Scott Alexander

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If you're not familiar with X years to escape the permanent underclass, see The New Yorker here, link in post, or The Lane, Bear, and Trammell slash Dworkish articles that inspired it.

The permanent underclass meme isn't being spread by poor people, who are already part of the underclass and generally not worrying too much about its permanence.

It's preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they're just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the singularity.

Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture.

Even if you end up there, you'll be fine.

Dario Amadei has taken the Giving What We Can pledge, number 43 at a link here, to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate.

Your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies.

Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.

On that tiny shoreline of possible worlds, the ones where the next few years are your last chance to become rich, they're also your last chance to make a mark on the world.

Proof, if you could change the world, you could find a way to make people pay you to do it, or to not do it, then become rich.

And what a chance!

The last few years of the human era will be wild.

They'll be like classical Greece and Rome, a sudden opening up of new possibilities, where the first people to take them will be remembered for millennia to come.

What a waste of the privilege of living in classical Athens to try to become the richest olive merchant or whatever.

Even in Roman times, trying to become Crassus would be, well, crass.