Who Owns the Future? Read Online Free PDF

benefits with frustrations.
    If finance is imagined as a great fluid of capital flowing about the world, it will seem to storm and accelerate into great vortices, just like any large body of fluid. Some vortices swirl upward and some downward. It has often been true that the poor get poorer and the rich richer. Karl Marx spent a preponderance of his energies on observing this tendency, but it did not take a microscope to notice it.
    Attempts to stem the flow and replace finance entirely with politics by means such as Marxist revolutions turned out to be vastlycrueler than even the worst dysfunctions of capital. So the conundrum of poverty in a world driven by finance remains a challenge.
    Marx wanted something that most people, including me, don’t want: a committee to make sure everyone gets what’s best for them. Let’s reject the Marxist ideal and instead consider the question of whether markets can be counted on to create middle classes as a matter of course.
    Marx argued that finance was an inherently hopeless technology, and that market systems will always degrade into the rut of plutocracy. A Keynesian economist would accept that “ruts” exist but would also add that falling into ruts can be staved off indefinitely with interventions. While there are theories to the contrary, it seems that middle classes have thus far relied on interventions in order to survive.
    Great wealth is naturally persistent, generation to generation, as is deep poverty, but a middle-class status has not proven to be stable without a little help. All the examples of long-term stable middle classes we know of relied on Keynesian interventions as well as persistent mechanisms like social safety nets to moderate market outcomes.
    However, it’s possible that digital networks will someday provide a better alternative to these mechanisms and interventions. To understand why, we need to think about human systems in fundamental terms.
Two Familiar Distributions
    There are two familiar ways that people can be organized into spectrums.
    One is the star system, or winner-take-all distribution. There can only be a few movie or sports stars, for example. So a peak comprised of a very small number of top winners juts out of a sunken slope, or a “long tail” of a lot of poorer performers. There are stars and wannabes, but not a lot of Mr. In-Betweens.

A winner-take-all distribution.
    The distributions of outcomes in fashionable, digitally networked, hyperefficient markets tend to be winner-take-all. It’s true for tech startups, for instance; only a few succeed, but those that do can amass stupendous fortunes. It’s also true for new kinds of individual success stories in the online world, as when someone actually earns serious money from a smartphone app or a video uploaded to YouTube; only a tiny number do well, while the multitudes dream but fail.
    The other familiar distribution is the bell curve. That means there is a bulge of average people and two tails of exceptional people, one high and one low. Bell curves arise from most measurements of people, because that’s how statistics works. This will be true even if the measurement is somewhat contrived or suspect. There isn’t really a single type of intelligence, for instance, yet we take intelligence tests, and indeed the results form a bell curve distribution.

A bell curve distribution.
    In an economy with a strong middle class, the distribution of economic outcomes for people might approach a bell curve, like the distribution of any measured quality like intelligence. Unfortunately, the new digital economy, like older feudal or robber baron economies, is thus far generating outcomes that resemble a “star system” more often than a bell curve.
    What makes one distribution appear instead of the other?
Tweaks to Network Design Can Change Distributions of Outcomes
    Later on I’ll present a preliminary proposal for how to organize networks to organically give rise to more bell curve