All of what you wrote makes some sense. What point are you responding to?
Even in your own examples of zero sum, the reality is they are excess-driven. People go to Harvard often by competing for excess which enables contributions above and beyond what is required to pay for education — excess, not academic meritocracy. Many people go to the Olympics because of sufficient excess to spend years practicing bobsledding, not because they’re necessarily the best athletes in the country. We have an abundance of highly paid professionals working jobs they would self describe as “bullshit jobs” (excess).
I’m even saying that I have excess in my own opinion, even though I’m maybe a top 10% earner. And while people are hungry, uneducated and homeless, we have the means to resolve this with existing technology, but we don’t have an economic framework to do it.
In my opinion, the AI race could lift up everyone, or it could create greater excess and inefficiency. I’m pessimistic that recent history is showing it’s the latter.
My original point was just that even in the top 10% of earners (and probably more), violence is a preposterous idea. Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent. It doesn’t threaten my basic needs or impact my greatest desires, which are to have the freedom to pursue things that I think are important. In my view, the fabric of society is strong when people’s basic needs are not in jeopardy, not resulting from insufficient excess.
And I agree - it’s questionable how much economic progress has been made in 50 years.
But now to Thiel’s point. Most people don’t actually believe that’s true. They believe in some kind of tech progress narrative so the alarms aren’t going off.
The more radical and disaffected political segments are those that do not believe this. They have a defeatist or at least pessimistic view of future outcomes. So the question is more psychological - what happens when people no longer think the pie is growing? And I think the answer is it’s not pretty.
we have excess but we also have massive inequality. The economic conservative position is literally that this is ok because everyone’s well being is going up at the same time. So what if we stop believing that?
> even in the top 10% of earners, violence is a preposterous idea.
Have you been following the news this last week?
> Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent.
You’re right. You don’t see yourself in competition with your neighborhood. Try to imagine a situation where you do. What are the most politically gut wrenching topics for you?