This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century.

One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic principles, or failing to apply them for no good reason. Key assumptions are often unstated and even unrealized, and also false or even absurd. Reference posts are needed.

That will take longer, so instead this post covers the specific discussions and questions around the post by Trammell and Patel. My goal is to both meet that post on its own terms, and also point out the central ways its own terms are absurd, and the often implicit assumptions they make that are unlikely to hold.

What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome

They affirm, as do I, that Piketty was centrally wrong about capital accumulation in the past, for many well understood reasons, many of which they lay out.

They then posit that Piketty could have been unintentionally [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome

(03:15) Does The Above Conclusion Follow From The Above Premises?

(03:30) Sounds Like This Is Not Our Main Problem In This Scenario?

(07:31) To Be Clear This Scenario Doesn't Make Sense

(13:51) Ad Argumento

(14:44) The Baseline Scenario

(16:31) Would We Have An Inequality Problem?

(20:57) No You Can't Simply Let Markets Handle Everything

(22:22) Proposed Solutions

(25:55) Wealth Taxes Today Are Grade-A Stupid

(28:27) Tyler Cowen Responds With Econ Equations

(30:29) Brian Albrecht Responds With More Equations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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