Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
Episode 483: We Love Inequality
In this episode, we look at what happens when artificial intelligence is put in charge of real-world systems, starting with an experiment in automated pricing and what it reveals about incentives, scarcity, and control. We turn to Denmark’s decision to shut down its national postal service, using it to examine the decline of physical mail, environmental tradeoffs, and why government monopolies struggle to compete with private delivery. We highlight the week’s “foolishness,” including the rise of competitive spreadsheet championships, before turning to a broader discussion about inequality. We examine IQ distributions, bell curves, and why inequality is often confused with poverty, exploring the limits of measures like the Gini coefficient, the difference between snapshot and lifetime earnings, and the role of incentives, envy, and value creation. We close by contrasting equality of opportunity with equality of outcome and asking what societies should actually care about when assessing fairness and prosperity.
00:00 Introduction and Overview
00:27 AI Runs a Vending Machine at the Wall Street Journal
01:52 When AI Meets Communism and Price Controls
03:52 Why AI Isn’t Replacing Humans Anytime Soon
04:32 Denmark Shuts Down Its Postal Service
06:11 Is Physical Mail Environmentally Absurd?
07:39 Why the Postal Service Can’t Compete
11:43 The Foolishness of the Week: Excel World Championships
13:25 Are Spreadsheets More Important Than Football?
15:08 Main Topic Setup: Should We Care About Inequality?
16:13 IQ, Bell Curves, and Random Distributions
23:05 Why Inequality Is Not the Same as Poverty
25:36 The Gini Coefficient and Its Limits
28:57 Sports, Superstars, and Value Creation
38:00 Taxes, Transfers, and the Illusion of Inequality
41:57 Lifetime Earnings vs Snapshot Inequality
45:14 Equality of Opportunity vs Equality of Outcome
49:30 Envy, Incentives, and Human Motivation
53:38 Closing Thoughts on Inequality and Society
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Published on 2 days, 10 hours ago