How to Own a Slave (2016) | Hacker News Reader

How to Own a Slave (2016)

nakedcapitalism.com

41 pointschmars18 comments

That's Taleb, trying to be an expert on everything.

"About in the 1990s, people suddenly realized that working as a company man was safe… provided the company stayed around."

1990s? That's when being a "company man" ended. Taleb uses IBM as an example, but IBM had their first layoff in 1993.[1] IBM made it through the Great Depression without laying off anybody.

Then he goes on to an argument that only autocrats are free, because elected leaders are subservient to their electorate. He mentions Putin, but not Trump. In the last century, autocrats haven't done all that well; they mostly lost wars and headed countries that went downhill.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/16/business/first-layoffs-see...

re: Trump, this was written in 2008, and the blog post is from before the election.

> 1990s? That's when being a "company man" ended.

Yep - The Dilbert Principle came out in 1996, and had entire chapters devoted to how companies had abandoned long-term loyalty in favor of stock-boosting job cuts. Even by then, people were mocking the transparency of euphemisms like "rightsizing" and "reengineering". If an idea is a naive laugh-line in popular culture, it's probably not also a cutting-edge insight.

I honestly have trouble working out how Taleb thought about that idea enough to specify a date and still got it so badly wrong.

Yes. The "company man" is a 50s cliche. Many 1950s movies were made about it, such as "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" and "The View from the 40th Floor".

The 1950s were the high point of manual bureaucracy. People were doing with paper and people what's now done with computers. This required huge buildings full of paper-pushers. Assembly-line organization was applied to office work. Because everybody in the 1950s had military experience, office work tended to be organized on military lines, with the military emphasis on uniformity.

I didn't think it was possible but you just made the 50's sound even worse.

The modern chaebol is still organized along military-bureaucratic lines. Or at least the one I worked for was. You can still have this experience today!

The point is that people realized that being a company man is only safe if the company stayed around. Which started to not be true for big companies. Thus being a company man was no longer an option.

I think you've understood those words in precisely the opposite sense in which he meant. A possible implication of "provided the company stayed around" is that it was around that time that they started going through a major phase of mergers, closures and downsizing. And, if this was his meaning, that's just Taleb obliquely and wryly stating that the 'company man' era was over.

How is Trump an autocrat? The congress, the supreme court, the individual judiciaries of states?

His dealings with these so far have been him backing down at every turn.

Aspiring autocrat.

I think he would love to be one in the same way he is probably in his companies. Thank God he is not very good at it.

He writes:

> Contractors are too free; they fear only the law. But employees have a reputation to protect. ...

What! Contractors definitely have a reputation to protect too! Good luck getting contract business if everyone knows you're likely to walk out on them mid-project. Word gets around.

Contractors are not necessarily cheaper. Employees are not bound to stay -- most employment contracts are "at will" in all states that allow it. There are lots of intangibles, such as institutional knowledge, personal reasons to stay or leave, likeability of the firm in question, compensation, etc.

The truth is you need to have some slack so you can handle demand peaks. You need to have management that can handle turnover. You need to be able to hire quickly. Making employees your "slaves" is not really an answer to any problem.

> That's Taleb, trying to be an expert on everything.

It might be worth it to provide an overview of Taleb: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

While he's had some good ideas, such as black swan theory, he also has a long history of inadvertently having his theories contradict each other, promoting junk science, denying actual science, and calling his critics "retards" on Twitter.

That article comes across as one massive ad hominem attack against the guy. It's fine if there's a "Controversy" section, but it's practically the whole article. There's just a little section at the end called "Notable contributions", but the massive first section ("Questionable activity") dominates---not to mention casts judgement on everything.

It was my first exposure to RationalWiki. Color me unimpressed. I'm all for skepticism, but it seems RationalWiki has a very particular agenda, as if the answers are all decided.

The Wikipedia article strikes a better balance, in my opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

The whole point of RationalWiki is that it's a callout site. RationalWiki is first and foremost a well-documented list of science deniers and pseudoscience pushers. Neutrality is counter to its goal.

Yep, Taleb's Medium account is a great place to go if you value any kind of expertise and want to raise your blood pressure.

However, this is one of the very few pieces by Taleb I sort of like. He makes an important point: if you work for an organization, and you aren't financially independent, you are not a slave iff that organization needs you more than you need them. In some ways, he independently discovered the concept of leverage here in 2016.

But there is a danger in this line of thinking that he gets close to when he talks about Putin. It reminds me of the logic of "pick-up artists": the idea is that simply acting independent substitutes for the reality of being independent.

That really doesn't work in most cases, although there are always many people who can't see through the facade, which may make it a useful tactic in politics. If this kind of bluff is used in employment, it relies on the assumption your employer is gullible, which is not a safe assumption to make.

And if you actually do have the reality, I see no reason to boast about it. "Any man who must say, 'I am the king' is no true king", and all that.

Taleb is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. Who are you again?

The point is this-- as a capitalist society runs out of resources to exploit, it has to point inwards and exploit itself to maintain growth.

TL;DR life is chaos. Slavery is giving up your will for the illusion of safety and protection. Freedom is only found by taking on the risk of self-ownership.

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