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You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

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If you’re not familiar with “X years to escape the permanent underclass”, see the New Yorker here, or the Laine, Bear, and Trammell/Dwarkesh articles that inspired it. The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity. Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying ab

You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership ... Scott Alexander Jan 02, 2026 802 533 86 Share If you’re not familiar with “X years to escape the permanent underclass”, see the New Yorker here , or the Laine , Bear , and Trammell/Dwarkesh articles that inspired it. The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and tha

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