Publicity is good I think. We want the public to understand that very rich people pay less taxes than the average person. I don't think this is commonly understood, because people get caught up on income statistics, which are an incomplete picture of the accumulation of money.
We don't know how sentient LLMs are. Nobody understands how they work. There's nothing concrete we can point to that guarantees LLMs don't start
"acting on their own".
LLMs are software programs. Waste no more time considering than an LLM is conscious than you would considering that a running copy of Microsoft Word is conscious.
There's a great article by author Ted Chiang discussing this in depth [1].
Well no, if rich people just consumed then the money would flow back into the economy via their consumption. This would generate economic growth. Whether that growth is greater or lesser than their capital investments would presumably be hard to measure. But to assume growth resultant from investments will always exceed growth from consumption requires evidence.
Now an even better outcome would be that rich people didn't get rich in the first place. This would mean lower inequality, which in the data correlates with higher growth. This is demonstrated convincingly in Piketty's work.
Overall, if youw ant to maximize growth for the poor (or really, growth for all of society at an equal pace, say), then you would want to dramatically raise taxes on rich people and eliminate the class entirely (IE, no more rich people). That would massively stimulate growth and of course skyrocket the wealth of currently poor people.
It's a bit sad that the solution is so simple and has no downsides.
> For instance, if you founded a startup that then raised a few million dollars, at a valuation that values your shares at $1M, should your income be treated as $1M for that year, even if it didn't even hit your bank account and can't even spend it?
Yes, though it requires some intelligent accounting. For instance, the ability for tax payers to defer certain obligations. However, the principle of "all income should be treated equal" is a necessary prerequisite to having a fair society. As it currently stands, the richest people don't pay much tax at all. Effective taxes on the billionaire class are like 8%-24%, less to way way less than the median tax payer.
IMO it's helpful to think this through to the post-wealth-tax equilibrium. In such a world, financial services will adapt and develop mechanisms for handling these seemingly tricky tax situations. IMO focusing on the minutia of how this is going to work is not useful in evaluating the macro effects of the policy.
> Does (or how much does) it matter if any specific percentile group is getting disproportionally richer, given all (or a vast majority of) groups are?
Yes it matters very significantly. Rising income/wealth inequality causes all sorts of social problems. It's corrosive to society. This has been studied pretty significantly. The kicker is that it even slows economic growth! So all the classic libertarian arguments about incentives to work and marginal utility of labor turn out to just.. not be supported by the data at all.
Which means there are no good reasons to promote income inequality whatsoever (that are supported by data). It persists purely for cultural reasons and presumably very effective propaganda.
> It's that we can never allow this technology to advance outside of trusted labs.
Impossible. In 10 years you'll be able to train today's models for ~$10M from Moore's law and training innovation. In 20 years it'll be ~$200k. The genie won't go back in the bottle.
100%. American capitalism is broken. So far that illness has given us Trump. So bad, but apparently not a catastrophe (yet). I wonder what comes next (assuming we don't fix it)..
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