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This is going to come off as tangential at first, but I am beginning to think that the next great human progress will not be engineering, or science, but philosophy.

We discovered nuclear fission in the 40s. We can fix atmospheric nitrogen into industrial fertilizer. We communicate at the speed of light. We can manufacture things so absurdly complicated and with such small tolerances that we can do everything from microelectronics to spaceflight. We can and do literally farm in deserts and we do alchemy as a power source!

So how is it that our primary means of collaboration dates to antiquity and potentially into prehistory? Here I specifically mean the mechanism of prices and currency exchange.

We refined it somewhat at various points - we layered powerful abstractions onto it with the invention of the corporation and securitized ownership thereof; we gave it a macro structure with capitalism and free markets, to socialize the concepts we wanted people to engage with. But at the end of the day, the system works because it is the most accepting of reality - it is a system that reinforces itself when people are driven to try to exploit it, instead of falling apart. Indeed, it reinforces almost too well - most of our intervention into it takes the form of "nudging" local minima - breaking up monopolies, enforcing minimum qualities, etc.

So, we have this system that has been fundamentally the same. And to my perception, we have two ways out: we either Star Trek our way to complete abundance, to where the cost of everything is ~0 so everyone might as well be given enough. Or - we decide that even though it is not free, it is time that everyone has enough. And given we've managed to literally perform alchemy and actual biblical miracles of agriculture, and we're still not really much closer, I hesitate to say that anything but the conversion of energy to highly-structured matter - a la Star Trek replicators - will make notable progress here.

So I think that the next big step forward will be philosophical. We need to take this urge that the article mentions - where people see the 90 year old working in the street, say "this is wrong", and correct it - and we need to make it so that people believe and live it axiomatically. We need to say - even though I cannot see them, and they may not look like me or think like me, they should have enough.

Except all this counted on constant growth and with huge environmental debt. I agree on philosophy though, we need better understanding why we need all that growth, or do we need it at all.
> why we need all that growth, or do we need it at all.

Whether or not we need it, we can't have it indefinitely. So the best thing to do long-term is to rethink our economic system so it will work without it.

Billionaires depend on regular people having money, as otherwise they lose customer base. So I'm guessing, if your scenario materializes, the elites will be pro-UBI.
The fact is the true nature of humanity revolves around the concept of survival. Survival of the fittest. Having largely defeated and subjugated nature on this world, we are no longer in competition with the natural world. Rather, we are in competition with one another. The strong, be it physically or mentally, will always overpower the weak. Our role on this world is not to live in peace with one another, it is to conquer and conquest over our fellow man.

Anyone who disputes this is lying to themselves about the true and ruthless nature of humanity, and disrespects the mechanisms that have allowed themselves to exist and ask that very question.

This is your permission to do whatever you can get away with in the quest to amass as much of whatever is the current measurement of conquest. Be it money, fame, or power. It will never be enough, but that's not your place to ask why. Only how you will conquest.

I once read a book on primatology (can't remember the title, wish I could) that observed that over 8 million people live together in NYC. For the most part peacefully. But if you put 8 million chimpanzees together in the same space they would rip each other apart. It would be a bloodbath.

Which is to say that one of the unique things about humans is our ability to get along with each other. To form ever-larger stable communities. So I question your declaration that the "true nature of humanity" is to be in competition with one another. I'd say we're the dominant species on the planet precisely because we have an ability to put aside competition and cooperate with each other. Not always, of course, but the majority of the time.

What a dismal view of the world that is! Such a life would not be worth the trouble of living, so I'll simply discard your argument and assume that you must be wrong. Call it an inversion of the anthropic principle, perhaps.
This is what I call the Randian paradox in a nutshell.

It is, when you actually think about it, quite selfless to tell people to be selfish and to take care of and control their own affairs, as the least likely person to receive any benefit by following the speaker's advice is the actual speaker.

