Logical Fallacies and Income Equality

[flwyd]

I started reading Paul Graham when he wrote A Plan for Spam, and I wrote a masters' thesis examining several variants on Bayesian spam filtering. He generally writes insightful articles about creating tech startups, in large part because he's a domain expert on startup companies.

Graham's latest essay, on income equality is, however, mostly

Comments

[dr_tectonic]

Ugh.

I've been reading Paul Graham for ages and generally find what he has to say interesting, but it seems pretty clear that he's always had a good financial safety net and has intense blind spots about how much privilege that affords him. He pushes the idea that startups are for everybody because at worst you come out of it with great experience, but dude. At no point in my life could I have done that without risking catastrophic consequences had I been unable to get a steady job within, like, a week of the startup going under.

I am reasonably well-convinced that wealth distribution is innately Pareto because of all the feedback loops that exist in economic systems. Left alone, it will always move towards a higher Gini coefficient. Some level of inequality will always be with us (at least until and unless we manage to develop a post-scarcity economy). But I think you're on to something with that forest fire analogy; that's a really insightful mental model for thinking about our options for dealing with the issue. Well-said!