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Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards.

Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.

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This seems to be a basic principle of biology which fractally translates to entire societies. Piketty's data shows that historically, the curve was flattened only when the economy itself was upended, i.e. after wars. We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. A parallel money system like cryptos might have been used for that, but so far it has done the opposite

> We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy.

Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day? The simple fact that so far only war makes the curve flatten suggests that this is not a curve we want to flatten. Nobody comes through a war feeling good.

Define 'comfortable'. It's always relative as people aspire to be what others have become. Wars have always happened, naturally, so it's nothing 'unnatural', and perhaps nature's way to flatten the curve. Our current feelings about war may or may not be correct - wars have many benefits too.

You've never been to war, eh?

> Define 'comfortable'.

Hot and cold running water, a toilet, shower, electricity and internet, shelter, medical care (not dying of easily curable diseases, for example.)

Really, IMO, the baseline is what folks at the Google campus have. If everyone in the world had that QoL as a baseline I think we could declare victory and go home.

the soviet union provided this level of 'comfortable', decent basics for literally everyone . somehow its people didn't 'declare victory and went home'

So, your answer to the original question

> Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day?

Is that "that's not enough"?

Where are you going with this?

Nit: Power law distributions aren't specific to biology. Even the sizes of asteroids follow a power law. Absent some law of physics or another, your null hypothesis of any measure of just about anything is a power law.

Biology deep down is physics. But not everything is a power law.

A top 1% on it’s own is not a problem. It is the power they have over everything to not only keep things that way but make life worse for everyone else. For example by lobbying for laws that help corporations not people.

I mostly agree, except corporations aren't being helped; people are. Might be through higher dividend payments to shareholders, higher salaries to employees or lower prices to consumers, but the corporation isn't a thing in itself that benefits.

Yes the corporations are a representative. Some are fully owned by a one or few people so their ethics align with those people for better or worse. Others are run by boards for shareholders but those board members ethics would come into play there. Then there are associations that lobby. So it is people but various groups acting in complex and different ways.

Calling those groups "corporations" just masks that complexity, and not in a useful way.

This is also my intrinsic gut feel but can you point to any academic research work that supports this claim?

Not exactly academic research, but this has been known since biblical times..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_rich_get_richer_and_the_po...

It seems to be built into the world.

> Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.

True, but more so today than 50 or 100 years ago.

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