people controlling it.

> Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?

Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated, she donates quite a lot of money. $26m going out some time soonish according to a recent heaadline. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/02/taylor-swift-t.... She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids. It turns out to be nontrivial coming up with good examples in practice.

[IanCal]

> Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues.

Massive concentration of wealth has a few outcomes you may find disagreeable or sub-optimal

* Huge concentration of power in smaller numbers of people, chosen for unrelated skills, heavily tied to luck

* People with huge amounts of power being able to make extremely sub-optimal decisions and still be entirely fine. Elon can buy and run a business into the ground on a whim and be entirely fine.

* Concentration of direction of human labour - it is more worthwhile to spend many lifetimes of humans to very slightly increase the comfort of one multi-billionaire.

For the last example, Americans earn more typically than anyone else in the world and data is easy to find. Assume lifetime earnings of $3M. Bezos' yacht cost more than enough for 100 full lifetimes of US median worker labour, and requires ten lifetimes every year to maintain.

For one ship, for one person.

You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.

> Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome

Well it being a daft choice is rather the point, taking the absolute extremes is rarely a sensible approach. Total abolition of private wealth is not the point anyone is making. The argument people are making is to take money from those that have so much that the impact to their lives would be negligible, and use it to improve the lives of many others. It may even make them wealthier!

You said optimum there, but optimal for what? Even if it's just efficient allocation of capital, doesn't that rely on pressure to invest well? The reward for doing so is more wealth, but what if you don't need more, or don't need to constantly try and get more?

The wealthiest could sit with vast sums as cash and be fine, which is sensible for them but surely a terrible use of capital.

> the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away.

That's a government.

> Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated,

Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?

> She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids.

How do you figure that? And you can simply swap over fully educating those kids for something else if you want, unless the argument is that Taylor Swift specifically is better at allocating resources for whatever outcomes the population wants.

Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy?

Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring?

In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?

edit -

To be clear, I think the market is an incredible way of constructing a ludicrously large graph of how to use the worlds resources and human labour, tied to what people want as an outcome, allowing fractional voting through the network in a way that's extremely simple for end users (I buy things for prices I'm happy with, the "market" of millions of other people optimise the back end of that) and is self-optimising.

The problem comes when some people have enormously more votes than others, distorting it all, or are able to manipulate the graph, or where hill climbing optimisation cannot reach the more optimal states (infrastructure classically, legal systems are another good example).

[roenxi]

While I have no objection to long ranty posts - I write enough of them myself - as a matter of practicality I'm going to ignore most of it and stick to the questions to keep the walls of text under control.

> You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.

Well, we started back in ~1,000AD with 0 people who own such a boat. Now in ~2,000AD we have >1 person with such a boat. Ideally we'd like to be as close as possible to a world where everyone has such a boat. So 1 person isn't ideal but, y'know it is a start and we're going to need to have 1 person before we get to 2. Probably it is about as good as we can manage right now. Bezos is a good candidate for the 1st person, he's done some pretty amazing things.

> Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?

She might not donate the money. She's choosing to give money away because it won't impact her lifestyle, so if you take money from her on the theory that it doesn't impact her lifestyle maybe she stops. And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.

> Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy? Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring? In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?

Yes to all of the above. I assume. I don't know much about Taylor Swift except she's got a lot of money and she sings.

[IanCal]

If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".

> And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.

Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?

> Yes to all of the above. I assume.

I have to point out that you are likely looking at the world in a drastically different way to most.

You think that

1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources

2. Taylor Swift is being rewarded for efficient allocation of capital and not her songwriting, singing, etc.

3. Taylor Swift, who has been singing for many years at lower amounts of wealth, would stop if her fortune dropped and she had to release songs in order to gain more wealth

4. Taylor Swift is making music because there is something she wishes to purchase that she is saving up for. She does not wish to make music, and is putting up with it to finally afford something.

I think most people believe that musicians who are extremely popular for their music would continue to make music if they could live an extremely lavish lifestyle without a care in the world for money but their net worth didn't increase. I think that most people would prefer some measure of how well things are going that look at their own life, or how many people have food.

[roenxi]

> If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".

A disturbing number of people are financially incapable to the point where they struggle with concepts like spending less money than they earn. There is a significant tension between what they want to measure and what economic optimal looks like. The economy is there to maximise peace and prosperity, the people who think otherwise should be kept well away from the levers of power.

> Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?

I assume she's got a team of analysts working on it. I doubt she manages her own money directly. They're probably pretty good.

> You think that

> 1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources

I think that a world where one person has a superyacht is better than a world where nobody does. In much the same way that a world in the 60s someone probably owned a really expensive mainframe and there'd be people moaning about how outrageous it was that someone could spend so much money on a big calculator. The market doesn't seem to want to give everyone a superyacht, and I doubt it would be efficient to jump right in to it. For obvious reasons

Points 2 to 4 though seem like an accurate restatement. With the caveat that my knowledge of Swift is patchy and distant.