Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.

I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.

Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".

People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.

There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.

That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.

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derektank 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.

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rglover 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).

[1] https://abcnews.com/US/98-year-man-donates-stock-now-worth-m...

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himata4113 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.

Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.

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somenameforme 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern times. For instance the Founding Fathers are a simple people often find surprising - with some even living on into their 90s. People didn't just drop dead at 40, but rather when one person dies in childhood and the other in his 80s, you end up with a life expectancy of around 40.

The thing about life is that you're doing awesome, then you hit senescence, your body starts shutting down and you're going to die. As Warren Buffet recently put it in his final letter to shareholders, "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood." He's perfectly healthy for his age, a multi-billionaire, and is not long for this world. It's how elderly people can seem to be in amazing health, and then 6 months later they're dead 'of old age'.

So life expectancy zoomed way up until the point that a newborn started to be able to reach around that age of senescence, but then gains started rapidly plateauing. And this makes perfect sense. We'll see global life expectancy continue to increase as more people are able to hit those years, but it's not really significantly moving, hasn't for millennia, and there's no real reason to think that's going to change.

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himata4113 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't life expentancy 95th percentile where infant/sids deaths are excluded? Either way I am pretty sure the topmost of life expentancy has also been increasing faster.

But you're right, even if we solve biological aging our brains will likely give out and will take even more generations on top of that to ever come close to solving it.

	▲	somenameforme 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Typical life expectancy figures include childhood and infant mortality. In the past it's not like people just hit their 40s and keeled over, but rather many people didn't make it to 15. But if they did, then they tended to live comparable lives to you and I if insulated from famine/war/plague. For another random example, running for Consul in Ancient Rome had a minimum age of 42. Here [1] is a source from a recent study overviewing shifts in life expectancy, if the word of some guy named somenameforme on the internet is, for some reason, insufficient by itself. [1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251026021749.h...

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datadrivenangel 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All the new tech gods will eventually die of cancer due to prop 65 (thanks California.)

	▲	tanseydavid 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
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