Freedom

There is a tipping point beyond which one’s wealth increases on its own. Given enough time and/or enough wealth, the pot grows—all by itself—beyond what anyone could ever need.

This tipping point is the dividing line between the wealthy and everyone else.

It’s very hard to reach the tipping point by yourself. It takes either extraordinary effort, good timing, and luck to make enough money or an extraordinary amount of self restraint to keep one’s spending below one’s income for long enough to get there.

But, if wealth is passed from one generation to the next for long enough, scions of a wealthy family find themselves past the tipping point without ever lifting a finger. Once wealth is captured in this way, it self-perpetuates.

All things being equal, I would like to see inherited wealth abolished. Whatever wealth you have accumulated at the time of your death should be deposited in a fund that serves as an endowment for a universal basic income. 

This would go a long way towards leveling the playing field. This would ensure that the wealthy were those who created that wealth. 

There has been a big fuss today about the eight or so richest people in the world owning as much wealth as the bottom 2.5 billion.

Many of those people created that wealth on their own (minus their social advantages): Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are among them.

Hats off to them. Each of those people has created a great deal of value, essentially from scratch (again, they each had social and historical advantages, but those advantages reduce to nothing compared to the scale of their achievements). They deserve the money they made and the power and glory that goes with it. 

But, their children do not.

Imagine a world in which, at the end of their lives–after they have enjoyed their wealth and, hopefully, put it to good use–the fortunes of everyone went into the aforementioned fund.

That fund would, in a generation, be an endowment capable of providing nearly everyone on earth a stipend large enough to cover basic needs. A few generations later, the fund could provide a stipend large enough to provide every person on earth with enough income to live a decent, American middle-class style life.

A few generations more and every person on earth would have more income than they would know what to do with.

But, wait! I hear the chorus cry: that would create a world of idle fools. There would be no incentive to work!

Is that really true? In a world where everyone has what they need, would everyone really do nothing? Would the system collapse under its own weight?

I think not.

The human condition is to strive. The same incentives to create great things that drove the aforementioned billionaires would still apply. They might not have at their disposal a sea of wage slaves, but they would still be challenged to make great things–and they would figure out how to motivate the people they need to their cause (as they already do). They would also figure out how to fill in the gaps with machines–as, in fact, they already do.

There are plenty of people in the world with great dreams and the intelligence and fortitude to realize them. The great projects would commence apace. 

What of the rest of humanity? The rest of humanity would indulge itself in whatever fascinated them. Many–perhaps most–would make nothing of their lives beyond living them. What of it? Before civilization, that was the state of all people. We’d just be doing it without being chained to a Malthusian cycle.

Think of the millions of potential world-changers whose lives have been constrained or destroyed by circumstance. The world I’m asking you to imagine frees them from their chains. Since every person would have an equal shot at greatness, every potentially great person would have the means, at least, to try. Nearly none of them will achieve it, luck being what it is, but how many more Newtons and Einsteins would we see?

I predict legions, free at last.