Comment by mcmoor
4 hours ago
It's hard because while for a 1 in 10,000,000 achievement, even if they're lucky to get 1 in 1,000 just by being born at the right place/time, they still need to fought hard for the rest of 1 in 10,000.
I've seen people attributing Taylor Swift' success entirely to luck. But eventhough of course she has inherent advantage, she still has to defeat tons of people who also has the same or even more inherent advantage as her. The numbers are arbitrary and a spectrum, and I've seen too many people treating it as black and white.
I think your comparison with Taylor Swift is not good, a distraction even.
Billionaires optimize for very different goals than most other people. You don't become one by accident, while you are actually focused solely on your work. That will at most get you to a few million, maybe tens of millions. At higher wealth, you need to focus on the wealth itself. I don't think that that is something good if (even) more people tried to do.
People getting better like Taylor Swift is IMHO much better than people trying to be like a billionaire. The latter is all about controlling more and more important aspects of important parts of society, from production to sales, and in the end politics in general.
Taylor Swift getting really good does not negatively influence others, or force them how to live. Billionaires controlling more and more does. It's a tradeoff. Having more centralized control, like creating a Walmart or an Amazon, has advantages, but it also has disadvantages.
Also, the reason there even is the option of becoming that wealthy, controlling so much value, is almost entirely outside the hands of the individual. Like every human, billionaires too rely almost entirely on the context they live in. The vast majority of what we have was created by the dead, knowledge, infrastructure, culture. Even the most capable human only adds a very tiny amount. Mostly billionaires are good at gaining control over already existing things and other people.
Not necessarily a negative, a central control is essential for anything higher level. The point is that one, they did NOT create most of the things they use, second, there are only so many "chief" positions available in the human network to begin with (even if that number is somewhat flexible).
However, I think the laws of competition don't work for those positions of central power like they do in other "markets". I doubt billionaires are so rich because there is little supply and competition for those positions (you may have trouble finding another Warren Buffett, but many billionaire positions are about the right time and place, especially when it's about resource control and not about innovation). I think there is plenty, and many would be just as capable as many currently holding those spots, but that does not cause their "wages" to fall.