If you're worried about the rich getting things unfairly, focus on tax policy and closing all the thousands of loopholes. That's a lifetime's work.

It also applies to countries. Look at the increasing resources that go to people who produce little or nothing of value to others eg lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, financial engineers, LBO operators etc. Not to mention many of the people on welfare.

It's impossible to separate people becoming richer from advancements in technology. We didn't grow GDP by 77 times, because we work 77 times harder.

Improvements in underlying technology are what help us create more wealth. The problem is that the new wealth being created and benefits of that new technology is being shared so proportionally.

The heart of what's going on (good or bad; I tend to think it's bad for society in general) does not lie on the surface, instead it's rooted on the flawed notion that profits to appease shareholders should be maximised and indeed prioritized over corporate goals that benefit society in general.

Increased automation and productivity are a good thing. They have the potential for increased standards of living for all. Unfortunately, the profits from increased productivity are not being redistributed/recycled into higher wages and a more educated workforce, they are instead being hoarded at the top by shareholders accumulating wealth.

That's certainly the prerogative of shareholders, but it's a foolish shortsighted bet. This faulty thinking is depleting a large consumer base because an increasing number of people have less to spend on taxes, and also products/services that these same companies sell. So, they're basically stealing from the future to eat heartily now. The future of our children, as a result will have a less educated and poorer populous, resulting in more crime, litter/pollution, and likely even a social atmosphere ripe for violent revolution thanks to the increasingly segregated wealth gap. It is what it is, and you can bet your sweet bippy that I'm not selling the stock I've accumulated for the good of the masses in the long term. However, I don't think it needs to end poorly.

If you want to dig into this deeper, I highly recommend "WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us," by Tim O'Reilly.(1)

It explains the philosophical shift that needs to occur to repair our societal trajectory, not just for the sake of the 99%, but also the 1% (and even the 0.01% where the worlds wealth reserve is truly accumulating).

1.) https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062565716/wtf/

1) technology development has tended to hugely improve society-wide productivity and be a general (though not unmitigated) good.

2) technology development has been absolutely shit for many individuals as their careers disappear.

people should be way more worried about good national governance and safety nets to deal with the terrible consequences of 2 while we reap the benefits of 1.

> Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages.

workers are capturing less and less of that, especially over the last twenty years.

Also, Paul Graham's premise, I'm sorry to say, is sensationalized (by invoking concepts like "inequality" and "startups") but wrong. The premise is, basically, "inequality has bad CAUSES, but startups and technology are never one of them."

Only at the end does he hint at what I believe to be the more accurate analysis: AUTOMATION and OUTSOURCING lowers demand for expensive human labor, therefore reducing one of the main ways that money trickles down to the middle and lower class. The better and more widespread the technology, the more I can

1) Outsource jobs to regions with a lower cost of living, leading to two losses of trickle-down:

1a) local workers don't get the job, and the money goes to someone in another country

1b) either way my company writes the expenses off its taxable income, but my country doesn't get the tax $$ from the worker's income to spend on social programs, safety nets etc.

This by itself is fine, unless you're a nationalist, because it helps reduce poverty where people are poorer, which is outside your country. However, technology also enables:

2) AUTOMATION, which means I now reduce the amount of HUMAN workers, and once again it has two aspects:

2a) Now, the demand for human labor drops, and since the supply of workers remains the same, their average wages drop.

2b) The worst one: monopolies with server farms, contracts of adhesion, and all the power. Like Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, etc. extracting rents from users and providers, until open source disrupts them.

By commoditizing the providers and workers, they get squeezed. See Amazon's dealings with wage slaves, and its tactics with publishers (middlemen which it eliminates). But those same workers are also supposed to be spending money back into the economy on things they need.

It takes time to invent new industries and educate everyone, there is no guarantee that will happen forever, and there is no guarantee that demand shocks for labor won't be severe. So, there should probably be unconditional basic income, negative tax or some other scheme for people to KEEP BEING ABLE TO AFFORD THE BASICS even if they face no prospects of making money, which a growing unemployed class will.

