https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qGk9vfHdY_4
One of the things that made Marx wrong was Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed. And like so many things that Marx said, that’s, it’s kind of true. It’s kind of true in that the distribution of wealth, in fact the distribution of anything that’s produced, follows a Pareto pattern. And the Pareto pattern basically is that a small proportion of people end up with the bulk of the goods. And it isn’t just money. It’s anything that people produce creatively ends up in that distribution. And that’s actually, the economists call that the Matthew principle, and they take that from a statement in the New Testament, and the statement is, to those who have everything more will be given, and from those who have nothing everything will be taken. And it’s a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself, where human creative production is involved, and the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you’re successful, the probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you’re successful. And as you fail, the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate. So your progress through life looks like this, or like this, something like that. And the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a feature of the capitalist system. The reason that he was wrong is that it’s not a feature that’s specific to a capitalist system. It’s a feature that’s general to all systems of creative production that are known. And so it’s like a natural law, and it’s enough of a natural law, by the way, that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum. So it’s a really profound, it’s a fundamentally profound observation about the world, the way the world lays itself out. And it’s problematic because if resources accrue unfairly to a small minority of people, and there’s a natural law-like element to that that has to be dealt with from a social perspective, because if the inequality becomes too extreme, then the whole system will destabilize. And so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people. Now the other reason, however, having said that, the other reason that Marx was wrong, there’s a number of them, one is that even though creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people, it’s not the same people consistently across time. It’s the same proportion of people, and that’s not the same thing. You know, like imagine that there’s water going down a drain, and you say, well look at the spiral, it’s permanent. You think, well the spiral’s permanent, but the water molecules aren’t, they’re moving through it. And it’s the same in some sense with the Pareto distribution, is that there’s a 1%, and there’s always a 1%, but it’s not the same people. The stability of it differs from culture to culture, but there’s a lot of movement in the upper 1%, a tremendous amount of movement. One of the reasons for that movement is that things get large and then they get too large, and then they collapse. And so in 2008 when the politicians said, too big to fail, they got something truly backwards, as far as I can tell, and that was, it was a reverse, the statement was reversed. It should have been so big it had to fail.