https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=72AyNEomzPk
One of Marx’s dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And that’s right, that’s true. Wealth and capital, income for that matter, but not only that. Whatever it is that you might like to have accumulates in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people. It’s a principle that was discovered by an economist named Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto. And he pointed out something that had been pointed out in the Gospels, by the way, thousands of years earlier, which was, to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. The rule being, once you start to succeed at something, the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly increases. So there’s an exponential function with regards to success. But there’s also an exponential function with regards to failure. So failure and success aren’t like this. They’re like this. Fail, fail, die. Succeed, succeed, succeed ridiculously. Like it’s this weird curve. And it’s funny because it doesn’t just characterize economics. It’s a really funded, looks like a really fundamental economic law. I was actually quite shocked when I first learned about this, which was only about 15 years ago, because I thought most things were normally distributed. It turns out that that’s not true. What people produce creatively isn’t normally distributed. A small proportion of people produce most of what’s of value. It doesn’t matter what it is. And you know this. It’s like, how many books does Stephen King sell? It’s like half the books, right? And then there’s the next guy after Stephen King, and no one even knows who he is. And he sells like one-tenth as many books as Stephen King. And then there’s author number 50, and out of thousands and thousands of offers. And he’s barely scraping by. And then there’s the bottom 99.9 percent. And they can’t make a living writing. And that’s how it is. And it’s the same with musicians. And it’s the same with athletes. You know, if you look at number of goals scored, for example, in hockey. I’m a Canadian, so I’ll use that. There’s a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players, even in something as amazing as the National Hockey League or any professional sports league. You know, you have to be one hell of an athlete to make it in a professional sports league. And still you get this tiny group of superstars who are way better at it than anyone else. You know, and so there’s this weird rule that as you get more, getting even more gets easier. And who knows why it is exactly? Partly it’s practice. And it characterizes all sorts of situations. Like it characterizes the size of planets. A small number of planets have almost all the mass. It characterizes stars the same way. It characterizes biomass in the Amazon jungle. It characterizes city size. A small percentage of cities have almost all the people. It’s like, what was that? And then you go back 10,000 years, you look at a Paleolithic grave site, and you see what people are buried with. And like there’s one guy, there’s two guys there, it’s covered with gold, right? The grave site is insanely rich. Everyone else has like a bone and it’s theirs. And that’s it, you know? And so you analyze Paleolithic grave sites, you see exactly the same preto distribution. A small number of people are buried with all the wealth. And almost everyone else has none. And so it’s this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to distribute themselves unequally. And you know this too, because you play games like Monopoly, right? You’ve all played Monopoly. What happens when you play Monopoly? You all start out equal, right? Exactly 100% equal. And you all have an equal chance of winning, because it’s basically a game of chance. Not entirely, because you can play stupidly. But you can only play so intelligently, because you’re at the mercy of the dice. And what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the hotels and all the houses. And just like takes you out. And yet you play and you don’t think, oh my god, you know, there’s something fundamentally unfair about that. Or maybe you play non-competitive Monopoly, where after every round you redistribute the money so everyone… Right, so there’s no fun in that. And so the problem with Karl Marx, as far as I’m concerned, is that he was nowhere pessimistic enough. It’s like, no, you can’t blame inequality on capitalism. In fact, capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality. Like there’s still plenty of inequality in capitalist societies, make no mistake about that. But you can make some claim, although it’s a tricky one, that some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years. It depends on how you measure it, because it’s complicated. Because, you know, even poor people now have access to, well, let’s say iPhones, which have more computational power than the entire system that put the Apollo 11 on the moon, which is, you know, for $600, which isn’t a bad bargain. So it’s not that easy. It’s not that easy to do those economic calculations. But one of the things you can say about capitalism and about private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they own, is that it’s pretty damn good at generating wealth. And the wealth isn’t equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination, but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom. And that’s why we’re seeing, well, a relative dearth of tremendous deprivation. And you might say, well, we want to squeeze out that last bit of inequality. And it’s like, well, maybe we do. And maybe we don’t. It’s not so obvious, first of all, because even if we did want to, we don’t know how. And we certainly do know that if there are some ways that if we go about it, then things really go to hell in a handbasket really fast. And everyone’s ends up equal because they’re all starving and dead. You end up in a situation like Venezuela, not that they’re all starving and dead, but the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year. And that wasn’t from voluntary diet. Right. And that’s a very rich country. And so we do know that there are ways of ameliorating inequality that just don’t work. And so it’s a dangerous thing to mess with because we don’t understand it. Now, you know, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand it. And that also doesn’t mean that the left doesn’t have a point. You know, if your society becomes too unequal and too many people stack up at the bottom and they don’t have an opportunity to move forward, that seems like it’s bad for everyone. And so we could we could agree on that. And we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they’re not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom. Right. That would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that. But I think we’re not doing that bad a job of figuring out how to do it. We build infrastructure that everybody can use. We have the universal education systems and so on. And they’re not perfect, but they’re they’re far from they’re far from catastrophic. And they’re a hell of a lot better than they were 100 years ago.