Equality, not competition or hierarchy, is 'the mother of invention'. Progress slows or goes into reverse as soon as ideas are appropriated by hierarchical organizations. Inequality is sustained when a few people persuade the majority that there is no alternative. [...]

All societies that become greatly unequal eventually fail to adapt technologically and become unsustainable. [...] When inequality rises, you pour more and more resources into your armies and into new technology for them--not into truly productive and co-operative purposes. Slaves and scribes are left to do the hard work. Eventually the empire falls--because high and rising inequality and a consequent lack of innovation and adaptation is how it so often ends.

We can see this end coming. It is not too late to learn and change. And technology can help us do this if we better understand it--and ourselves.

[...] 'Technology' often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to 'the guys who understand it'.

The frequent claim that inequality promotes accumulation and growth does not get much support from history. On the contrary, great economic inequality has always been correlated with extreme concentration of political power, and that power has always been used to widen the income gaps through rent-seeking and rent-keeping, forces that demonstrably retard economic growth.

A key part of any Utopian project should be to discuss widely and think deeply about the human natures we want to have and the ones we do not want to have, and to devise the kinds of social arrangements that will support and reward those characteristics.

[...] Demand for large, luxury cars fell abruptly; labor historian Rob Rooke records that demand fell steadily from 150,000 sold in 1929 to only 10,000 a year by 1937. Perhaps this was because it no longer felt right to drive in luxury when people were starving, and perhaps, following rumored or actual attacks on wealthy limousine-owners, rich people suddenly felt 'that ostentatious displays of wealth could cost them their lives'.

[...] unequal societies have a short-term competitive edge over more egalitarian ones because those who take the decisions do not have to suffer their consequences. Rogers writes: 'unequal societies are better able to survive resource shortages by sequestering mortality in the lower classes'. In the longer term, however, these societies can only survive by proliferation--finding fresh populations to bear the burdens they create. [...]

Positionality is a valuable concept for anyone who is interested in making society more fair, because it highlights the fact that the system is not composed entirely of people who believe in it and want it, but perhaps very largely of people who have been dragooned into it and would love to be free of it. This may even be true of some members of the rich elite. [...]

[...] the publication in 1973 of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes's algorithm for the pricing of options.

Before Black and Scholes's work, derivatives had been a small fraction of all investments, essentially the contracts known as 'futures,' [...] Black and Scholes's algorithm allowed almost everything else to be priced the same way, including personal debt. It was what made the 'hedge fund' possible, and a world economy in which financial assets completely eclipsed the real ones that they supposedly represented. [...]

The power-shift towards finance became self-reinforcing. Financial institutions deployed their increased lobbying power successfully against the legal barriers between speculative and retail banking [...] This drew creative effort and investment into the monetary system itself, and away from the productive economy for which monetary systems in theory exist.