Unbounded: Progress, Economic Growth, and Society
Unbounded Growth
In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch explains that progress happens when we create better descriptions of how the world works. A healthy society is one that never stops trying to improve. While new problems will always appear, they can always be solved. This requires us to actively clear the way for new ideas rather than just protecting what we already have. I believe the best way to do this is by making our thinking visible and working together.
This series, Unbounded, explores how we can keep growth open-ended. When everyone has a chance to participate in the economy we get more ideas, more productivity, and more opportunity. Extreme wealth concentration blocks innovation and limits broad prosperity.
Politicians often talk about growth to justify policies that increase inequality. Instead of funding new ideas, money tends to move toward the top and stay there. When wealth is concentrated society is less able to adapt, experiment, and correct mistakes.
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” – Louis Brandeis
High wealth concentration hurts the economy because the wealthiest buy assets rather than spending their money. This reduces the circulation of resources needed for a healthy economy and makes the whole system more fragile. Extreme inequality hurts our shared standard of living. When we limit opportunity, we lose out on millions of people who could be solving our biggest problems. If we ignore inequality, people lose trust in the future. Such conditions stall and regress growth.
Growth is unbounded when there is a corrective mechanism against excessive concentration. A wealth tax is that corrective measure.
Central Claims
I have divided the argument into separate posts so each idea can be examined clearly, and so you can focus on the information most relevant to you.
These are the central claims made throughout the series:
- Who Pays Tax - The tax system taxes labor income more than asset growth.
- Wealth Tax - A wealth tax restores parity between labor income and asset compounding.
- Labor Hours - Rising costs and weak wage progression are turning full-time work into survival maintenance, reducing mobility and prosperity.
- Interactive Factors - Wealth distribution is a root factor behind growth, resilience, and living standards.
- Wealth Concentration - Wealth concentration is accelerating.
- Economic Growth - Concentrated wealth suppresses growth by diverting capital away from broad demand and productive experimentation.
- How to Get a Wealth Tax - Wealth-tax legislation is only possible through political pressure.
I spent the bulk of my career on projects that enriched companies at the expense of workers through automation. I kept hearing “growth” and “creative destruction” used as if they justified everything, but I could not shake the feeling that something was missing. My nephews and nieces have entered a workforce that offers none of the opportunities I had. Humanity is on a long-term positive trajectory, driven by knowledge creation and sharing, yet we are clearly self-inflicting unnecessary pain in the short term.
Reading The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson provided an epiphany: we are ignoring distribution. From my background in maths, statistics, and systems modeling, I recognized how critical this error is. When distribution is ignored, we fail to understand the situation. As I investigated wealth distribution and the impact of this omission in financial models, I was shocked to my core by how dramatically wealth has concentrated over my lifetime, and how far it distorts our view of our economy.
To solve this and other crises we face, and to return to a truly positive long-term trajectory, we need knowledge creation and sharing. The SciCloj and ClojureCivitas habit of building models in public leads to shared, inspectable reasoning. That motivates me to build diagrams and Clojure notebooks, so I can see the mechanisms more clearly and communicate them to those willing to look.
Start Here
In the first part, Who Pays Tax, we will examine how the current taxation system is unfair to you.