The underlying issue that a unit of capital is intrinsically more valuable than a unit of labor in the current shape of our economy. From the perspective of what's broken, it's not who has the capital that is broken. It's that between capital and labor, capital is too powerful and over time most ROI will end up being earned from capital.

In my view, people who have money should not be separated between those who have talent and those who don't because for the vast majority, money is stronger than talent at ROI, and therefore carries more weight (in our current economy). Talent, sadly, is both the outlier and the rounding error.

Also, when talking about the economy, it's not really about improvement of standard of living - that's the side effect. The key issue is actually distribution.

If you look at Amazon, it's lowering the cost of goods and making it faster / more convenient to get them - arguably, that's a higher quality of life for its consumers. The only issue with Amazon is that it's doing the job so well that many of the very same consumers lose their job and can't consume anymore.

Rich people who create personal empires have their money stored somewhere. They probably bought some companies stock that are making improvements to people's lives, so indirectly their money is being used to improve standard of living globally. The issue is not improvements, it's who gets the money.

The plain fact is that in our current economy there's just not enough value that labor can provide to get enough share of our global monetary supply. Capital is eating it up, no matter if it comes from inheritance, from financial institutions, or rich tech conglomerates.

You can try to solve by either reducing the return on capital as a whole to match labor, or increasing labor's ability to get returns equal to capital. The first can be done by a tax on wealth that can't be loop-holed out of - unsurprisingly, quite hard to do. The second can be done by improving labor's value through making people work harder, take less wages, or become more skilled - also very hard to do.

But even if you manage to equalize capital and labor return temporarily, capital is always getting more efficient over time, while labor will be largely stagnant (unless we modify our genes on a societal level to increase our ability to work). So while we can level the playing field temporarily, eventually we need to explore how labor can exit the economy altogether.

2 reasons - first, the only winning strategy of labor right now is to become capital. That doesn't sound sustainable. Second, it just doesn't make sense for (certain parts of) labor to be in the economy anymore.

For instance, we have the technology and systems to fully automate our cashiers in restaurants. Why keep someone there? I understand the need for fulfillment, social life, and something to do, but can't we as a society come up with something better than working an assembly line at a McDonald's?

We grow up with the assumption that we should work for our existence and our value is based on the work that we do. If we don't work, we don't eat. If we don't work hard, then we deserve everything bad that comes to us. Conversely, if we work hard, then we deserve the money that comes.

But the reality is that rich people don't have to work hard. If you inherit a couple million, you can just throw it in an index fund and not have to do anything for the rest of your life, and "earn" substantially more than the 99% of the population.

Capital > Labor is not just an economic crisis, it's a values crisis. It calls into question almost everything we believe about our self worth. In many ways, it's our belief in the value of our hard work, not the system of capitalism, that is preventing us from making good solutions.

From a pure systems point of view, economics does not need to be fair to work. The economy is just how resources get distributed, so we could yearly collect and throw the world's money into a pot and roll a dice to see who gets what, and that's an economic system. It's not fair but it is a distribution. We have strong opinions of what is fair because much of our self worth is tied up in what we do.

Currently, the capitalist economy says the people who can generate the highest ROI deserves most of the resources. This… is not wholly bad, it generally means that people who know what they're doing get to manage most of the resources of the world. But with the emergence of tech and winner-take-most companies, it creates a larger and larger group of people who, based on the distribution rules of the current economy, don't get anything, and this is bad because it creates a situation where slavery or starvation is the typical livelihood of the 21st century.

One solution is universal basic income. UBI is basically the admittance that labor will never become competitive in our economy again, and that we should look for other ways to distribute resources to them because market forces ain't going to give anything to them.

I actually think UBI is one of the only solutions. But it only scratches the surface of the issue. Beyond income, there's structure, affirmation, goals, promotion, social status, social interaction, belonging on a team, and more built into the social fabric of work. Even if we give income to people who are forced out of the workforce, there's still a lot missing.

But I don't think capitalism should be completely thrown out. The very same tools that you use to build a successful ROI generator can also be used to solve hard problems that don't give ROI. One positive example I think about is the goal to reduce cases of malaria to zero. This is tough! But it's an activity that can potentially create a lot of value - just that you don't capture it directly yourself. And you don't fund it based on your profits, you fund it based on people who align to the cause, want to invest in the cause, and believe you capable to use the money well to actually tackle the problem instead of wasting it.

At the highest level, the truly scarce resource is never the lack of money; it's the lack of ability (talent). So, even though from an ROI perspective, talent isn't as good as money, if we expand our values beyond ROI, talent becomes paramount.