I don’t think it’s inherently bad. It’s fine that many things in life follow a power-law distribution, but this inequality shouldn’t feed into itself. If you’ve ever played Monopoly you know that it’s so unsustainable that even the winner won’t want to continue.
But I strongly disagree that rich people provide value. Windows is not a good operation system, and the competition they prevented would have made for a better world. Most of what made Bill Gates rich was essentially stolen as well. It wasn’t just that you picked a bad example, most rich people are not the original creators of value. If it were people like Alan Turing and Neumann who became billionares, then I’d agree with you, but it’s actually companies like King (they made a clone of an old flash game called Bejeweled and made billions). Nikola Tesla died penniless and in debt.
You assume that more popular things are more valuable, but is that really the case? Most of what I enjoy is obscure, and most of what I dislike is common. You could counter that with “While gold is worth more than iron, it would hurt us more if all iron disappeared than if all gold did”. So if value = quality * quantity, then yes, all the most popular things are the most valuable, but should we really define value in this way?
A poor product which is well marketed often does better than a good product which is never marketed, so reach is rewarded more than quality. And the things which made us rich are often harmful to others (which is why money is considered the root of all evil). Chances are that if you are a good hacker, or good at finding loopholes in laws and such, then you’re also good at making money. There’s a Youtuber called The Spiffing Brit who breaks video games with exploits, but he does the same to the Steam market and the same to the Youtube algorithm, and this is because it’s the one and same ability. If we assume that richer people simple added more value to the world, then we can conclude that scammers are good for society and that people like Tesla were a waste of oxygen, but that conclusion is the opposite of the truth. Ideally, merit = reward, but we’re so far away from the ideal that the two hardly correlate (in my opinion).
I don’t think it’s inherently bad. It’s fine that many things in life follow a power-law distribution, but this inequality shouldn’t feed into itself. If you’ve ever played Monopoly you know that it’s so unsustainable that even the winner won’t want to continue.
But I strongly disagree that rich people provide value. Windows is not a good operation system, and the competition they prevented would have made for a better world. Most of what made Bill Gates rich was essentially stolen as well. It wasn’t just that you picked a bad example, most rich people are not the original creators of value. If it were people like Alan Turing and Neumann who became billionares, then I’d agree with you, but it’s actually companies like King (they made a clone of an old flash game called Bejeweled and made billions). Nikola Tesla died penniless and in debt.
You assume that more popular things are more valuable, but is that really the case? Most of what I enjoy is obscure, and most of what I dislike is common. You could counter that with “While gold is worth more than iron, it would hurt us more if all iron disappeared than if all gold did”. So if value = quality * quantity, then yes, all the most popular things are the most valuable, but should we really define value in this way?
A poor product which is well marketed often does better than a good product which is never marketed, so reach is rewarded more than quality. And the things which made us rich are often harmful to others (which is why money is considered the root of all evil). Chances are that if you are a good hacker, or good at finding loopholes in laws and such, then you’re also good at making money. There’s a Youtuber called The Spiffing Brit who breaks video games with exploits, but he does the same to the Steam market and the same to the Youtube algorithm, and this is because it’s the one and same ability. If we assume that richer people simple added more value to the world, then we can conclude that scammers are good for society and that people like Tesla were a waste of oxygen, but that conclusion is the opposite of the truth. Ideally, merit = reward, but we’re so far away from the ideal that the two hardly correlate (in my opinion).