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 — and 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, it's anything that people produce creatively
ends up in that distribution. And that's actually — Economist called that the Mathew 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 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 ways 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 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 — tThere'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 is 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 it's
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 and 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 it's so big it had to fail.