While I love the UX of this site and how well executed it is, I think it’s spreading misconceptions about how the world works.
Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system.
Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on.
Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one.
And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth.
You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos.
Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality.
So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.
Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system.
Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on.
Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one.
And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth.
You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos.
Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality.
So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.