A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality
I hope I didn't go too overboard by dissecting PG's essay like this, but I felt it was necessary to correct many of the items that I read.<p>It may seem spurious now, but economic inequality is relevant for the tech industry, too. The massively increased productivity that information technology provides is very infrequently distributed proportionally to the people who actually forged it-- exactly the same condition as most workers in the US, currently. The principal difference in terms of economics is that the absolute wages of software engineers are currently higher than the median wages, meaning that they don't feel the pressure of not having quite enough-- given enough time, this will change unless we make a decision to alter our course.<p>The accumulation of economic gains from massively increased productivity will trend toward stagnation at the uppermost levels-- the founders and owners. Our society is currently engineered for this to be the case, and we have much work to do if we want a more equitable society.<p>If we accept economic inequality, we accept that we are not citizens but instead are largely debt-laden effortful passengers in a world owned by our betters.