On the other hand, it is exceptionally selfish to tell others to place others' well-being ahead of their own for the opposite reason, that following the speaker's advice is absolutely more likely to benefit the speaker (and everyone else) at the expense of the listener.

Accordingly, it's utterly incoherent for anyone acting upon this self-centered philosophy to tell anyone else to do it, because the first principle of being a wolf among sheep is don't let other wolves into the fold.

> the Randian paradox ... It is ... quite selfless to tell people to be selfish

Unlike most paradoxes, this "Randian paradox" has an easy resolution: it's utter bullshit parroted by asshole psychopaths who have been wishing desperately their whole lives for justification that their utter disregard for the wellbeing of their fellow humans is actually a good thing. It's not.

> the first principle of being a wolf among sheep

and one way to spot an asshole psychopath is that they divide the world into "wolves" and "sheep" and, of course, put themselves in the "wolves" category.

Illiteracy and throwing a tantrum is not a resolution.
The fittest humans are those who cooperate with and who can be at peace with their neighbors.

The only thing that conquest brings is death, suffering, and broken men.

Prosperity increases in areas and populations that are peaceful and decreases in populations and areas that are not peaceful.

I understand the people who fail to see this, and I pity them.

A diet too rich in documentaries on WWII and the Roman Empire leads to intellectual malnutrition.

Where, when, and what exactly are you speaking of when you speak of increasing prosperity?
If you are asking for examples: everywhere on Earth, for all of human history.

If you are questioning whether or not prosperity is increasing, especially in peaceful areas, I cannot help you. Not being able to tell that we are currently in the most prosperous and peaceful era of human history, and it isn't even close, is like not being able to tell if it is raining or not whilst standing in the middle of a downpour. I would first have to explain what water is, the water cycle, what the sensation of wetness is, other sensory perceptions of rainfall, and a basic understanding of what objective facts are and I don't have time for that.

That's a lot of rhetoric to dodge a question. Peace doesn't fall out of a coconut tree.
I wonder what it would look like to go back in history and compile a bunch statements of the form "The fact is X and anyone who disputes this is wrong." What gems might we find? "The fact is that the Sun obviously revolves around the Earth and anyone who disputes this is lying to themselves." "The fact is that man will never fly and anyone who disputes this is wrong." I'll leave an exercise to the reader to imagine a white plantation owner stating "obvious facts" about another race. I'd like to say "the Earth is flat" but you're more likely to hear that now than thousands of years ago.

And of course we have entire disciplines of study that are basically devoted to finding a justification for being a greedy asshole. I'm guessing you're a fan of those lines of study?

The fact is that the world is complicated, and we're here now and it's our turn to say what it means to be human.

Yeah but we could just not do it that way is the issue. We actually can build systems that affect and restrain human behavior in ways positive for people. Murder is a part of human nature, but we put a lot of work into preventing it to a large degree of success.
When a larger share of per-capita money production goes to EXISTING asset owners - aka people/corporations who did not do any work to earn that money - this is going to be the outcome.

There is only one way out now - wealth tax to fund social security.

Okay, let's assume we take every last dollar from every billionaire in the U.S. regardless of the legality, feasibility, or morality. We now have $5.5 trillion dollars.

This would more than double the current $4.2 trillion in funds and extend the runway to bankruptcy ~10 years. That's not nothing, but it's a move you can only place once as no one with any chance of being impacted would stay around.

I feel it’s worth remembering that Social Security’s insolvency was created by the Republicans choosing to exempt everything over $125k from taxation. Restoring that would help immensely because there are a lot more millionaires than billionaires, and you should be thinking about cash flow rather than current asset holdings.
Social Security's insolvency was created by it being a rotating door of money rather than an actual pre-funded retirement account. Its funding only ever worked so long as there were more contributors than withdrawers (i.e. the population keeps growing, and retirees don't live too long).

I also think Social Security's implementation is regressive, and this only makes that worse. Social Security is a payroll tax, so it only gets paid on payroll. I suspect that millionaires and billionaires pay very little in Social Security and would continue to pay very little because their income is almost all investments, which doesn't require Social Security tax.

