The issue is concentration of power. Wealth inequality is just one way destructive levels of power concentration can happen. We need low wealth inequality along with truly democratic government.
But the preferences might be changing not because people like the new way more, but because the economic system forces people to choose the most efficient way of doing things. Someone who plays games at home can do it cheaper or in less time than someone going to a cafe, and because we are constantly competing against each other in this system, the less efficient choices become unaffordable over time. Efficient people hold most of the economic power and therefore the economy will mostly serve them.
Also people, especially kids, are not always good at understanding the consequences of their choices. The convenience of playing games at home is easy to see, but few kids understand how that choice will affect their social skills over the long term. Allowing individual preferences to dominate society might not give us the best result.
Maybe they aren't and never will be capable enough to do this, but if there's even a 1% chance that they are, then it's very important to consider the consequences and take the necessary precautions before it's too late.
> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.
> You may hate it but you don't matter. We all do it no matter what.
I've seen you say "you don't matter" in many of your comments. Why do you think like this? Sure, we don't matter much most of the time, but this kind of elitist thinking and decision-making is clearly leading to growing discontent, which can then be used against "people who matter". Perhaps the tools for controlling the masses are now powerful enough to make what you say true, but there's a chance your "let them eat cake" attitude will lead to the downfall of the people who currently matter.
Bezos didn't create that wealth alone. He had help from thousands upon thousands of people. It's impossible to calculate how much of the value of Amazon was actually created by the work Bezos did, how much by other people in the company, and how much was just natural evolution brought about by technological and societal change. Bezos gets billions because he is in a position of power where he gets to take it, not because he created that much value.
But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.
People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.
This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.
Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.
There's value in that only if assessments made by people using the prediction for something aren't better than crowd wisdom. I would guess that a large part of prediction market participants are simple gamblers whose assessment is worse than the prediction of someone doing it because they need the information for something.
So if people who need predictions for decision-making start relying on prediction markets with a lot of low value gambler predictions and opinion manipulators (wealthy participants can use the platform to mislead people as well) the value of these things might be negative.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
Why couldn't China be better? It can't get much worse than what the US is currently doing. It's getting dangerously close to 30s Germany levels of madness. China at least at the moment seems like a better run country, and much less interested in forcing its will on other countries.
Yes. The bigger the gap becomes, the more the economy will be geared towards serving the needs of the wealthy instead of regular people. If a trillionaire wants a mansion on Pluto or an AI to serve him, a large workforce and a lot of resources will be put towards that goal, making those resources and work more expensive to use for other goals. Your healthcare and shelter has to compete for resources and their prices will rise as the demand for overlapping resources goes up due to the huge purchasing power of the wealthy.
What we produce in this economic system is decided by money. If 90% of all money is in the hands of the wealthy, then 90% of all we make with out limited workforce and resources will be decided by them.
Those meals would most likely help a lot of kids become healthy productive members of society. That money would be saved by the families of those kids and used in other parts of the economy. A lot of the cost would therefore be returned. The money spent of this war is producing only destruction.
I don't think this is what social media provides. With social media people are able to choose one perspective and seem to just immerse themselves in a bubble so that they only get exposed to the view of their choice.
What they do there is not enough. All decisions should be made using some form of direct democracy, otherwise you leave an opening for power concentration again, which will lead to the same problems we're now facing. We can't make all decisions using referendums.
Could be, if we can come up with efficient ways to govern using direct democracy that lead to better decisions than what we now have. I don't see much work being done to come up with such a system, though.
I wish it was just psychos with power that are causing these issues. It's worse than that I think. It's the competition based systems of human organization that will result in what you're describing.
Even if people in one country manage to get rid of the psychos and give power back to the people, the countries that continue at full speed to full automation of the economy and the military will just win the competition over resources and power. For as long as our economic system and the systems that govern relationships between countries are based on competition, we are forced to continue on this path. The ones that choose not to will lose.
We would need to quickly build systems based on cooperation instead of competition if we want to avoid a disaster. No more markets, no more competing nation states. Probably an impossible task considering we don't have much time left before we have automated systems that make it impossible for people to take back control from the owners of those systems.
> Europe faced a worse Russian threat during the Cold War without giving up national sovereignty.
That's because Europe could rely on the power of the US back then. If the US was just a patchwork of small independent states, Europe would very likely be a part of USSR now.
> Cooperation and military alliances do not require national suicide.
It may if your opponent is a single large country. Cooperation between many nations each looking out for their own best interests is a lot lot harder and slower than a single command structure. An alliance like that can't win against a more united enemy. The enemy can simply focus on manipulating the small weak countries individually to hamstring the alliance, as has been happening.
I would not want to be a small country caught between larger powers fighting each other, that's never a good position to be in. You'll just be a pawn on the board, getting pushed into proxy wars and civil wars by the bigger powers playing the game. I'd rather give up sovereignty willingly to be a part of a large power and a player in the game, and not on the board being played.
I don't think so, because it's not only the truly weak that get exploited and abused in an "every man for himself" system. It'll also destroy the lives of many who could become strong in an environment that protects them when they're weak.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.