Well, I wasn’t so much getting at what you’re saying—which I completely agree with btw—but rather, I’m trying to understand what prevents people from realizing that the reason for their poor living conditions is the accumulation of capital in far too few hands.

The reason for my question: the global resurgence of fascism, which, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the influence of billionaires, because they use this mindless ideology with all their might to pit people against one another and thus distract them from where the real problem lies.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many democracies where people view immigration as the most pressing problem. Absurdly, this is also the case in my home country, Germany, even though the German labor market needs far more foreign workers in a wide variety of sectors.

This is classic fascist ideology, which we unfortunately know all too well in this country. What’s frightening, however, is that the billionaires wield their influence so effectively that even the German masses no longer remember their inhuman faces and now still parrot whatever the algorithm—or rather, the will of the billionaires—presents to them.

It’s a tragedy, and my question in this post simply seeks to understand how this can be—how people fail to grasp that it is the powerful, and by no means the powerless, who should be despised.

And who do you think has the greatest interest—and the resources—to set up the system you’re talking about in such a way that it essentially serves only the interests of billionaires?

I’d say the U.S. demonstrates quite impressively how this works.

To me, the saddest aspect of this nation’s decline is that the people who are paying the price have resigned themselves to their fate, since their ideology seems to make it appear inevitable to them.

In and of itself, it doesn’t matter at all which country someone lives in, as long as you’re aware of the answer to the question I asked.

The answer is simply: the billionaires—even if you think you can undermine that reality with a counter-question (in Europe, where I live, there are certainly billionaires as well).

However, if—knowing all this—you don’t come to the same conclusion, I can’t understand why not.

That’s what my original question was about, and so far no one in this thread has answered it: How does society as a whole benefit from the existence of billionaires?

I know my answer to that.

Do you know yours, since you say it wouldn’t make any difference whether they exist or not…

This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.

Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).

Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.

And who do you think has the greatest interest in this? Who do you think has the power to make it happen?

Yes, I completely agree with you. I just fear that reality shows that billionaires—who, after all, aren’t some kind of fantasy—simply don’t do that. Quite the opposite: With their power, which is equivalent to the capital of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, they do everything in their power to make life for ordinary people worse and worse. We’re seeing this happen right now.

I simply cannot understand why people fail to recognize the reason for their increasingly dire situations.

I do understand that the reason is that the billionaires have so much capital that they control the media and can thus spread misinformation massively. That is precisely why fascism is so strong again—it is so attractive to billionaires because, with its ideology, it is designed to protect the “elites.” However, it’s not foreigners or any of the bogeymen this idiotic “doctrine” has to offer: the problem is those who spread this inhuman ideology—namely, the billionaires.

You still haven’t answered the question: Why should there be people who, as private individuals, have enough capital to finance entire countries?

We’re seeing the consequences of your approach today, and it’s this very approach that led us to this problem in the first place: The world isn’t run in the interest of the general public, but by unscrupulous billionaires who don’t give the general public a second thought.

Therefore, one can only conclude that your idea of some “Führer” who act justly leads to disaster.

I’m sorry, but if I have to put it this way, this is Nazi ideology.

What you might have in mind may be a technocracy, but even that would endow individual people with a level of power that, in my opinion, is hardly desirable.

China is largely organized this way, since most of its ministers are experts in their respective fields.

However, that doesn’t strike me as a society worth living in.

You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.

There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.

You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.

What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.

Aren’t the circumstances that give rise to them simply the fact that societies allow individuals to become so wealthy in the first place?

The problem, however, is that the world’s largest corporations pay virtually no taxes, which gives rise to the very serious problem the world is facing today.

I can’t understand why you think of murder when it comes to the question of whether it makes sense for societies to allow people to become so rich that they rise above everyone else. In reasonably functioning states, this can be regulated by law.

You’re probably from the U.S., right?

But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?

Indeed!

“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”

I think that pretty much sums it up.

The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.

The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.

Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.

Well, if they were to start doing this on a large scale, everything would probably collapse pretty quickly.

If, for example, BlackRock were to pull its billions out of AI companies, “the market” would be terrified and smaller investors would start asking about the business model—then they’d quickly realize that it doesn’t add up at all, and they’d want to sell their shares as well, because even this giant player has lost their trust.

The result would likely be the collapse of the global economic system, since such absurd amounts of money are at stake here that a crash would make the 2003 banking crisis look like a minor slip-up.

The bitter truth is that this will almost certainly happen sooner or later—and this time, governments will no longer be able to step in to bail out the “systemically important” megacorporations, because the sums involved are so vast that even the richest countries in the world can no longer foot the bill.

If even the goddamn BusinessInsider comes to this conclusion, I wonder why they don’t also realize that all stock market transactions work this way today. None of this has the slightest connection to the real world anymore. Stock prices are determined purely by how many billionaires—or rather, their concentrated capital—are betting on which companies. And here’s the key: They always win, because even with the most absurd business ideas, they can drive up the price, which only crashes after the super-rich have sold their shares.

This makes it very easy to understand why the dumbest people in the world never lose money, as long as they’re rich enough.

Humanity is footing the bill for this, and it’s now becoming very clear just how high that bill is.

The fact that U.S. authorities are actively covering up the crimes of what appear to be numerous and influential co-conspirators—by unlawfully redacting documents and withholding material they are required to release—is likely a factor. The fact that U.S. law enforcement agencies refuse to investigate this case for the same reason is another factor.

Consequently, there have been no new developments, since it is clear that the investigation has effectively been suspended, even though the case is obviously far from closed.

This in itself is, of course, a scandal that in any reasonably functioning country would inevitably lead to the government’s downfall.

But as many have already said, the media isn’t reporting on this because there is essentially no free press left in the U.S.

However, I simply cannot comprehend the fact that U.S. citizens have apparently resigned themselves to the fact that their system is so obviously corrupt that it not only fails to prevent the most serious crimes but actually enables them in the first place. To me, it is absolutely inexplicable that the current regime remains in office despite its obvious criminality and is not forced to resign through mass civil disobedience.

This regime and its network of oligarchs behind it are the reason why the most serious crimes, including those committed by Epstein’s accomplices, go unpunished.

In short: There is no longer any reporting on Epstein and his network because high-ranking members of the U.S. government are quite obviously involved themselves and are therefore doing everything in their power to suppress coverage. This, however, is only possible because U.S. citizens are not holding them accountable.

That’s frightening, but unfortunately it’s the reality.