The hole in the positive sum view of capitalism is the effect that savings have on asset and commodity prices.
Savings equals debt equals savings. Money has to be put somewhere. When the savings of the top 10% or so exceed a certain threshold then they tend to be dumped into things like property or "safe" forms of debt like student loans and mortgages.
Thus the wealth of the rich does steal from the poor, not directly but by making housing, college, and commodities more expensive. Your savings is why I can't afford a house.
Keynes called this "savings beyond planned investment" and on that count at least history seems to be proving him right.
To make capitalism truly positive sum we must find a way to deal with this problem. Perhaps the answer is to make things like equity investment and startup founding even easier-- to increase the efficiency and availability of productive growth investment markets so they can compete for idle dollars against destructive rentier investments.
So while I no longer believe in naive Randianism on these issues, I do still prefer non coercive solutions if such can be found. I wonder if the sort of work YC is doing is really the "problem" or whether PG is actually a bit wrong about that. Every startup represents some investment capital going somewhere other than to jack up the rent.
Sarbanes Oxley seems like precisely the wrong thing. I wonder if the present day housing silliness would exist if IPOs hadn't been made borderline illegal. The housing bubble, which made housing unaffordable to at least two generations, immediately followed the partial closure of the IPO market. Did all the capital that should have gone into post-series-A-D financing go into inflating real estate instead?
Savings equals debt equals savings. Money has to be put somewhere. When the savings of the top 10% or so exceed a certain threshold then they tend to be dumped into things like property or "safe" forms of debt like student loans and mortgages.
Thus the wealth of the rich does steal from the poor, not directly but by making housing, college, and commodities more expensive. Your savings is why I can't afford a house.
Keynes called this "savings beyond planned investment" and on that count at least history seems to be proving him right.
To make capitalism truly positive sum we must find a way to deal with this problem. Perhaps the answer is to make things like equity investment and startup founding even easier-- to increase the efficiency and availability of productive growth investment markets so they can compete for idle dollars against destructive rentier investments.
So while I no longer believe in naive Randianism on these issues, I do still prefer non coercive solutions if such can be found. I wonder if the sort of work YC is doing is really the "problem" or whether PG is actually a bit wrong about that. Every startup represents some investment capital going somewhere other than to jack up the rent.
Sarbanes Oxley seems like precisely the wrong thing. I wonder if the present day housing silliness would exist if IPOs hadn't been made borderline illegal. The housing bubble, which made housing unaffordable to at least two generations, immediately followed the partial closure of the IPO market. Did all the capital that should have gone into post-series-A-D financing go into inflating real estate instead?