> I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?
I'm in general disagreeing with major points in the article, but it's too large topic to have a full discussion here. The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.
Can they? The US government has spent more on, and done more to advance space travel and exploration than Musk can ever hope to. The CDC completely eliminated malaria and other mosquito born illnesses in the US, amongst many other things. Gates has done nothing comparable. If you look at every billionaire’s pet projects you’ll find governments that have already done and are doing more. What billionaires lack is oversight and what they have in spades is budget and incentives to spend on PR to make themselves look good while doing little. As an average person, I’d rather governments did these things than have to put up with billionaires class who get less done while talking about it more.
This is exactly right. In huge swaths of the US, your local county's Mosquito Control department is probably a small number of full timers (maybe one or even zero), some budget for seasonal staff, and some commercial F-150s with sprayers in the bed. They probably have six-seven figures a year in budget.
They don't have a PR budget, just trucks and sprayers. But they are absolutely the reason that there isn't endemic malaria in your county.
there is no doubt that government employees can innovate. Anyone can innovate. Provided with the correct competitive structure (large market rewards, big prizes, etc).
And yet, the F150 was built by capitalists, the sprayers are built with capitalists. The chemicals were built by capitalists.
so yes some problems are best solved by government, but innovation isnt one of them.
> so yes some problems are best solved by government, but innovation isnt one of them.
1. I've worked in gov labs, industry labs, and academic labs. Mostly industry labs. People and culture are the most important thing. The variability in innovation between companies is often WAY higher than the variability between the public and private sector. Gov labs can be insanely innovative or quagmires. Same for industry labs. It's all about the people and culture. Good people and good culture and possible in the public and private sectors. Bad people and bad culture are also possible in the public and private sectors. Anyone telling you otherwise is trolling and/or selling an idiology (sic).
2. The whole point of the above post was that there's ENORMOUS value in the "tried and true". Getting rid of endemic malaria has been possible for the better part of a century. It's a governance problem, not an innovation problem.
"In 2018 a whistleblower told me about a new satellite thruster that used mercury, the poisonous liquid metal, as a propellant, and that it would inevitably fall back to earth when used, thus beginning my Space Lawyer arc. The company that designed it was in the process of selling the tech to big space companies: SpaceX, OneWeb, etc., who were in the planning stages of putting new "megaconstellations" of 10,000s of satellites into orbit. Every one of these satellites has 20-100kg of propellant onboard, which is ionized and expelled over time to do orbital correction and scoot around up there. Mercury is heavy, which means that it gives you a lot of Δ(v) per unit of propellant used, it isn't explosive, you don't have to heat it as much as other fuels to stay liquid, and it's cheap because nobody wants it.
It’s not like the wealth of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos is in liquid assets: their wealth is from owning shares in a corporation.
What we’re saying when we say “limit their wealth” is that we should force them to lose control of the company they founded and led to success — almost entirely!
Eg, Jeff Bezos would go from ~10% of Amazon to ~0.01% if we wanted to reduce his “wealth” below a billion dollars.
Given that neither government nor Wall St seem to show greater wisdom than these business leaders with demonstrated success, I’m strongly against forcing corporate leaders to cede more power to those groups.
Isn't this argument entirely defeated by the existence of share classes though? Forgive me if I'm incorrect but aren't founders already free to maintain control of the company by holding all voting shares while issuing separate non voting shares.
It seems supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company.
Personally I think affording that level of control to an individual is supremely irresponsible once a corporation has reached a size that it's failure would cause severe harm to society. Especially since the people responsible, more often than not, remain extremely well off while the rest of us get to pick up the pieces.
> Especially since the people responsible, more often than not, remain extremely well off while the rest of us get to pick up the pieces.
This is equally true of Wall St and the government, except that neither has shown they’re capable of managing the company — while the founder has.
I’m not seeing what the benefit is in removing control from someone successful to give it to people who are routinely not - eg, Wall St running Boeing into the ground, to the point their planes self-crash (737), can’t be certified because the doors blow off (777), or be manufactured to spec (787).
> supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company
Your only argument for really complicated legal structures, including having to constantly change the ownership structure, is that you don’t like people who are wildly successful can parlay that success into other efforts?
Okay — but I think that’s dumb.
Why is it a problem that Jeff Bezos can try his hand at rockets now that he’s demonstrated success at leading Amazon? — or that Elon Musk can try fixing Twitter now that helps demonstrated success at Tesla?
Bezos and Musk take far too much credit. Most of the work, including the intellectual work, the vast majority in fact, was done by other people.
Those are the people who should be celebrated, not the guy who happens to own the organisation, and nudges it now and again like some tinkering monarch.
