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Inequality and Risk

paulgraham.com · 2,824 words · saved by 1 readers

August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.) Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere. You can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started. You have to get it from the rich. There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive — for example, by improving access to education. Instead of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could enable people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers. This is an excellent strategy for making the poor richer. But the evidence of the last 200 years shows that it doesn't reduce economic inequality, because it makes the rich richer too. If there are more engineers, then

August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.) Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere. You can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started. You have to get it from the rich. There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive — for example, by improving…

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