"The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury."
… [for] thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies.
What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!
The seed of all reform and revolution is planted simply by sitting and thinking about how fucking asinine this system is. Really, we all have to be peasants working in fields so the king can live in a castle? That’s the reason? We have to spend our days in coal mines so the CEO can have a grand apartment? We have to spend all day getting repetitive motion injuries in a warehouse so Jeff Bezos can buy a yacht so big that he asked for a historic bridge to be dismantled in order to sail it through? All of this sweat and toil and misery is arranged in service of that? What the fuck?
The “operational benefits” of technology — better drugs, an “easlier way to order toothpaste,” electric cars — are side-effects of the main task of making the super-rich even richer, Nolan says.
Capping the accumulation of personal wealth could go a long way to solving societal problems, Nolan argues. Maybe the cap is $1 billion, maybe higher, maybe lower, maybe a sliding scale based on the total wealth of the entire world. The main point is not the number; the main point is having a cap.