I'm sure it's by design. I don't know the author's stance on nationalizing, but people who make similar arguments about "you don't need that much money!" also like to propose nationalizing all wealthy companies.
Yeah it's interesting considering he cited individuals like Xi and Putin who essentially are the government of their respective countries getting horrible value for their wealth. And it's not just limited to dictatorships; the US didn't get shit for the $2 trillion it spent on the Afghan wars, and still lingers behind some smaller countries in QoL. While it's nice to extoll of efficiencies of scale, it's hard to say they work in practice. Maybe it would be a better idea to say any entity shouldn't have control over X amount of assets, whether individual, corporation, or government.
> and still lingers behind some smaller countries in QoL.
I hear this all the time and it’s a silly comparison. Some small homogenous country in Western Europe with citizens who subscribe to an empowering philosophy and share the same culture will obviously have a higher QoL.
It’s way easier to get the ship where you want it to go when most everyone is actually rowing and agrees on the direction.
That supports my argument though. A highly populated country is much more likely to have citizens with clashing philosophies or cultures. Subdividing it to smaller states results in a state having less citizen "worth" but more efficient application of that worth overall.
I've always been a fan of state over federal, but I don't think a lot of our states are "rich" enough to balance out the others. I'd imagine an optimal balance would be several of the lower population states be merged together based on culture until we have ~10 states with the wealth of Germany or some such, but then dumping a lot of the federal powers to before Wickard v. Filburn. The thing is that the impotence seems to kick in on the "super-large" continent sized countries, but that doesn't mean there isn't a minimum size too, of which a Vermont or Kentucky doesn't really meet compared to a Texas or California.
It should also be noted these changes would only practically be achieved with a time machine, because the social/economic/military cost of changing anything involving the foundation of the US nowadays would be apocalyptic
A system that can arbitrarily take away all assets over 1 billion, will arbitrarily take assets of less than a billion. When the government has that much power, someone will come along and abuse it.
Also no matter how much money the government is given, it will never have enough.
That argument seems flawed to me. The government already does have the power to tax, and could arbitrarily take away all your assets, but in developed nations, it doesn't.
> it's too large topic to have a full discussion here.
It's not a large topic at all. There's a belief that there should be no upper limit to wealth accumulation for an individual. It's nonsensical in extreme cases.
In practice, even the ultra wealthy know to split the wealth over multiple individuals/companies, which provides stability and splits accountability[1]. The IRS failure to audit the wealthy is both a testament to how effective wealth hiding is (making most attempts to curtail it, futile in the short term), but how ingrained the idea of limitless capitalism is with the current US Government as anything but a net-negative.
While the poor eventually try to "eat" the rich, statistically, it's unlikely that any given wealthy individual will be the unlucky one over time. So the idea of uncapped wealth as a virtue persists.
[1] It also introduces wasteage and grifting, to a degree.
> The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.
Stross anticipated your reply though,
> They can fund lobbying groups and politicians, rant about colonizing Mars, and buy midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station, but their scope for effecting real change is actually tiny on a global scale. Even Putin and Xi, who are at the state-level actor end of the scale (individually they're multi-billionaires: but they also control nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8-9 digits) have little global leverage. Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is.
Right, and these words are basically wrong. It doesn't matter how big GWP is comparing to a persons' resources, it's the application of these resources, which often can't be done on government level - they are largely for different things, can't risk that much, in practice aren't very efficient etc.
Of course there are also arguments to the contrary - e.g. Apollo project was rather effective, large military operations like working during WW2 shows government can actually be quite efficient etc. That doesn't matter though, we only need to point to an example - let it be SpaceX - when a billionaire shows better results than the government.
> we only need to point to an example - let it be SpaceX - when a billionaire shows better results than the government.
Stross anticipated this too:
> Granting individuals enormous leverage can sometimes be socially useful. But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust). Meanwhile, billionaires can do immense damage: the Koch network has largely bankrolled climate change denial, Musk's Mars colony plan is fatally flawed, and so on.
You say "better" results than the government... but it's not obvious that a government can't make these marginal improvements... you just assert that "these words are basically wrong".
Yes, and here the author also makes mistakes. Founding Tesla is irrelevant; results of Tesla are. Saying that reusable space launchers existed before SpaceX is like saying there were people in America before Columbus - technically true, but Columbus achievement is colossal, similarly the achievements of SpaceX. But we're comparing billionaires and governments :) - will you say Space Shuttle, or Buran, are comparable to Falcon 9? Author didn't provide any arguments for Mars colony's plan :) so let's not get there.
As I said, the article is very questionable - and not because billionaires couldn't use some healthy attention, just because too many statements in the article are doubtful.
I'm in general disagreeing with major points in the article, but it's too large topic to have a full discussion here. The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.