Highly compensated employees are often paid largely in stock, which I believe also doesn't get hit by Social Security (but I could be wrong there).

We are talking a significant swing in tax burden for people in the upper-middle/lower-upper. At $200k, it's about close to a 3 point increase in overall tax burden (i.e. from 20% of income to 23% or what have you). At $400k, it's close to a 5 point increase (~16% increase in overall tax rate). It also double-dips because employers pay half of that; at a $200k salary, it's about an extra $4,500 in taxes from the employee and $4,500 from the employer ($16.5k from both at $400k). In reality, the employee will likely pay for both with withheld raises/bonuses that the company uses to pay for the new tax.

> Social Security's insolvency was created by it being a rotating door of money rather than an actual pre-funded retirement account

Perhaps, but the fund was healthy when we had a balanced budget at the turn of the century. That’s why the Bush administration was able to deliver those tax cuts for their wealthy donors since they could deploy some confabulations about increased economic growth balancing out a “minor” change and were able to drown out the people who actually do math.

Do you have a reference for that law/tax cut to Social Security? So far as I can tell, it has always had a maximum taxable income component dating back to 1937. I don't see any dramatic increases in the maximum taxable income component, nor do I see a dramatic cut in the rates. Looking at the charts, I don't even see a significant drop in funding other than ~2010, which is probably recession related.

Have you seen graphs like https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1.png ?

The obvious answer (at least to me) is "the ratio of beneficiaries to contributors is substantially worse than it was in 2000, and it will only get worse in the coming years". In 2000, there were about 23 people withdrawing from SS per 100 people contributing so each worker funded about a quarter of a SS account. In 2022, that had increased nearly 50% to ~32 people withdrawing per 100 contributing, so each worker is funding about a third of a SS. By 2060, we're projected to be at 50:100, so each worker has to fund half of a SS account.

The ratio of retirees to workers has never been worse, and is only going to continue to worsen. It's either going to go bankrupt or grow to be an enormous tax.

Just extrapolating from the current numbers, the average SS monthly payout is current $1,782.74.

We're currently at 32 withdrawers per 100 payers, so 100 payers have to cover $57,047.68/month or $570.48/payer/month.

On a 2060 population curve (no inflation because SSI is indexed to wages, so both sides inflate roughly evenly), there's 51 withdrawers per 100 payers, so at the same monthly payment those 100 payers have to cover $108,747.14/month or $1,087.47/payer/month.

Even removing the income cap entirely doesn't fix that. As of 2017 (the last year I could easily Google data), 84% of earnings were taxed under SS. Removing the cap entirely would only increase SS revenue by ~20%, which only makes it solvent slightly longer. There is no way around the fact that if SS is going to stay solvent, we're going to have to either increase the tax rate substantially (or change how it's applied), decrease the payouts substantially, or change our age curve substantially with birth rates or immigration.

That's why I think they should have reformed it in like the 70s, when the age demographics were much more favorable. Changing age ratios have always been a threat to either make Social Security insolvent or make the Social Security tax balloon to an incredible size.

> Okay, let's assume we take every last dollar from every billionaire in the U.S. regardless of the legality, feasibility, or morality. We now have $5.5 trillion dollars.

This would be stupid. You collect money from the passive gains that are rising automatically.

If the $1 billion grows automagically to $1.1 billion - that is $100 million earned without doing anything - just tax that $100 million at say 10% which will make their return $90 million instead of the $100 million. They will still end up with $1.09 billion but they also return some value to the rest of the society that is making them wealthy.

Do this over and over for every concentrated billion in existence and keep funding social security deficits.

Eventually, automation leads to labor surplus when the value of human labor is lower than the cost of human living.

This problem will be resolved, by our action or inaction as a society. We just need to decide the corpse/profit ratio we want.

