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Comment by embwbam | Hacker News Reader

I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing.

I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.

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Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible.

Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top.

Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.

There will always be people in power. But maybe it is better if those people are elected, and operate in view of the public

I’ve read the book you’re referring to. We absolutely should not try to prevent people from amassing enough individual power to do what Elon et al are doing. Bureaucrats are generally good at some things (eg reliably running services that are well known quantities and should be provided to everyone regardless of profitability), and generally awful at others (eg efficient innovation in new fields). You need a mix of both types to both run the world and keep it moving forward. I for one am very happy that sufficiently motivated and skilled people are sometimes able to amass enough resources to try crazy things like competing with each other to start orbital launch companies and deploy a world-wide network of thousands of communications satellites to break the government granted chokeholds a few telecom companies have on internet access.

For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.

That is a bold claim, for which you will need some pretty solid evidence.

An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion.

We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.

If you make a list of the horrors of history and rank them from worst to mildest, you'll find that public officials (even in democracies) are much scarier than rich people operating private concerns.

Sorry I don't quite understand. Are you seriously saying democracy is a bad idea and that you would like to live in an oligarchy?

Private property and decentralisation are good ideas.

50%+1 liking the way someone talks doesn't mean that the person is fit to manage the whole economy for four years.

Oligarchies are even worse. The point is that people who win elections, and political leaders in general, are a much more concerning threat than wealthy, powerful & unlikable business leaders.

I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.

A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.

That all depends on who is doing the voting.

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