@djc it's not just him. Hughes, Henry Ford. Gates is not so flamboyantly evil, but his IP-first, market-incentives-uber-alles politics (Zuckerberg's too) have undermined global public health, both directly by preventing broader IP access and indirectly by making plausible the idea that vaccines are a greed-motivated conspiracy, and led to at-best unsuccessful if not outright destructive diversions in educational reform.

@djc Plus, these people obviously face information problems. It becomes harder and harder for their worldview not to be refracted through sycophants. Autocrats and plutocrats lose their capacity for good social judgment, even when their intentions remain sincerely prosocial, due to information problems, the fact that their advisors have so much to gain from titrating advice towards their self interest. If you believe incentives matter, they matter here too.

@djc (re relative comparisons, maybe! we'd have to see. but if plutocrats are going to perceive relative status in logarithmic terms, that's a preference structure we just can't afford to accommodate.)

@djc I guess here we'll disagree. If Galt must be motivated by money, he must be motivated on a scale that lets him buy Twitter or finance Fox News (or MSNBC! Whatever!). The social cost of that far, far exceeds whatever technical contributions sociopathic motivation can make.

Fortunately, sociopathic motivation may be relative! If Musk is motivated by being richer than Bezos, downshifting the entire scale may have very little motivational effect!

@djc Plus, I'd ask you to consider whether Galtian incentives aren't self-debilitating. Howard Hughes starts as a brilliant aviator, but become Howard Hughes.

Elon Musk, well, his politics are obviously flamboyant. But early in his career, you could think (I used to think!) he was stewarding Tesla in a prosocial way. I don't think that's a reasonable conjecture anymore. His talents have been deflected by his wealth.

@djc taxing the top 0.1% doesn't get what we want in terms of financing, but the income tax is not about financing. it's about shaping society, avoiding caste. i'm not very into high income taxes on the upper-middle class, am very into "confiscatory" rates above about $1M per annum. (see https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/03/the-us-federal-income-tax-in-pictures/index.html especially the part about sewing the seeds of the 1980s tax revolt.)

@djc the top 1%, 10% is largely opposed because of the political work by the top 0.1%. the whole game is based on persuading people earning $500K a year that they — THEY — are going to be raped by communists unless they adopt the politics of billionaires. it's a shame that too much of "the left" is willing to play along. by e.g. Biden does a pretty good job with that, no (income) tax increases $400K or less.

@djc If you don't believe me, I'd ask you to consider why we were able to do so much more before "tax simplification", before we collapsed our many many tax brackets, which allowed discriminating between plutocrats and the merely affluent, into just a few, placing plutocrats and the merely affluent in the same boat. This was the core of Reagan's absolutely catastrophic project. See @chrisp's animation, watch the number of brackets go poof. https://github.com/chrisvwx/taxFoo.jl

@djc @chrisp (my pithiest expression of all this was a 2019 tweet.) https://x.com/interfluidity/status/1092519956439130112

@djc @chrisp Perhaps we can agree that it wouldn't hurt to...

1) Restore 1940s tax rates at the very high end

2) Restore many more tax brackets (or, for us nerds, a suitably shaped continuous curve) to make it easier to discriminate between the affluent and the plutocratic in our income taxes.

@djc @chrisp I think that'll take us farther than you think. Maybe not. But it almost surely will do more good than harm among a wide variety of social axes, unless you really believe that for the good of all John Galt and his genius must be retained on the job, and the best and only way to keep him there is financial incentives even though he is already richer than Croesus.

@djc Apparently by whatever that’s measuring Finland’s welfare state has grown more generous. Lots of Swedes lament the retrenchment of social democracy during neoliberalism. Norway is of course Norway. In any case, Nordic social democracy is not a particular number. It is first and foremost a commitment to a universalism of positive rights, backed by an ethos of solidarity and reciprocity. Everybody must have access to the basics of a decent life and to complements to social contribution.

@djc Very arithmetic notions of egalitarianism would have tons of means testing. Take from the rich, give to the poor, maximize arithmetic equality per dollar taxed. But arithmetic egalitarianism is dumb, inhuman. Egalitarian means equal participation, equal dignity. It does not mean uniformity in every outcome, including income or wealth. It should (unfortunately in the Nordics does not) foreclose differences in wealth so great that political equality becomes a sham.

@djc But there is no great contradiction between Nordic universalism and the “capitalist” side of Nordic social democracy. They complement one another. Arithmetically, universal benefits promote equality in an incentive preserving way. Adding a large constant number to everybody’s variable “capitalist” income reduces variation.

@djc (You’ll note in that thread the declines are attributed to less generous unemployment and pension benefits. Those are actually difference preserving, rather than difference reducing benefits. With less of them, people fall back more quickly on more universally identical benefits. I’m not arguing that threadbare unemployment insurance is “good”! What goods, including protection from what kinds of rich, a society should define as universal is an open conversation with lots of nuance.

@djc But a decent society ensures a decent basic, no matter what, and the Nordics still do that. Nordic wealth inequality is high, due to the basic political settlement that enabled social democracy. That’s fine. Nordics should do a better job of preventing plutocratic wealth accumulation though. There as here, every billionaire is a policy failure, and they have too many.

@djc We all should think less about means testing at the bottom and more about means testing at the top, to prevent the emergence of caste and influence.)