A counterpoint is that if the government was doing this instead, it meant government buying stocks collectively with the money taken from people as payroll taxes, then distribute the proceeds. But it will mean government owning means of production, and on enormous scale - almost a textbook definition of communism. It was both politically impassable, and also will inevitably end up in a massive disaster if actually tried, will make entire economy into a charade of manipulation. People will start companies with a specific goal of getting "on the list" of those government will buy, instead of a goal of making money, as a result giving birth to monsters. Huge fortunes will be made by tricksters teaching people how to build these companies for them to appear more plausible, and these tricksters will be same people who will make the decisions, through the revolving door system. It will be hard to do any macroeconomic regulation because say, increasing interest rates will mean the government directly loses money because stocks fall. Every conservative politician will love to see the huge mess a decision like this would produce, will be the best proof of Republican "government is bad" philosophy.

For someone born in the Soviet Union, this idea sticks so bad there's not a slightest inclination to try it out.

Other approach is "the government should directly own the productive assets it creates itself, not buys on the market", but that will create an even bigger conflict of interest (government will have to make sure those pesky private businesses don't compete with it), it will be truly a resurrection of the Soviet Union, and a wall will soon be needed to keep people in, rather than to keep them out. Been there, done that. No need to repeat the same to arrive to the same result again.

That’s exactly what pension funds in Europe do, though. Private organisations, sure, but you are required by law to join one. And often per job type there is one (or two) which you then have to pick.
Doing so will mean turning American economy to the like of European. That is, socialism, generational stagnation and people checking checkboxes rather than doing things.

Why not just educate people into investing better instead? It has a side consequence of (purely by chance) making some people multimillionaire heirs simply because their granny lived a very long life and markets were good, thus creating a lot of surplus money to spend or invest. Old people tend to be stingy so that money is unlikely to be spent before their death.

> educate people into investing better instead

So 401ks were intended to do this in a way. I think it was the greatest theft of a generation.

"Lets incentivize and normalize the middle class to give the rich their retirement funds to play with."

In general stock investment does nothing but make the distribution of wealth more and more lopsided. For every dollar gained by the poorer the rich gain more. When the rich gain more, they get to leverage the new capital to get even more next time in a positive feedback loop.

Man I hear that so much on HN. I'd never been to Europe until 2021, and I met so many happy, beautiful, productive people who enjoyed healthy food, great booze, love, and just LIFE compared to the U.S. Here on the Colorado front range it's all scrambling to keep an edge, trying not to look homeless people in the eye, taking as much as you can, working killer hours for (lots of) cash that we then blow on stupid plastic shit ....

Sure many of the people I talked with complained about the government stepping on its own toes to try to increase tourism or provide grants for building new things, etc., but I also saw women walking alone in the middle of capital cities at midnight because it was perfectly safe to do so.

Granted this is just one small country in Europe but if that's what socialism, generational stagnation, and people checking checkboxes looks like then sign me up. That said ...

> Why not just educate people into investing better instead?

Yes! This along with critical thinking about social media, lessons on how to fill out your taxes, fostering an interest in local politics over national politics, and maybe America can get its head out of its ass and actually produce happiness instead of just money.

As they say, the grass is always greener. I’m lucky to have worked with enough colleagues who have immigrated from Europe to realize that the situation there is far from perfect.

For example they are making 30-50% the pay of a software engineer in California or New York, and that’s in a “rich” european country like Germany or France. The chance of owning a house is almost impossible. They don’t have access to open spaces even remotely like Colorado. Obviously what you prefer will be up to you, but the US has a lot more options in terms of the lifestyle you can choose from.

