However, although the comfort that we experience (in the developed world) due to our modern technology is very much a product of the analytic-rational paradigm, that comfort is given roughly equally to everyone and is certainly not given preferentially to the kind of person who most contributed causally to it happening, i.e. to scientists, engineers and great thinkers.
How much have scientists and engineers contributed to our standard of living? Probably a good amount, but why do we have scientists and engineers? My impression is that our current high standard of living is due to the fact that most people are rational, in certain domain specific ways. Namely, they adopt better tools when given the opportunity. They specialize and trade. It seems quite possible that ambitious entrepreneurs, rather than thoughtful rationalists deserve the most credit for past progress.
Even entrepreneurs capture very little of the value they create: I’ve heard estimates of 5%. Not to mention the massive degree of risk they shoulder (and humans have basically risk averse utility functions).
Money isn’t value, but what’s transferred in game-theoretic interactions isn’t value, it’s control. Money is control. It’s only possible to compare control of different agents, much less so the value they obtain, and it would be particularly hard to compare the value that 10^9 humans obtain with the value one person obtains. Saying that a person obtains 5% of control that the beneficiaries would be willing to give up in return does seem to make sense.
How well could that control be cashed out to improve the world to entrepreneur’s preference is a separate unrelated question. Maybe the benefit people receive directly through the innovation would constitute the majority of the improvement in value of the world according to entrepreneur’s preference, as compared to other effects of taking the beneficiary action, including the use of obtained money.
How much have scientists and engineers contributed to our standard of living? Probably a good amount, but why do we have scientists and engineers? My impression is that our current high standard of living is due to the fact that most people are rational, in certain domain specific ways. Namely, they adopt better tools when given the opportunity. They specialize and trade. It seems quite possible that ambitious entrepreneurs, rather than thoughtful rationalists deserve the most credit for past progress.
Even entrepreneurs capture very little of the value they create: I’ve heard estimates of 5%. Not to mention the massive degree of risk they shoulder (and humans have basically risk averse utility functions).
Humans don’t have utility functions; that’s why we’re so bad at this.
Money isn’t value, but what’s transferred in game-theoretic interactions isn’t value, it’s control. Money is control. It’s only possible to compare control of different agents, much less so the value they obtain, and it would be particularly hard to compare the value that 10^9 humans obtain with the value one person obtains. Saying that a person obtains 5% of control that the beneficiaries would be willing to give up in return does seem to make sense.
How well could that control be cashed out to improve the world to entrepreneur’s preference is a separate unrelated question. Maybe the benefit people receive directly through the innovation would constitute the majority of the improvement in value of the world according to entrepreneur’s preference, as compared to other effects of taking the beneficiary action, including the use of obtained money.
Seeing as control is a “timeless” notion, I don’t see how it can be “transferred”. Maybe a formalization would help.