Because inequality beyond a certain excess makes a system unstable, and given the chance, even wealthy people would rather be wealthy in a stable world than an unstable world.
There is not only one power distribution, there is a whole set of them.
Can you refer to any evidence that inequality makes systems unstable? There is no reason that I can think of for that. OnlyFans looks pretty stable, in fact. And It doesn't make sense that a political system gets unstable when some people get wealthy. Political systems fall apart when large numbers of people can't afford food (an issue which has nothing to do with equality).
Inequality much more extreme than that was quite stable. Antoinette was only wealthy compared to people in the 1700s. She was basically an equal to the peasants wealth-wise compared to the inequality we've seen since after the industrial revolution.
We've probably got more poor people today than were alive then in absolute numbers, and our wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy. And the situation is much more stable.
Except that if food is plentiful, but not everyone has equal access to food, then it has everything to do with equality.
Actually, many wars and rebellions in history have been due to some kind of inequality, whether perceived or real, when individuals or groups were motivated to fight to seek redress. And wars are very much unstable.
I don't think it's stark. That's how the entertainment business naturally works. Footballers, youtubers, actors, etc...
Onlyfans has a very low barrier to entry and being better than a 100 other people isn't all that hard, assuming you have the body for it and the marketing chops.
I don't understand why you'd want a company doing the government's job, that's what taxes are for.
>There's nothing wrong with income inequality. People are just envious.
It isn't envy some feel when they can't afford medical care for themselves and those they care about. This applies to a lot of things in additional to medical care.
If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive for a stable democracy.
> It isn't envy some feel when they can't afford medical care for themselves and those they care about. This applies to a lot of things in additional to medical care.
When people say “inequality isn’t a problem” they mean it isn’t a problem on its own, assuming living standards are decent for most. Even Friedman and Hayek were for UBI and safety nets respectively. Healthcare, housing and education are too expensive today, even the extreme libertarians don’t deny this.
>If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive for a stable democracy.
This is unfounded. The influence of the wealthy on politics is insignificant relative to public opinion. David Shor has demonstrated that big donors are to the economic left of their party bases for both R and D. Trump and Bloomberg presidential campaigns are vivid illustrations of the limits of money in politics.
They’re forcing Musk to go through a deal he signed but doesn’t want now. Billionaires parted with half of their net worths in their divorce settlements. Neither of these would have happened in any other society in the world at any point in history.(My relatives from Asia were baffled, they asked me why these guys don’t simply bribe the judges, find legal loopholes or even use the threat of force to silence their (ex)wives.)
The wealthy in America today inherited their wealth to a lesser extent than in Europe, and again also relative to the wealthy in any society in history.
Citation actually not required because the result is trivial.
First, I’m not claiming that the disequilibrium point is anywhere specific, just that it exists.
Second, all you need to do to understand this is to consider the most extreme scenario: if the king has literally all the wealth in every form (all property, all money, all food, etc), and everyone else have literally nothing, how stable do you think the system is?
There are proven instances where systems such as this can remain stable. Slavery is one. There are tons and tons of other systems throughout human history where massive inequality remains stable.
In fact inequality is the bedrock of civilization according to our current theories of anthropology.
How do self interested parties gather together to fund great infrastructure projects and technology required for the progress of civilization? People on their own are self interested do not assist others outside of family or tribal units.
What causes people to organize is that there must be a small group of wealthy individuals who pays a Large group of individuals who lack wealth to work together. This isn't something I'm making up. This is the basis for the formation of civilization according to anthropology and there there are loads and loads of research and papers that support this theory so it is currently the best of what we know.
So it is not at all clear that the result is trivial. your conclusion is not at all scientific or logical you're just going off your intuition which is highly flawed.
Isn't a representative government the opposite? When a large number of people work together to decide to funs or accomplish some goal, voting and taxes
No it's not. Any form of government is an attempt at centralization of resources and decisions. It is an attempt to move closer to an extreme system of singular decisions with a single point of resources. You do tend to see these concentrated centralized structures within government. Leaders, central banks, executive branch, centralized resources.... etc. Although It's not fully centralized, the creation of government from no government is essentially movement in the direction of centralization. So in other words:
The point of government IS centralization. The US government is sort of an attempt at centralization with checks and balances. An attempt to make sure that the centralization doesn't become too powerful. A movement towards the extreme but not all the way.
So the liberal western form is not an exercise in working together towards some mutual goal. Rather it is in satisfying some baseline level of acceptance of how society works, property rights, etc. Power comes from the people, not by divine mandate or military might.
Right, but that was my point. Its a step closer to people coming together to accomplish or fund some goal instead of just some rich guy saying "I have money, I'm paying you all to so this now"
It doesn't have to be a rich guy. But some form of centralized rich power. Like a corporation for example. But even complex structures like this involve a cluster of individuals who own the corporation or have seats of power within the structure. This small population of people controls wealth and resources and deploys it accordingly.
