Comment by epolanski
3 days ago
Not sure why wealth inequality is mixed anywhere near the rest of the topics.
I couldn't care less about it, if some people live to make money, let them, as long as they do it legally.
On the other hand hacker culture is very lacking and the fact that we don't really own our devices is part of the issue.p
Wealth inequality is a problem because it deprives median citizens of limited ressources; consider urban housing as an example. There are two factors at play:
- Average people have to compete on price with the wealthy (which becomes harder as inequality rises)
- Wealthy people are incentivized to use their wealth to acquire things and extract rent, which drives up total costs and makes inequality worse
A lot of the resulting problems stay negligible or hidden or as long as there is enough overall growth, but as soon as that growth slows down these kinds of problems become very apparent.
Inequality necessarily reduces living standards for those at the bottom of the heap.
When the person at the top has more than they can spend on necessities and luxuries, they put their money to work. That means buying assets and driving up their prices.
Some assets are fairly divorced from the "real" economy, but enough filter through to extract wealth from the masses who have to work for a living as eg. spiralling rents, inflated credentialism etc.
Regardless, what's the connection to hacker culture.
This deserves an answer.
Cash and assets are phantom wealth, the kind that celebrities lose after their first big break when they forget to pay their taxes and everything gets repossessed. Real wealth is majority shareholder control of the means of production.
It's not so much that billionaires should be blamed for acquiring vast wealth, but that they are a symptom of a broken economic system. In that they use their wealth to lobby and capture the government so that they not only pay low or no taxes, they also get large government contracts and subsidies to multiply their wealth further. And they also own the mainstream media, so can use it to spread propaganda to convince people to vote against their own self-interest. So that deregulation, tax cuts and austerity appear to have equal footing with public investment, even though the former aren't supported by macroeconomic theory.
Why does this matter? Because the premise of trickle-down economics is that investing money at the top causes ripple effects in the economy that eventually reach the bottom. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice, the wealthy use financialization and tax shelters to vacuum up capital so that it grows only for them. In effect turning themselves into black holes where capital only flows one way (see Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty). Thus shattering any logical argument for trickle-down economics.
The result being that there is plenty of money for private equity firms, real estate developers, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big pharma, fossil fuel companies, proxy wars in Middle East and former USSR, you get the idea. Yet there appears to be no money for food stamps, public education, public healthcare, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, university research, government grants, and yes - grants and loans for small businesses like startups.
Meaning that as the US government endlessly slashes funding for anything outside the status quo, the national debt only grows larger. Prices go up while wages stagnate. Paradoxes that apparently nobody can see, because they keep voting for the same people and parties. It's like Lucy pulling the football away just as Charlie Brown tries to kick it, but he never figures out that he's being fooled.
When for a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars we spend on, say, election advertising, we could cure several diseases. We could have thousands, maybe millions, of $10,000 grants for startups working on disruptive technologies, the type of grants that Y Combinator used to give when it started.
Instead we flush it all down the toilet year after year. So that hackers are forced to work in their parents' basements, on shoestring budgets, with skeleton crew teams, spending years of what little leisure time they have to build things that might have otherwise taken weeks. All so that billionaires and surveillance capitalism can keep vacuuming out our savings.
The US GDP is $30 trillion, and there are about 150 million workers. That's $200,000 per year, per worker. Yet the median income is around $65,000 per year. Meaning that 2/3 of our productivity gets skimmed by the wealthy. Where does that other $135,000 per year go? It's not going to hacker culture, that's for sure. So we run in place as the world burns.