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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.

I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).

The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)

The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.

All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?

It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.

I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.

How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?

There's two ways to approach this, you can try to reduce capital's share of income or you can try to spread capital's share of income more evenly through society.

Spreading out capital's share of income is conceptually easy. Just have some sort of wealth/inheritance/income tax that puts money into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, every citizen gets a non-transferable share and receives a dividend. Over time the Sovereign Wealth Fund becomes a larger and larger share of total investment capital and most of the capital share of national income is spread evenly among the population. There are myriad political difficulties in funding the SWF and the population would have to resist the temptation to drain the fund rather than live on the dividends, but conceptually it's pretty simple.

Solving r>g seems harder. You can artificially reduce r with taxes but that discourages investment. You can try to ramp up g, and obviously more economic growth is good, but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.

but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.

In this respect, current AI developments feel like a make-or-break moment.

I don't understand why anyone expects AI to make that much of a splash. It's probably going to be the same story as computers and the like internet. Undoubtedly revolutionary technologies, whose gains went mostly to feed bureaucracy

Because we're seeing two portents:

  1. AI is becoming equal to or better than humans in more and more domains.

  2. The number of domains it is getting better than humans at is increasing faster than expected.

Which for most 'experts' in the field, show that AI is now going to contribute a LOT more to the economy as we figure out how to exploit these capabilities.

Right now the most obvious gains seem to be in the programming space. Where a programmer can 10x their productivity by sloughing off a lot of their work onto the AI.

ChatGPT is already scary good at a lot of tasks. ChatGPT, hooked up to other AIs that are scary good at particular tasks will probably be an all purpose tool.

And this is without entertaining the "AGI goes FOOM" side of the equation.

I myself just recently fed a PDF of a user manual for one of my household appliances to Anthropic's "Claude" Ai and asked it to help me troubleshoot, and it got me to a step by step procedure to both identify and fix the problem I was experiencing.

This doesn't fully 'replace' the role of a repairman, of course, but it saved me a noticeable amount of time and possibly money, and that sort of benefit compounds over time.

Imagine for instance if we could replace most Teachers with an interactive AI bot.

Which for most 'experts' in the field, show that AI is now going to contribute a LOT more to the economy as we figure out how to exploit these capabilities.

Right now the most obvious gains seem to be in the programming space. Where a programmer can 10x their productivity by sloughing off a lot of their work onto the AI.

My point is that computers did that too, for many fields. The internet did it again. It did not result in a return to 20th century growth rates. We have fundamentally the same lifestyles as we did pre- the digital / internet revolutions. I'm saying that whatever sucked up the gain from them is likely to suck up the gains from AI.

Yes, but in this case, the change is potentially going to lead to self-perpetuating improvements as each augmentation to our capabilities immediately unlocks further ones.

Think something closer to the industrial revolution.