Context about prior thread:

I'm building a politics where the explicit goal of regulatory bodies is to maximize diffuse value capture. (or, "non-central value capture").

ie: maximize the amount of value that is created that a central group/person *doesn't* directly capture. The goods that make everyone else better.

interested in community, future cultural institutions, metamodernism

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Priming you with examples that do this well: www, Email, DNS, highways, many vaccines, Khan Academy, seatbelts, printing press, clean water infra, cheap electricity, ...

Let's say someone starts a company that automates a human-capital expensive industry. The "value" of the industry was $10bn, and NewCo quickly captures the market via slightly lower cost. Only slightly, because the customers are provider agnostic, and will switch to save 10%.

Thus, "value" (benefiting real people in the real world) is created, undoubtably, since customers save 10%. And for the founders/investors, "value" (valuation, share price) is created (taken from incumbents?).

But these are different "value"s!

One centers around the benefit to others, and one centers around how efficiently the NewCo transferred existing $ flows to themselves.

Imagine if self-driving trucks take over long haul trucking, and only one company cracks it. They charge the same price, but you don't have to deal with pesky drivers anymore.

Shippers switch over, lots of people lose their jobs, shippers are slightly better off... overall, on a society level: how much value did they *create*?

So many tech cos (especially crypto, sorry) focus on capturing value for themselves.

And in general, this is good, because central economic value capture is correlated with value creation. But not always! And if you're only 10% better but make a lot of people unemployed... is that a net positive?

This is easiest to see with pharma drugs. If a drug permanently reverses Type 2 diabetes, and costs $1k/month, the pharma co both captures value (they make a lot of money), but also creates a lot of extra value/benefit (people will live longer! healthier! we save way more $ on care! etc).

That gap is what I think matters. So this isn't an anti-billionaire thing, but is an anti- letting people capture economic value without also creating excess value that they *can't* capture.

This should be the explicit regulatory goal of governments. Make the pie bigger, *and* make sure someone can't eat most of it.

Obviously, these are correlated. Google may be worth $1T, but *having access to Google search* creates way more human value than what they could ever capture.

That extra, between Google's *valuation*, and the *beneficial value* Google creates for humanity is what I'm talking about.