Why are you casting it only in material terms? Freedom and a good life is also what other people want. Rich people don’t fight over cars, they fight over Harvard acceptance for their kids, or play in the Olympics, etc.

Our political system is built on coalitions fighting for things for their groups: credentials for jobs, taxes for projects, space for their people and families, status in community.

When the supply of those things becomes fixed it’s a zero sum fight for what’s left. You can’t lose without another side winning.

The point is that growth alleviates the bitterness because there is a belief that in the future there will be more and I will have a chance to get what I want. When that belief goes away power is the only game in town - and that tends to manifest as violence.

▲

deepsquirrelnet 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Except that is not how it has played out. In science fiction, there are competing views of the future.

One view of the future is like Star Trek, where people’s needs are easily provided for by technological advancements, and people spend their lives on advancing human understanding at a species level. In other words, technology has liberated people from working to provide for their basic needs and enables them to focus on higher ideals.

In other stories, humanity is dominated by technology and a minority of people who wield it.

If you believe in a zero sum game, then try going somewhere like a community fridge, where our agricultural abundance is saved from the garbage by stores who are willing to donate. Or watch as generational wealth provides for people who will never work a day in their lives. Look at the extreme excess of PhD students working jobs far beneath their abilities, and teaching no one. Ask yourself how worker productivity and participation has skyrocketed and homelessness has too.

Zero sum is not the way I see the world. I believe gradients drive economies, but in almost every system, large gradients are unstable. Large gradients inefficiently over-allocate resources to the wrong places and reactionary effects result. That manifests in violence.

▲

monkeyelite 10 hours ago | parent [-]

All of what you wrote makes some sense. What point are you responding to?

▲

deepsquirrelnet 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The system you’re describing is one where lives are enriched by this drive away from zero sum, but in my view the one we observe is increasingly described by excess and inefficiency. The middle class is shrinking in the face of technological advances. More people say they no longer expect to do better than their parents. Either the last 40 years have seen no tech progress, or he’s just wrong. It’s worse than zero sum on average, it’s declining economic conditions. It’s full time jobs that used to pay a living wage, but don’t anymore. Even over years of productivity gains (ie away from zero sum, the conditions Thiel says keeps us from violence), a great percentage of the population is losing ground.

Even in your own examples of zero sum, the reality is they are excess-driven. People go to Harvard often by competing for excess which enables contributions above and beyond what is required to pay for education — excess, not academic meritocracy. Many people go to the Olympics because of sufficient excess to spend years practicing bobsledding, not because they’re necessarily the best athletes in the country. We have an abundance of highly paid professionals working jobs they would self describe as “bullshit jobs” (excess).

I’m even saying that I have excess in my own opinion, even though I’m maybe a top 10% earner. And while people are hungry, uneducated and homeless, we have the means to resolve this with existing technology, but we don’t have an economic framework to do it.

In my opinion, the AI race could lift up everyone, or it could create greater excess and inefficiency. I’m pessimistic that recent history is showing it’s the latter.

My original point was just that even in the top 10% of earners (and probably more), violence is a preposterous idea. Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent. It doesn’t threaten my basic needs or impact my greatest desires, which are to have the freedom to pursue things that I think are important. In my view, the fabric of society is strong when people’s basic needs are not in jeopardy, not resulting from insufficient excess.

	▲	monkeyelite 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Excess exists in the system - in the sense that we have more economic goods than subsistence. And I agree - it’s questionable how much economic progress has been made in 50 years. But now to Thiel’s point. Most people don’t actually believe that’s true. They believe in some kind of tech progress narrative so the alarms aren’t going off. The more radical and disaffected political segments are those that do not believe this. They have a defeatist or at least pessimistic view of future outcomes. So the question is more psychological - what happens when people no longer think the pie is growing? And I think the answer is it’s not pretty. we have excess but we also have massive inequality. The economic conservative position is literally that this is ok because everyone’s well being is going up at the same time. So what if we stop believing that? > even in the top 10% of earners, violence is a preposterous idea. Have you been following the news this last week? > Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent. You’re right. You don’t see yourself in competition with your neighborhood. Try to imagine a situation where you do. What are the most politically gut wrenching topics for you?