The top marginal tax rate in the US was 90% for most of the post WWII 20th century and that didn’t seem to hurt anyone. Invented transistors, went to the moon, built interstate highway system, mass construction of nuclear power, and became the world leader in manufacturing

Today we have low tax rates and can’t make chips, still working on that moon landing, can’t build high speed rail, can’t build nuclear, and are trying to tariff our way back to a manufacturing sector

They haven’t even come close to taxing billionaires. Europe has loads of problems with bureaucracy and a lack of dynamism, I’m not persuaded a tax on billionaires is actually workable and suspect we will try WW3 instead…

I mean, we do have affordable healthcare and usable trains (in some countries)...

They are neither investing in production nor consuming assets really. Any billionaire's yacht is an insignificant fraction of the world's resources. What matters is capital misallocation - they are investing in things that aren't productive that they think are productive and because they have too much money to invest, a too great share of society's resources are going towards those unproductive investments and productive activities are seeing shortages (e.g. the RAM crisis in PC and console gaming).

1000% I honestly believe this is why the US is such an economic powerhouse - the rich there deploy capital in a way that assumes optimistic win-win outcomes when they invest in startups! In the UK the investors are trying to get much higher percentages at half the valuation and it’s terrible for everyone even the investors to have people with 25% the upside of US companies.

The article opens with a discussion about how AI investments are forcing up the price of computer hardware, so it’s not off topic at all.

I don’t believe point 1 at all, or the skill atrophy point of 2. and the billionaires think AI will indeed make them richer otherwise there would be no investment in these companies would there?

Not at all quickly. People's lives got immediately worse — well within a working lifetime. Life expectancy fell and infant mortality worsened for well over a hundred years. In particular the quality of life for people displaced by the second agricultural revolution degraded radically. It took until the early 1900s for people in cities in the west to be as healthy as a pre-industrial revolution farm worker.

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not!

If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in the west if we can’t prevent the rich from inflating and buying all the assets you will own nothing and rent everything from them.

"All everybody has to do is work and there will be no unemployment" --throwaway323929

Wow, you just solved economics!

Your argument is so incredibly reductive as to be nonsensical. The understanding of the allocation of capital is seemingly below grade school level. Even moreso, your understanding of the business cycle and how it interacts with governments and banks seems to be even more immature.

"manufacturing" didn't "go away", it moved to China so investors could capitalize on lax environmental laws and cheap labor. This engineered trade off of wealth had devastating results to massive parts of the US. On top of that, not every city can become Seattle. There isn't enough 'service economy' to go around and do that, especially as technology tends to concentrate wealth.

I love AI and have built many projects with PyTorch and use LLMs daily for all my work and am building a startup in my spare time here: https://veloa.com/

Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.

Did you adopt cryptocurrency in 2022? What were your results?

If any of you guys who use the phrase "neo-luddite" had any grasp of who the Luddites were, what their concerns were, and why such campaigns did what they did, you'd be getting ready to fight the future too. Whichever side you're on.

Maybe try to understand the future neo-Luddites before you have to fight them off. Libertarianism made your salaries good but it made them affordable semi-automatic weapons.

It seems to me that it's a bit more likely to be a Captain Swing than a Ned Ludd who emerges, anyway.

If AI was utilized to eliminate the "shitty" jobs I'd be more enthusiastic about it. AI Robots that clean toilets so humans don't have to? Yes, please. (Yes, I get it that at present its probably still cheaper to employ a human wage slave to do this job -> the economic argument).

But at present AI seems to be just eliminating the junior programmer positions. That is, the apprentices. Once the more experienced engineers retire and die off who will replace them? AI? Who will have the knowledge and expertise to know what is crap software is and what isn't?

it's really funny when people advise the fix for widespread sociological problems as "just become an entrepreneur and disrupt an industry bro"

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> disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".

> adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive,

Funny, the strategy of creating a company entirely dependent on mercy of another company, vulnerable to destruction with any simple change in TOS has been criticized on HN previously.