Sam Altman, Technology and wealth inequality:
Without intervention, technology will probably lead to an untenable disparity—so we probably need some amount of intervention. Technology also increases the total wealth in a way that mostly benefits everyone, but at some point the disparity just feels so unfair it doesn’t matter.
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This widening wealth divide is happening at all levels—people, companies, and countries. And either it will keep going, or innovation will stop.
The very first intervention ought be in our innovation policy, which presently is tuned to maximize concentration of wealth and minimize the access of everyone to the benefits of innovation — because our innovation policy is a property/rent seeking regime. A few data points.
Such an intervention won’t stop innovation, but might change it, and we should want that. Beautiful progress is that which is produced by a freedom and equality respecting regime. We ought be suspicious and ashamed of progress which depends on infringing freedom and promoting inequality. If mass spectacle ends when the regime falls, all the better. We’ll love whatever culture we have and create, will be amazed by its innovation, in part encouraged through non-enclosing innovation policy.
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If innovation-driven inequality is a big problem, we ought be more highly valuing (including figuring out how to characterize that value) and promoting existing systems which depend on and promote freedom and equality, i.e., commons-based ones such as free/open source software and the Wikimedia movement (and recursively working on equality and diversity within those systems).
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Innovation could tend to increase inequality independent of wealth concentrating, property/rent-seeking based innovation policies and other political factors. If this is the case (or honestly even if it is not), I’m always disappointed that progressivity of tax systems isn’t central to the debate — and I don’t mean marginal income tax rates. Basically property > income > sales. Further, property property can’t be moved and taxing it doesn’t require extensive privacy invasions. In theory I’d expect the strongest states and most free and equal societies of the future to strongly prefer real property taxation over other systems. But perhaps path dependencies and other factors will swamp this (and innovation policy as well).
Basically property > income > sales.
YES. Beautifully concise.
Perhaps too concise. If you take income as the measure of inequality, as many do (I think that’s a bad move overall, though understandable), then it’s easy to make the case that income > property. And there are probably degenerate property tax systems that amount to head taxes, making sales > property. But I’ll attempt to justify in depth the last paragraph of this post in the fullness of time and for now stand by the conclusion even as I admit it isn’t that simple.
(Of course the main contention of this post is that treating innovation as property is batshit insanely bad social policy, especially if you’re concerned about innovation increasing inequality.)
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