maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel".
That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments.
the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution. We’re not quite at the point where we don’t need menial labour. But we can sure see the through line to it. The alternate future to the despairingly unemployed is every person being something of an owner.
> if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more
Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if you’re being paid $750k/year, you’d better be worth more than $1.5mm to your employer, because taxes and regulatory costs are typically estimated around 100% of base up to the low millions.
how so? what do you think is the breakdown between say working people in the USA (excluding gig-jobs cause you know…) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
Automation. Consider the number of jobs today that one can do singly today that didn't even exist then.
> W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
There are about 165 million workers in the American labour force [1]. There are 33 million small businesses [2]. Given 14% have no employees [3], we have a lower bound of 5 million business owners in America, or 3% of the labour force.
Add to that America's 65 million freelancers and you have 2 out of 5 Americans not working for a boss. (Keep in mind, we're ignoring every building, plumber or design shop that has even a single employee in these figures.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-busi...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at...
Are you trying to estimate only those without employees?