On the bright side, automation will help wean countries from their dependence on an ever-growing population to fund social security schemes. Endless population growth is unsustainable, and countries are currently worried about birth rates mainly because of that. So in a global sense, the solution is: tax the gains from automation, redistribute the proceeds, use condoms.

in any case, the last 50 years have been a slow but relentless imbalancing of the playing field against labor and in favor of capital, rather than a relentless march toward perfect productivity.

technology certainly has aided and abetted this shift, by helping to speed up the world beyond the comprehensive agility of humans. and it has done so largely for wielders of capital, of financiers and bankers and investors and lawyers and consultants and executives, so that information can be hoarded and honed and aimed precisely. knowledge is power indeed.

as our greed led us to hoard money, and as capital concentrated, it wasn't enough to be well off. some of us really had an urge to be richer than our neighbors and out-compete them. our sense of self depended on it. we needed to influence the political system and even exert influence on foreign nations so that incremental advantages could be won over time. economists advocated unmitigated globalism and reagan cut taxes for the wealthy so they could "create jobs" and the benefits could "trickle down".

instead, money flowed to things like real estate, a relatively greenfield investment opportunity, where the mortgage interest deduction, combined with bailed out government guarantors (freddie and fannie) and tax shelters like 1031 exchanges, allowed speculators to make enormous sums on the spread between their cost of capital and the inflated interest rates of the times. and they could easily sell off the loans, recover their capital, and do it all over again in a matter of months, while the lone home owner often needed to wait years to realize gains (not that i'm necessarily advocating homes be investment vehicles).

money flowed to education, where regulations placed a choke hold on borrowers, basically giving lenders a risk-free investment backed again by government guarantees and the force of government to compel students to pay (bailouts are not for students of course).

executives and their investors, not to be outplayed, exploited tax shields to create private equity opportunities by essentially buying companies on loan, dressing them up, and flipping them. executives simultaneously complained about the lack of talent and the inability to compete with third-world labor, to get further concessions like a cut in the capital gains tax and tax holidays on foreign earnings that went straight past labor and into their piggy banks.

politicians on both sides of the aisle got fat on the largess all these regulatory advantages bestowed to them. the supreme court further obliged with citizen's united, and have so far allowed egregious gerrymandering.

we bailed out the banking industry not once, but twice, as well as the auto industry. we subsidize oil & gas and transportation, and give huge unaccounted-for sums to the military-industrial complex. all this money seems to somehow end up benefitting capital much more than labor. the US spends 3-4 times on infrastructure projects than most other countries; the same with education and healthcare. all with no perceivable societal benefit. we seem to be in collective love with giving tax-payer money to capital holders for free.

and so it goes. but that's not even the tip of the iceberg, that's a few droplets of water melting down off the side. the ground is swelling with anger over the continued blind eye of government and capital at all of this unfairness. we are social animals, and deep down, we expect that the group will care for each other, treat each other fairly, even protect each other, but greed has overwhelmed us. and technology-driven efficiency gains are only incidental to all this.

It isn't actually a criticism of technology/automation!

In healthier countries, like the Nordics, they've organized their society so that automation, resource extraction, and really all success in business benefits their society as a whole rather than concentrating the wealth into the hands of the elite.

Having written that, I feel like I'm picking a nit, because what you said is true in the USA and I don't see it changing in my lifetime.

and gubmint R&D

What bothers me about this sort of discussion, though, is the assumption that we need to work. I want technology to do my job for me, so I can focus on fun stuff. But for that to work, we should change our economic system so we don't need to work, or at least not as much.

What technology has really done, is not so much take away people's jobs, but make capital investment an increasingly large part of productivity, leading all the profits of this increased productivity to end up with the small elite that controls the capital. Look at how much wealth inequality has grown over the past 100 years, particularly in the US.

Keynes predicted in the 1930s that due to increased productivity, we'd all have to work a lot less than we're currently doing. He's wrong because the benefits of our increased productivity are not distributed equally.

In short: we need a basic income. Or something else to ensure that everybody benefits from this.

Workers merely made tools to make their own work processes more efficient which was taken by many corporations and applied across the workforce without the payment of proportional savings to the people who invented it.

The mass adoption of technology funds the future research process thus the profit is diverted from the masses directly to benefit and maintain competitive advantage.

The time saved due to technology never did reduce working hours or increase leisure time of the workforce.

Thus more benefits go up rather than come down.

Less inequality will create opportunities for better education for millions if not billions of humans. That will improve technology in ways that just producing more stuff will not.

I do not think that to tie increased consumption with better technology is true. Most of what we produce is low tech stuff like fast fashion. I will argue that producing less and having more time for leisure will also increase scientific output.

So, economic growth is not the same that technological advance. And that is one of the points of the "lefty Europeans": economy measurements are not tied to human advancement and well being but just money.