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Comment by mvncleaninst | Hacker News Reader

> Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

if you run with this attitude, it sort of destroys society. Everyone is too focused on being better than everyone else. It essentially sacrifices culture on the altar of economic growth

And I seriously think this GDP-worshipping attitude is outdated. Net economic output means very little if people like horowitz come in and steal most of it for themselves

A much better metric would be life expectancy, or average level of educational attainment. Imo instead of prioritizing GDP at the expense of everything else, we should prioritize having a functioning society where people are happy, healthy, and the system is sustainable

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This is a good takedown I read [1] My own take: Andreesen doesn't get that politics/law/society also has "software", i.e. rules that advance and get complex as civilization gets complex. In a sense there is human/social "technology" as well that has to evolve and advance as well. Hard Tech needs Soft Tech, they are not "enemies".

[1] https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionai...

Heh:

> Economic inequality does not solve itself. Markets are not perfect, self-correcting mechanisms. At one point, Andreessen writes “The market naturally disciplines (…) Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.” I take this as evidence that he doesn’t read any actual economists. One could make an argument that the 90s techno-optimists did not yet know any better (we were just trying global capitalism for the first time, maybe it’d work great!). But, for a Silicon Valley set that likes to pretend at being hardcore Bayesian rationalists, there is something downright comical about how they have managed, across the past thirty years, not to update a single one of their priors.

>much better metric would be life expectancy

I think that's a good start. Perhaps it's a combination of life expectancy, sustainable birthrate, and some sort of quality of life measurement.

Basically, measuring health, society health, and happiness.

GDP is a gameable metric. Life expectancy is not everything we want, but it’s not bad. “The Federal Reserve announced today that life expectancy was up 0.1% this quarter. Stocks rallied on the news.”

If we want to do that though we still need merit, ambition, striving, achievement, and greatness.

> If we want to do that though we still need merit, ambition, striving, achievement, and greatness.

We will die to heat death before anyone in the current ruling class is able to measure merit, much less striving, achievement, and greatness.

We still need all of those things though so I’m putting out a Request for Metrics on merit, ambition, striving, achievement, and greatness.

Once you figure out a way to measure any of those without bias I'll write the software for you for free. And then I'll burn it.

I like "number of girls that cycle to school every weekday".

Life expectancy of those in the bottom has gotten quite close to those at the top. Horowitz may have 100000x the amount of money, but he won't live even 2x as long as your average American (or global citizen). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

Thankfully educational attainment is also way up

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-having-attaine...

"The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of [American] individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women." [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/

And the gap is increasing https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/figure/...

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