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Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

The best we can do as society is to offer equal opportunity at success. Success is multifold: physical, mental and economic health jump to mind.

Beyond opportunity equalized, an equitable society should bestow success proportional to the ambitious, persistent hard-working individuals. That might be imperfect, as a few statistical outliers who tend to have outsized innate advantages (Einstein, Ramanujam & Usain Bolt for instance) are likely to be more successful, but that's the most equitable design possible, within the bounds of reality, including evolution - where the fitter tend to survive better

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More than that. In my opinion, it's better to offer lots of small equal opportunities (which means certain forgiveness) than one big equal opportunity (which you can get easily wrong). That's why I would favor a minimum basic income, which gives people a small opportunity to do better every month, although it has its downsides, too (I wouldn't want to replace all public services with it).

Also, this only addresses the low-end of the inequality, for example people being poor. But inequality (of power, money are just a proxy for that) also causes problems at the high-end, because power corrupts and the more power you have, more corrupt you can become. So it is desirable to limit that too.

I wouldn't mind if there was a cap on personal wealth (say $10M), but many people feel it's wrong. I don't think it's necessarily unfair, I mean if economics is a competition (and not a power grab), in other competitions you don't get an advantage if you have been previously a winner (for example, Usain Bolt doesn't get to start 10m ahead because he won all the races up to that point). Even though people in other competitions start at the same line again, it actually doesn't seem to affect their willingness to participate. I don't know why people believe business should be any different.

If you have a system that caps personal wealth, you've just given more power to the people running the system. And if it's like any such system that's existed historically (e.g. communist Russia and China essentially capping personal wealth at zero), the people running the system will end up accumulating way more wealth than the cap (and way more power than in a system that didn't give the rulers such strong influence over people's lives).

Wang Mang ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Mang ) capped personal wealth in the first century at a level much higher than zero. It was still a total disaster as far as history tells us, though in this case the official histories are overtly hostile to Wang Mang.

The theory is always available, though, that history hates him so much because his policies were so awful.

Capping personal wealth at zero (or less than wealth per capita for that matter) is obviously a nonsense, so you should be careful with this strawman. Reasonable amount probably starts at some multiple of that.

Of course, you need democracy too. Since the beginning, the democratic concept was about equality of access to political power among citizens.

In many ways, it's what traditional anarchist/liberal left is about - equality in power (egalitarianism?) and not necessarily in the outcome.

>Capping personal wealth at zero (or less than wealth per capita for that matter) is obviously a nonsense, so you should be careful with this strawman. Reasonable amount probably starts at some multiple of that.

There's not much more power needed to cap wealth at zero than at 10 million: the enforcement infrastructure would be the same.

> wouldn't mind if there was a cap on personal wealth (say $10M)

> Even though people in other competitions start at the same line again

I think limiting personal wealth is too extreme personally. But you could still even the starting line, as you put it, by limiting inheritance.

instead of capping wealth, traditional societies had jubilees where after a certain number of years all debt is reset to zero

If only we were remotely close to giving everyone equal opportunities. Sadly, we've got a lot of work to do before we're there, and to some it's going to feel very unfair when they start to lose their advantages.

I feel we have a huge collective blindspot - hard work is emphasized at the expense of working smart. Mode than half of all work in our society is unnecessary and inefficient busywork.

Once you start considering efficiency of peoples work, it's very difficult to have a consistent framework.

> More than half of all work in our society is unnecessary and inefficient busywork.

Source? Data? That sounds completely made up and does not match the reality I live in, at all.

I am not sure about hard data, but it matches my perception very well and is a widely discussed observation:

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...

If you search meaningless jobs or bullshit jobs, you will find countless articles, and various percentages given, from 25% to 70%. I think it's safe to say the number I not zero

Society should bestow success on ambitious, persistent, hard-working individuals who make a positive contribution.

The real reason we have inequality is because this doesn't happen, but this is hidden behind the false narrative that it does - i.e. success is a positive contribution by definition, and somehow "must" be the product of hard work.

In fact the Money Cult rewards acquisition for its own sake. It hides the true cost of externalities which damage the prospects and life experiences of others.

Our accounting systems reward narcissistic sociopathy over mature contextual awareness, and are politically toxic. "Market" values specifically exclude social and economic costs. And political sponsorship adds another positive feedback loop to the whole mess.

If post-market values rewarded actions that created positive social and cultural benefits of all kinds - from technology to education to medicine to pure science to the arts - we'd see an explosion of prosperity and potential that would make capitalist ethics look comically crippled and backward.

Given the extreme polarity evident in cultural and social matters in the West, I'm wondering who's going to do the assessing prior to the bestowing of success for that positive contribution and detection of mature contextual awareness, as you put it.

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