Hey @TeaTieAndHat, thank you for the comment!
I think the core idea I'm trying to get across - and the reason I hoped this was a good fit for LW - is not about how govs can maximize revenue for its own sake, but that as a society we could do a much better job caring for the 99% by acknowledging the power laws behind wealth creation and focusing more on increasing our yield at the top.
This is true even if your goal as a government is NOT to maximize productive capacity, because cost / revenue is the bottleneck preventing you from funding everything else. Shifting policy to take advantage of this could let us better support all the "non-productive" things we care about: higher safety nets, public arts, etc.
So for example - if your goal as a country is to raise the standard of living via benefits to the bottom 50% of earners, unintuitively, the best to fund this is to help more high-potential folks become high-earners. Moving a single person from the 5% to the 1% generates enough revenue to pay for many dozens of basic incomes in the bottom quartile.
Thanks again for the thoughtful read and the feedback!
Hey @Myron Hedderson, thanks for reading and for the thoughtful comment!
The 1% in this article is just a proxy for that level of success - we claim is that we can grow the number of people who achieve the level of success typically seen in the top 1%, not that we can literally grow the 1%. Productivity and the economy isn't zero sum, so elevating some doesn't mean bumping others down (although I acknowledge that there are some fields where relative success is a driver of earnings).
I agree I could have been more clear about this a little bit, and I considered it - I just thought it was a bit of a distraction from the core point. Maybe I was wrong :) I appreciate the feedback.
"I am somewhat leery of having a government bureaucracy decide who is high potential and only invest in them." - 100% agree with this point. I see this mostly as pushing for a better way of allocating efforts and budgets that are already being spent, but I like your framing around marking sure "everyone has access" instead of picking winners.
Hey @NeroWolfe.
I think you're looking at the wrong numbers. For example, their 23.3% for the top 5% INCLUDES the top 1%, which skews the averages precisely because of the power laws at play.
The have another table further down where they break this out: