I have tried out various attitudes to billionaires over the years.
In my early twenties, as I was coming to grips with the fact that the mass of people spent a third of their lives in activities (“working”) that they don’t really want to do, I was aware that somewhere there were rich people with large amounts of money. I seem to remember that just taking their money did not cross my mind, but I thought instead of what we would now call printing money and handing it out to people, so that their choices would not be dominated by economics of survival. This would have been combined with a belief that there must be a way to organize society so that necessary things still get done, but not because someone was forced to do it.
In my early thirties, I suppose I had developed a more pragmatic attitude towards the existence of a society organized around working for money, a more nuanced attitude towards the psychology of work (e.g. that careers, or just earning money, can be psychologically fulfilling as well as actually constructive in their output), and so on, and so while I was still a transhumanist who believed in the liberation of humanity from survival-work as well as from death, it made sense to have opinions about how society should be organized under pre-singularity conditions; and I saw the logic of libertarian capitalism: people should be allowed to keep what they have earned, without arbitrary limits on how much.
However, some time after that, I noticed the idea (somewhere among Curtis Yarvin’s long essays) that property rights ultimately rely on the state to defend them, and so a philosophy which thinks solely in interpersonal terms (one citizen shouldn’t take from another), is not thinking deeply enough. If you have a state, there is a Leviathan in your society which you are relying upon in various ways, and which also in principle has very open-ended powers to reshape human affairs. A political philosophy needs to address the nature of the state and not just individual wealth, and without convincing me of any particular setup as the right one, it opened my mind to the idea that something other than 100% rights to the fruits of your labor might actually make sense.
The broader consequence of reading Yarvin, who is best known as a critic or even opponent of democracy, was not that I became an anti-democrat, but that I could tolerate societies that aren’t organized around democracy. I saw that a variety of cultures of power are possible, and that a non-democracy or limited democracy can still have its own ways of upholding rights, delivering justice, dealing with bad rulers, and so forth. This proved timely when the unipolar world order was breaking down in the mid-2010s and the universalization of western democratic forms began to look unlikely.
Returning to the BQ (the Billionaire Question), I remember deciding that one of the many differences between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, is that in Russia and China, the state dominates the billionaires, whereas in America, so it seemed to me, the billionaires dominate the state. And at that time, the post-2015 right-wing populism, perhaps even in tactical alliance with left-wing populism, seemed like a way that the state might come to dominate billionaires within the West as well.
I thought this was probably a good thing, but there was one major issue that I still had: the existence of immense private wealth means that wealthy individuals can just do things that organized society will never get around to doing. Again, this mattered to me because of my transhumanism. I have seen the human race spend decades wasting the existential opportunity implied by the potentials of technology. But now we have technology billionaires, they can personally just start a space program or fund research into radical longevity. I wondered if that would still happen, if the anti-billionaire forces prevailed.
What are my attitudes now? Billionaire power seems to be a fact of life that has to be understood, if you want to navigate these final moments before superintelligent AI. I spend much more time trying to understand, thinking descriptively, than I do thinking normatively. Social structure is highly contingent, it could have been very different, but this is what we have.
I do think it’s a bit of a joke to think of billionaires as equal fellow citizens of our democracies, who are just playing the game of wealth accumulation as private citizens. Extreme wealth is extremely political, and the super-rich are oligarchs who rule from behind the scenes. The law, the political system, are just another domain in which they seek to advance their interests, like the markets and the media space. Trump’s presidency is a change within the oligarchic “system”, because a low-level billionaire managed to grab direct and visible control of the political apparatus, rather than being a behind-the-scenes donor. It’s not quite clear where that leads. Also, I think my analysis is probably a little lacking in understanding of corporate power, as a phenomenon distinct from personal billionaire power. But the rise of tech billionaires at the level of Gates, Bezos, and Musk means that corporate power itself is evolving to be more personal, anyway.
Since it is intellectually useful to be able to visualize a radical alternative, I’ll point out that the fate of Jeffrey Epstein shows you one path to a society truly without billionaires. (California’s 5% tax would just be an extra cost of doing business, it does not even subordinate the oligarchs to the state, let alone get rid of them.) As we know, Epstein was jailed, and enormous portions of his personal dealings have been made visible to the public. This happened because his non-economic activities were particularly egregious.
But if there was a political regime which decided to make just being a billionaire illegal, one can easily imagine the same thing happening to all of them, or to those who refused to give up their wealth to the new system. Maybe they would be under house arrest rather than in jail, but otherwise a similar story—their assets under new management, and their paper trail and digital communications hung out for public view. I doubt it will happen (maybe it could happen in a small country, or in a big country where billionaires are already politically subordinate), but that’s what it could look like.
I have tried out various attitudes to billionaires over the years.
In my early twenties, as I was coming to grips with the fact that the mass of people spent a third of their lives in activities (“working”) that they don’t really want to do, I was aware that somewhere there were rich people with large amounts of money. I seem to remember that just taking their money did not cross my mind, but I thought instead of what we would now call printing money and handing it out to people, so that their choices would not be dominated by economics of survival. This would have been combined with a belief that there must be a way to organize society so that necessary things still get done, but not because someone was forced to do it.
In my early thirties, I suppose I had developed a more pragmatic attitude towards the existence of a society organized around working for money, a more nuanced attitude towards the psychology of work (e.g. that careers, or just earning money, can be psychologically fulfilling as well as actually constructive in their output), and so on, and so while I was still a transhumanist who believed in the liberation of humanity from survival-work as well as from death, it made sense to have opinions about how society should be organized under pre-singularity conditions; and I saw the logic of libertarian capitalism: people should be allowed to keep what they have earned, without arbitrary limits on how much.
However, some time after that, I noticed the idea (somewhere among Curtis Yarvin’s long essays) that property rights ultimately rely on the state to defend them, and so a philosophy which thinks solely in interpersonal terms (one citizen shouldn’t take from another), is not thinking deeply enough. If you have a state, there is a Leviathan in your society which you are relying upon in various ways, and which also in principle has very open-ended powers to reshape human affairs. A political philosophy needs to address the nature of the state and not just individual wealth, and without convincing me of any particular setup as the right one, it opened my mind to the idea that something other than 100% rights to the fruits of your labor might actually make sense.
The broader consequence of reading Yarvin, who is best known as a critic or even opponent of democracy, was not that I became an anti-democrat, but that I could tolerate societies that aren’t organized around democracy. I saw that a variety of cultures of power are possible, and that a non-democracy or limited democracy can still have its own ways of upholding rights, delivering justice, dealing with bad rulers, and so forth. This proved timely when the unipolar world order was breaking down in the mid-2010s and the universalization of western democratic forms began to look unlikely.
Returning to the BQ (the Billionaire Question), I remember deciding that one of the many differences between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, is that in Russia and China, the state dominates the billionaires, whereas in America, so it seemed to me, the billionaires dominate the state. And at that time, the post-2015 right-wing populism, perhaps even in tactical alliance with left-wing populism, seemed like a way that the state might come to dominate billionaires within the West as well.
I thought this was probably a good thing, but there was one major issue that I still had: the existence of immense private wealth means that wealthy individuals can just do things that organized society will never get around to doing. Again, this mattered to me because of my transhumanism. I have seen the human race spend decades wasting the existential opportunity implied by the potentials of technology. But now we have technology billionaires, they can personally just start a space program or fund research into radical longevity. I wondered if that would still happen, if the anti-billionaire forces prevailed.
What are my attitudes now? Billionaire power seems to be a fact of life that has to be understood, if you want to navigate these final moments before superintelligent AI. I spend much more time trying to understand, thinking descriptively, than I do thinking normatively. Social structure is highly contingent, it could have been very different, but this is what we have.
I do think it’s a bit of a joke to think of billionaires as equal fellow citizens of our democracies, who are just playing the game of wealth accumulation as private citizens. Extreme wealth is extremely political, and the super-rich are oligarchs who rule from behind the scenes. The law, the political system, are just another domain in which they seek to advance their interests, like the markets and the media space. Trump’s presidency is a change within the oligarchic “system”, because a low-level billionaire managed to grab direct and visible control of the political apparatus, rather than being a behind-the-scenes donor. It’s not quite clear where that leads. Also, I think my analysis is probably a little lacking in understanding of corporate power, as a phenomenon distinct from personal billionaire power. But the rise of tech billionaires at the level of Gates, Bezos, and Musk means that corporate power itself is evolving to be more personal, anyway.
Since it is intellectually useful to be able to visualize a radical alternative, I’ll point out that the fate of Jeffrey Epstein shows you one path to a society truly without billionaires. (California’s 5% tax would just be an extra cost of doing business, it does not even subordinate the oligarchs to the state, let alone get rid of them.) As we know, Epstein was jailed, and enormous portions of his personal dealings have been made visible to the public. This happened because his non-economic activities were particularly egregious.
But if there was a political regime which decided to make just being a billionaire illegal, one can easily imagine the same thing happening to all of them, or to those who refused to give up their wealth to the new system. Maybe they would be under house arrest rather than in jail, but otherwise a similar story—their assets under new management, and their paper trail and digital communications hung out for public view. I doubt it will happen (maybe it could happen in a small country, or in a big country where billionaires are already politically subordinate), but that’s what it could look like.