That. And more generally, there's almost no chance to change your life for the better. Rich people there are those who became rich before this system was put in place (before WWII that is, sometimes in the XIX century or before), and then just pass the wealth down the generations. Or those who immigrated having earned (or stolen) the wealth abroad. For others, there's really no hope of breaking out of endless toil for mediocre wage. And yes, on the flip side, it's really hard to fall through the cracks completely, but that's what it is: to prevent people from losing, we also need to prevent them from winning - you can't have one without the other. And, collectively, they just stagnate. There's no progress at all in any side of life, while America still enjoys relatively quick - even if very unevenly distributed - economic growth.
Why be rich when you can be comfortable? I know many Europeans (and immigrants to Europe) who make plenty of advancement in their careers. I hear you about house ownership though.
I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Wages are lower, yes, but if I compare myself with my friends from the USA I have more disposable income corrected for purchasing power.

I agree that working as en employee you will never get ahead. Which is why you should start your own company or invest if this is something you desire.

Also Europe might fall behind ik economic growth, there is a lot of innovation coming from Europe, exactly because of stricter governmental regulation regarding green enerfy, recycling, consumer rights ef cetera

I had a starkly different experience. The Alps are different than the Rockies in terms of isolation but definitely no less beautiful. And taking a bus or train to a trek vs fighting up I-70 was a dream.

I lived part time in New York and have plenty of colleagues on both coasts and saw how that pay was eaten up by massive rent and house payments and food costs.

Not saying Europe is perfect but living in Colorado, where I was born, is like watching a best friend become a whore. Such beauty and light consumed by the hunger of the people using it.

What are your thoughts on the Chinese economy?
They have none of that shit and thus growing fast. No social guarantees. No pensions. Effectively no unemployment benefits. Labour is a resource and nothing more than that.
The US model relies on perpetual growth, when in reality the problem is "do we have enough people to take care of the elderly". The issue is one of physical capital and human capital. The answer today is YES we have enough of both of those things to take care of our elderly, however we direct that human labor and capital towards things that produce more "value".

There is very little value in taking care of old people. Unless the government mandates that some proportion of the economy is dedicated to taking care of the elderly and expecting nothing in return, we are forced to rely on ponzi schemes.

And yes, this may be "socialism" but who cares? The government already owns all the land and all the dollars in circulation, they just lend them to you. The illusion of freedom is shattered for you by the word "socialism" but make no mistake this country is not some libertarian paradise.

A great lever would be to require the state acquire some shares in a company in exchange for the privilege of the corporate veil/limited liability.

1. This provides a benefit in exchange for the trade-in, basically end-running the inevitable Fourth Amendment kvetching if we just eminent-domained a stock holding, and the massive up-front cost of buying shares at market.

2. It automatically diversifies the holdings-- there is no "list of what companies the state can buy", it's basically every enterprise larger than a lemonade stand.

I also love the idea of giving the state voting stock in private enterprise. It will be used politically to maximize accountability. Maybe American regulators have no say about the labour or environmental conditions in a factory you run in Burkina Faso, but give those regulators 30% of the voting shares of the company and let them try to yeet the Board of Directors, I bet that gets action!

I also figured a lot of the trick to solving problems like retirement and homelessness was just to move more services outside of the dollar-denominated economy. Replacing "this apartment costs $1750 per month, and next year it will be $1900" with "we are obliged by law to accept your Class J-45 Housing Ration Voucher" means there's no way to claw additional assets from the poorest people who need the produc

Why not take money from payroll and give directly to retirees like they do in the Nordics.
Hasn't it happened with $35T debt yet? Ugh, but it hasn't gone to retirees only.
Isn't that what the U.S. Social Security program does?
But that will mean taking a much much bigger proportion of income because now at least that money compounds while the person is working, now it will be taken and consumed directly? It means yes, European taxes (50+% total charged from employer+employee, for a median person), and poverty pensions.

Any government solution also means paternalism. Which is, government deliberately makes life better for worse people, and worse for better people. It can make anyone into a Republican!

I experience vastly more constant interference, inconvenience, bureaucracy, stupidity, and oppression from the massive corporations we allow to run our lives in America.
Given that life quality is quite high in the Nordics and they are happiest countries on earth I'm not so sure it's a bad system.