.@naval: “The opportunities have never been more equal than now. @elonmusk and @JeffBezos have the same iPhone you do. They don’t have some better version of an iPhone. They’re eating food that might be marginally better than yours, but it’s basically the same. You might even have a better diet than them. You probably have more time to go to the gym than them. They’re not immortal, and they’re not going to be—most likely, not at this time scale. So you have more youth than them. You have a lot of advantages over them. The wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think. A lot of that is due to mass production, which comes from specialization, labor, and capitalism. But it’s very easy to overlook that and agitate—because that gets you higher in the status hierarchy with other monkeys. It makes you look like you’re fighting for noble causes and gives you status, which is really what people are craving these days. They’re craving status, not money or wealth. And status is a zero-sum game. So it’s kind of an evil game to play because there have to be losers for every winner. And the only way to win is by crushing somebody else down.”
