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Applied to a local scale, this feels similar to the notion that we should employ our willpower to allow burnout as discussed here
we will never have a wealth tax because pirate games, so marry the rich v2
original: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5qjrfvBb7wszBgWG/daijin-s-shortform?commentId=4b4cDSKxfdxGw4vBH
1. why have a wealth tax?
we should tax unearned wealth because the presence of unearned wealth disincentivises workers who would otherwise contribute to society. when we tax unearned wealth, the remaining wealthy people are people who have earned their wealth; and so we send a signal 'the best way for you to be privately wealthy is for your work to align with public utility maximisation' which privately incentivises work which helps increase utility.
unearned wealth includes: hereditary wealth, wealth due to being at the right place at the right time (you just so happened to buy a tract of land that contains your nation's entire supply of unobtanium / you just so happened to found a company that became the dominant news outlet for the entire world when other similar but less well timed companies failed)
on my original point about monopolies: monopolies are a special case of ^above. The loss of utility due to monoplies is recognised by economists as deadweight loss.
2. why will [countries where the game-theory supports the creation of ultrarich people] never have a wealth tax because pirate games?
Suppose a whole bunch of us got together and demanded that wealthy oligarchs pay a wealth tax. the wealthy oligarchs could instead take a small amount of money and bribe 51% of us to defect, while keeping their money piles. therefore we will never have a wealth tax.
re [countries where the game-theory supports the creation of ultrarich people]: nicky case's wonderful interactive game theory primer tells us that the specific payoffs/noise in zero sum games decide which strategies (cooperate, defect) tend to survive. I suspect countries with ultrawealthy tend to have payoff/noise combos that result in dominant strategies that would participate in pirate games
but hang on, what about the democracies that do have wealth taxes?
> Norway recently tried to increase their wealth tax. a whole bunch of rich people left Norway. I do not constitute this as a successful raising of the wealth tax
> [wikipedia] at its peak, only 12 countries have a wealth tax, representing as a whole less than 6% of global GDP; they are exceptions not rules (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland)
3. what to do instead? marry rich
this is not easy. EA consultants are in some ways marrying rich people.
I wish I read this sooner. Do you have a prototype or does this exist yet?
Can we add retrieval augmentation to this? Something that, as you are writing your article, goes: "Have you read this other article?"
we will never have a wealth tax because pirate games.
why have a wealth tax? excess wealth is correlated with monopolies which are a failure to maximise utility. therefore wealth taxes would help increase total utility. monopolies include but are not limited to family wealth, natural monopolies, social network monopolies.
however, suppose a whole bunch of us got together and demanded that wealthy oligarchs pay a wealth tax. the wealthy oligarchs could instead take a small amount of money and bribe 51% of us to defect, while keeping their money piles.
therefore we will never have a wealth tax.
what to do instead? marry rich
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1The laws of physics bound us to what we can do; so I counter that there is no such thing as extra abundance; and there is no 'cure' for scarcity, unless we figure out how to generate energy + entropy from nothing.
Instead I propose:
Better utilization is the only remedy for scarcity, ever; everything else merely allocates scarcity.
Thank you for this insight!