@Phil @realcaseyrollins yes. it does. read the Krugman piece. also, we saw the same boom in the countries whose manufacturing capability was destroyed. France, Germany, Japan all boomed along with the US during the postwar social-democratic era, it wasn’t some kind of lopsided winner-takes-the-spoils.
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 when private sector forces are decentralized, they check one another, they constitute participants in a kind of marketplace of ideas even as they try to influence. when private sector forces are very lopsided, the beneficiaries of that lopsidedness are so much more capable of influence that any marketplace of ideas becomes heavily rigged in their favor.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins yes. much of the design of contemporary institutions is about organizing things so that people who think themselves good can participate on systems that do a great deal of bad. your doctor heals you (good!) while getting paid from extraordinarily and just and predatory financing arrangements, but her work is segregated from those arrangements.
@realcaseyrollins @Phil not everyone. some people are extraordinarily willing to sacrifice for abstract ideas of virtue. most try to do the right thing, but are susceptible to pragmatic compromise. at a systemic level, the most win. the Mother Theresas get fired by the people willing to make compromises to advance. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5031.html
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 private sector influence is not oligarchy, it can be part of democracy, if it’s pluralistic and balanced. but as wealth becomes concentrated, private sector influence does become oligarchy. the same set of rules that work well in a reasonably egalitarian society (some richer, some poorer, but within a moderate range) can yield oligarchy under a more skewed wealth distribution.
@realcaseyrollins history. the US had its strongest business performance during the postwar decades when income and wealth dispersion was least.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins you’re going to end up with a symbiosis of cronies and sycophants when the scale of differences in wealth is so vast. competitive markets, regulators who can serve as trustworthy referees, all depend on a baseline of equality. everybody in the game performs their role in a trustworthy way, can afford to beat the consequences of calling out those who don’t, no one is above the law, outside the rules, because their favor is so valuable.
@seachanger it’s been a bad pneumonia season this year.
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 you can’t have ambitious, opinionated people with $400B hordes whose sustainability and growth depend on political choices and not end up with oligarchy. obviously people in that situation will deploy their resources as political influence.
@realcaseyrollins some of the do some worthwhile things coming up. but if they achieve billionairehood it’s usually by attaining market power and often net destructive. if the achievable spread were between 0 and 100 million (with only a very small fraction achieving 100M) rather than 0 and 1T, ambitious people would work just as hard for that status and do the same good things with less likelihood of becoming destructive monopolists.
@realcaseyrollins nope. billionaires claims to their hordes do nothing for the economy, and people strove just as hard when the economy’s big winners got tens of millions rather than billions.
@realcaseyrollins millionaires are rich. billionaires are something else. i don’t want anyone to hate anyone, and certainly not kill anyone. we don’t need a guillotine when we have a tax system. we do need to use our tax system aggressively.
@realcaseyrollins (i don’t think anyone’s better than anyone else. the dose is the poison. we’d all become whack if we had that much money and decided we had to protect and grow it. we’d become understandably paranoid and lose touch with reality as sycophants surround us.)
@realcaseyrollins people do all kinds of things. billionaires disproportionately compete and conform. billionairehood selects for people like that.
@realcaseyrollins lots of millionaires quietly take their fuck you money and live their best lives. billionaires compete for status and guard their unmistakable hordes, kissing whatever ass is necessary for advantage and to reduce the risk they might be targeted and disadvantaged in their pathetic little game to the very biggest pretend little gods.
billionaires are pathetic.
@John @ryanlcooper if we can get then to write, not ephemeral throwaways but things durably attached to their names, they will read again. life of the mind is neither consuming content nor drive-by commenting, but conversation.
and fascism!
from @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-06-bluesky-proves-stagnant-monopolies-strangling-internet/
Text: The old internet wasn’t perfect, but it used to feel like a place of almost magical potential, where you might stumble over a fascinating new site at any moment, instead of watching in horror as your aunt is driven mad by flat-earth conspiracies. This internet did not die of its own accord; it was murdered by a handful of mega-billionaires so they could sell ads for chukka boots and washing machines.
“A sensible politics needs to ask: how can we create constituencies of countervailing power to the regressive rich?” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2025/01/against-if-i-were-king-politics.html
“prioritize dense, mixed-use, and car-light ecodistricts. There are a number of wonderful examples in planning throughout the world, but I will note that the most visionary are so far removed from our status quo in the US – we lack the ability to even comprehend how much higher quality of life in these neighborhoods could be.” #MikeEliason https://ronpdavis.substack.com/p/mike-eliason-on-corridor-zoning ht @drvolts