People seem mad about crypto, but is this really much different from previous "gold rush" tech innovations? Oil made a bunch of people very rich, then I guess railroads, quant finance, tech, etc. https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1384967067024171008

Winners of course worked hard, but there's some element of being in the right place at the right time. Crypto maybe is somewhat different, given its interesting position at the boundaries of law/polite society: some of the ppl getting rich are not the cleanest characters perhaps

But big tech disruption events seem to quite generally involve giant pots of money dropped onto a small number of ppl's heads. Wouldn't be too surprised if Stanford gets Nakamoto/Buterin buildings popping up next to the Gates/Packard ones, in a decade or two..

Getting a bit more philosophical... I guess in much earlier times, power came from military strength. Vikings, Mongols, etc. happened to have the right set of weapons at the right point in time

Thus putting them, semi-accidentally, in charge of pretty vast empires to govern. Really not based on any notion of them being any good at governance

Big tech innovations in capitalism are in essence similar "kingmaker" games: a small set of people in the right place at the right time are given absurd amounts of power/control over the allocation of social resources

Just doing some quick accounting... Elon Musk is worth $175bil, meaning he owns around 2 million man-years of labor at $50k a year. He could literally hire all of Chicago, for a year

I guess my point is - random "power drops" are not totally unheard of through human history? This selection mechanism I suppose is somewhat different now, maybe more "technocratic" than prior versions based on military might. But similarly random

On the one hand, thinking about democracy and all that, you'd think social resources should mostly be directed by the ppl through a representative government

On the other hand, to my rough accounting the net worth of the richest ppl is still trivial as a % of, say, US govt expenditure (up at I think, 6tril in 2020 or so?)

Perhaps there's an argument for dropping a few bil on random people, as a simulated annealing/stochastic descent kind of algorithm: people who accidentally ended up with too much money may end up trying things govts wouldn't otherwise have tried