First LessWrong comment, but your fantastic post has had me thinking about mechanisms for a while!
Yesterday I saw a Super Bowl ad for Trump Accounts which are essentially a sovereign wealth fund-lite that gives newborns $1,000 in investment exposure. It’s treasury bonds, not yet tied to the S&P 500 (which is where I believe the winds are blowing), and the amount is trivial. But directionally it’s a surprisingly insightful step and what may be the first political experiment that reflects an acknowledgment of the depreciating value of labor relative to capital.
This also seems more likely to succeed than wealth taxes (which need a rebrand of sorts) or even UBI, at least partially because it captures the “think of the children” impulse and sidesteps the usual political failure modes around who should be the beneficiary and what demographic configurations they fall into. Everyone gets some growing stake in the economy (assuming withdrawals are locked until adulthood) without dependence on labor. Already, most standard life milestones like buying a house in an economically relevant city are next to impossible on wage income alone unless you have parental wealth transfers or equity compensation of some sort. And even setting aside ownership and only considering consumption, we need some mechanism for hedging against the medium-term externalities imposed directly by AI buildouts (power costs going up, DRAM and consumer hardware getting more expensive) that are already reconfiguring the economy.
First LessWrong comment, but your fantastic post has had me thinking about mechanisms for a while!
Yesterday I saw a Super Bowl ad for Trump Accounts which are essentially a sovereign wealth fund-lite that gives newborns $1,000 in investment exposure. It’s treasury bonds, not yet tied to the S&P 500 (which is where I believe the winds are blowing), and the amount is trivial. But directionally it’s a surprisingly insightful step and what may be the first political experiment that reflects an acknowledgment of the depreciating value of labor relative to capital.
This also seems more likely to succeed than wealth taxes (which need a rebrand of sorts) or even UBI, at least partially because it captures the “think of the children” impulse and sidesteps the usual political failure modes around who should be the beneficiary and what demographic configurations they fall into. Everyone gets some growing stake in the economy (assuming withdrawals are locked until adulthood) without dependence on labor. Already, most standard life milestones like buying a house in an economically relevant city are next to impossible on wage income alone unless you have parental wealth transfers or equity compensation of some sort. And even setting aside ownership and only considering consumption, we need some mechanism for hedging against the medium-term externalities imposed directly by AI buildouts (power costs going up, DRAM and consumer hardware getting more expensive) that are already reconfiguring the economy.