In the beginning though, before complex structures like corporations formed, civilization began with rich guys telling poor guys what to do.
The problem with income inequality is that the people at the top are actively stealing money from everyone else. Elon isn't out there building rockets. He just gets the rockets that other people made automatically and for free. This is the case with literally every billionaire. So, yeah, I'm envious. I'd like my stuff back.
That's only the case if you are a believer of socialism/communism, ie the labor theory of value. If not, then if one were a capitalist, they would say that systematically derisking the idea of reusable rockets is where Musk gets his billions from. If his workers are content with their compensation then that is what they agreed to.
If you gave his workers a choice between splitting the company equally with Elon and letting him have all or most of it, they would all choose to have the benefits of ownership. You can't say that someone "agreed" to something if they took the only available path.
That's post facto. What about when someone is first starting a company that could fail at any time, would workers have equally put money in and taken the risk of ownership too? People only want the rewards once they see how rich someone's company was but not when they might have to potentially lose their money if they had to invest their time and money in the beginning.
Pretty much every billionaire in existence has, at some point, taken millions of investment dollars from someone else. This is ultimately where the vast majority of their business value comes from. Compare to value generated by individuals (like book authors) which can sometimes generate millions of dollars.
That kind of individual value is more inline with the value that an individual with good judgment might be bringing on their own as an owner of an early startup who is willing to take some risks.
Basically, the risk itself isn't worth anything; paired with good judgment, the risk and the good judgment are both worth something. Really, that worth has to do with how common that good judgment is. But, most billionaires are idiots (at least at being billionaires) and their judgment tends to benefit them and nobody else. So, from a role perspective they bring negative value to a company in addition to stealing everyone's productive efforts.
You can look at how companies perform when a billionaire owner hands it off to a non-billionaire CEO. There's no sudden 20,000x value multiplier that's lost. Their role in that situation is essentially to just be privileged idiots and it's a process that's fully automatic after a certain point.
I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense).
I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.
No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more.
Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
> Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades.
There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist.
Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?)
In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on.
It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
Leveraging other people’s work doesn’t invalidate your own work…
Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome?
If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions?
Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.
It is always the case. Another fallacy that can only be the result of your flawed intuition.
All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case."
Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case.
The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.
Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
You did trigger me. Read your first reply to me. Your comment really pissed me off, it was intentionally rude. "New flash"
Either way it got me curious and I started reading your other comments and I realized you're just not a very nice person and highly mistaken about a lot of things. You're not very logical or scientific or academically inclined. So I just wanted to help you out and teach you some stuff that's all.
Just responded to a couple comments you made. Just trying to be informative. :)
It was the intention. You are lying to my face. The format: "News Flash: Statement of something obvious." is very rude. Implying I don't know the obvious thing.
I hold no grudges but your previous statement is a total lie. Don't pretend it wasn't intentional.
who says that the payout distribution has to follow the power law? And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
>who says that the payout distribution has to follow the power law?
The payout distribution is proportional to the number of subscribers, which follows a power law.
>And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
How is taking a larger relative cut from the content creators bringing in the most traffic a good (much less optimal) business decision?
are you really going to want to start an account on that site? Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
>are you really going to want to start an account on that site?
If I thought it would benefit me and was worth my time, then yes? Is the implication one shouldn't try to earn extra income because someone else earns more?
>Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
That's somewhat of an ad hominem. Anyways I'm all ears if you have a superior evidence-based economic model, instead of selling utopia.
Do you have sources or evidence that this linear payout system can work? Any businesses, platforms, or countries that have successfully used this type of model?
Nope. But I'm also not the one claiming a new model I've invented will work and should replace the current system. Your claim would be more convincing if you could point to an existing business or platform that uses the linear payout successfully.
Okay, but that's in the context of the state which can use its monopoly on violence to enforce such a redistribution. How might that work in private organizations? If you think governments should get involved, what do you think of the side effects? Such redistribution is effectively a tax on the top performers and a subsidy for the bottom performers. A popular saying is that "you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax". Why should we encourage more people into selling intimate pictures of themselves? Is that a policy that governments should really be pushing? You could argue onlyfan producers have some duty to their community or whatever, but they already pay income taxes. Why must they face additional redistribution compared to lawyers or programmers?
If every single user wants to be a soulless robot (pure capitalism), then yes. However if the userbase understands that larger accounts will be subject to larger fees, in order to support smaller accounts, then I would like to think at least some users would support that. Not everything in life has to be decided on a purely selfish basis.
So OnlyFans should pay people to post nudes ? (Rather than providing a place to post pictures and charge other people for them, in case you missed it)
I see this same argument made about Tinder, from guys who can't get laid.
You realize it's just a platform don't you ? Those are real human beings on the other side of that screen. OnlyFans can't choose for the humans on the platform.
