That is why, as I once wrote, "Every billionaire is a factory for producing policy-failures": That's the greatest trick billionaires pulled on us – making us feel like we are alone in our understanding of how they are destroying our world and our civilization. Or, as a study by Gregg Sparkman, Nathaniel Geiger and Elke Weber in Nature Communications put it, "Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half." That is, we all care about the climate emergency, but we think we don't. The dark money billionaires pour into climate denial doesn't merely fool people into disbelieving in climate change – even more importantly, it fools people into thinking that everyone around them has been fooled. The ultra-wealthy gave us education-denial in the form of the charter-school movement:Īnd they gave us vaccine Apartheid and the endless new variants it spawned, which threaten our very civilization:īut more than anything, they gave us climate denial, and with it, the most urgent threat to our species we face today. The great fortunes of today's robber-barons have a vast, distorting influence on our society, bending our most urgent projects away from evidence-based policy and towards the pet theories of billionaire dilettantes. Thus it is that the aristocrats-in-waiting are always with us, working tirelessly to create the society described by Frank Wilhoit: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." In 1890, Senator John Sherman addressed the Senate to argue for his landmark antitrust bill, saying, "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life."īut as Thomas Piketty showed in his magisterial "Capital in the 21st Century," market economies inevitably produce oligarchies, unless there is a muscular state that can strip the wealthy of the power and influence they accumulate through rent extraction and exploitation: The fight to prevent the rise of a new aristocracy has never ended in America. Thomas Jefferson (unsuccessfully) lobbied for an antimonopoly clause in the Constitution in order to check the power of the wealthy – only to be defeated by the wealthy landowners who saw American independence as a means to transition from one set of hereditary rulers to another. The tension between aristocratic aspirations and democratic limits has been part of America since the earliest days. Louis Brandeis once said, "we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." It's part of a long American tradition that abhors the gathering of power into just a few hands.īut there's a countertradition in American politics: the belief in the unchecked power of plutocrats and robber-barons, who amass great fortunes, convert them into political power, and use that power to unaccountably structure the lives of millions of working people. Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current readingĮvery billionaire is a factory for producing policy failures ( ).Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.The horrifying tale of a blockchain-based virtual sweatshop: "Anda's Game" was a warning, not a suggestion.Every billionaire is a factory for producing policy failures: On the "attack philanthropy" of Barre Seid.On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. – Medium: the timestamps for the episode. – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast Regulation, Disruption, and the Future: ĥ. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:ģ. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country.
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