Exactly. I work in AI (although not the LLM kind, just applying smaller computer vision models), and my belief is that AI can be a great liberator for humanity if we have the right political and economic apparatus. The question is what that apparatus is. Some will say it’s an inherent feature of capitalism, but that’s not terribly specific, nor does it explain the relatively high wealth equality that existed briefly during the middle of the 20th century in America. I think some historical context is important here.

Historical Precedent

During the Industrial Revolution, we had an unprecedented growth in average labor productivity due to automation. From a naïve perspective, we might expect increasing labor productivity to result in improved quality of life and less working hours. I.e., the spoils of that productivity being felt by all.

But what we saw instead was the workers lived in squalor and abject poverty, while the mega-rich captured those productivity gains and became stupidly wealthy.

Many people at the time took note of this and sought to answer this question: why, in an era over greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? Clearly all that extra wealth is going somewhere, and if it’s not going to the working class, then it’s evidently going to the top.

One economist and philosopher, Henry George, wrote a book exploring this very question, Progress and Poverty. His answer, in short, was rent-seeking:

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

Rent-seeking takes many forms. To list a few examples:

• Land speculation
• Monopolization of finite natural resources (e.g., oil, minerals)
• Offloading negative externalities (e.g., pollution)
• Monopolization of intellectual property
• Regulatory capture
• Monopolistic or oligopolistic control of entire markets

George’s argument, essentially, was that the privatization of the economic rents borne of god-given things — be it land, minerals, or ideas — allowed the rich and powerful to extract all that new wealth and funnel it into their own portfolios. George was not the only one to blame these factors as the primary drivers of sky-high inequality; Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has stated:

Specifically, I suggest that much of the increase in inequality is associated with the growth in rents — including land and exploitation rents (e.g., arising from monopoly power and political influence).

George’s proposed remedies were a series of taxes and reforms to return the economic rents of those god-given things to society at large. These include:

• Implementation of land value taxes:

Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.

• Implementation of Pigouvian (aka externality) taxes, e.g., carbon tax:

A Pigouvian tax (also spelled Pigovian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (i.e., external costs incurred by the producer that are not included in the market price). The tax is normally set by the government to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure) and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, social cost includes private cost and external cost caused by negative externalities. This means the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of negative externalities are environmental pollution and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption.[2]

• Implementation of severance taxes,

Severance taxes are taxes imposed on the removal of natural resources within a taxing jurisdiction. Severance taxes are most commonly imposed in oil producing states within the United States. Resources that typically incur severance taxes when extracted include oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, and timber. Some jurisdictions use other terms like gross production tax.

such as in the Norwegian model:

The key to Norway’s success in oil exploitation has been the special regime of ownership rights which apply to extraction: the severance tax takes most of those rents, meaning that the people of Norway are the primary beneficiaries of the country’s petroleum wealth. Instead of privatizing the resource rents provided by access to oil, companies make their returns off of the extraction and transportation of the oil, incentivizing them to develop the most efficient technologies and processes rather than simply collecting the resource rents. Exploration and development is subsidized by the Norwegian government in order to maximize the amount of resource rents that can be taxed by the state, while also promoting a highly competitive environment free of the corruption and stagnation that afflicts state-controlled oil companies.

• Intellectual property reform, e.g., abolishing patents and instead subsidizing open R&D, similar to a Pigouvian anti-tax (research has positive externalities) or Norway’s subsidization of oil exploration
• Implementation of a citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, e.g., the Alaska permanent fund or carbon tax-and-dividend:

Citizen’s dividend is a proposed policy based upon the Georgist principle that the natural world is the common property of all people. It is proposed that all citizens receive regular payments (dividends) from revenue raised by leasing or taxing the monopoly of valuable land and other natural resources.

…

This concept is a form of universal basic income (UBI), where the citizen’s dividend depends upon the value of natural resources or what could be titled as common goods like location values, seignorage, the electromagnetic spectrum, the industrial use of air (CO2 production), etc.[4]

• Funding public goods via the Henry George Theorem:

In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, beneficial investments in public goods will increase aggregate land rents by at least as much as the investments’ cost.[1] This proposition was dubbed the “Henry George theorem”, as it characterizes a situation where Henry George’s ‘single tax’ on land values, is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.[2] Henry George had famously advocated for the replacement of all other taxes with a land value tax, arguing that as the location value of land was improved by public works, its economic rent was the most logical source of public revenue.[3]

…

Subsequent studies generalized the principle and found that the theorem holds even after relaxing assumptions.[4] Studies indicate that even existing land prices, which are depressed due to the existing burden of taxation on labor and investment, are great enough to replace taxes at all levels of government.[5][6][7]

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