Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
economist.com
economist.com
- The survey covers just SV elites. It would be interesting to see how those beliefs compare to rank-and-file SV tech company employees (and to see that broken down further by profession). Differences in values between employees and bosses could lead to conflict further down the road.
- I'm reading more lately about the degree to which our temperament (the Big 5 personality index) influences our political beliefs. For instance, the managers and executives of established companies tend to be very high in Conscientiousness, which correlates with conservative beliefs. Entrepreneurs on the other hand score very high in Openness, which correlates with Liberal beliefs. I suspect their differences from standard Democrat politics stems from a relatively lower score in Agreeableness.
Edit: formatting and extended a thought.
which is kinda of hard to defend since Obama constantly blocked the bay area on reelection campaigns and most of his advisors came from/went to silicon Valley companies.
But now, these same class of people are quite a bit more pro globalization and might be considered globalists. They somewhat ironically seem to embrace some big aspects of neoliberal economics which is something they were quite antithetical to back in the early 2000's --so what gives?
That's the kind of "globalism" the tech elite supports. They love to hide behind closed borders when it protects their wealth and power.
Those "same class of people" have always supported true globalism for the people in terms of a complete removal of borders. Don't blame them because greedy neoliberals have hijacked the term globalism.
https://c4ss.org/content/41012:
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"In the early 20th century, when most industrial capital was national, Western countries’ main imports were raw materials from the colonial world and their main exports were finished industrial goods. So it was in the interest of American manufacturers to restrict competition in the domestic market from imported goods manufactured in other industrialized countries. Fast forward 100 years though, and most American imports are by the Western-owned global corporations themselves, importing goods produced under contract for them so they can sell them in the domestic market at an enormous “intellectual property” markup over the cost of production.
Since the movement of goods across borders is now mostly an internal affair of global corporations themselves, outmoded tariffs that impede the movement of goods have become an inconvenience. What they need, instead, is a form of protectionism that still gives them a monopoly over selling a particular product in a particular market — but operates at corporate boundaries rather than national ones. That’s what “intellectual property” does.
Aside from the manufacturing corporations we just discussed, most of the other profitable industries in the global economy have business models centered on IP: Entertainment, software, electronics, biotech, etc.
So what’s falsely called “free trade” today isn’t a decrease in protectionism. It’s a shift from one kind of protectionism that no longer serves corporate interests, to a new kind of protectionism that better serves them."
Seattle has been growing a lot in the past decade or two. I don't think we can conclude the population in the early 2000s is the same class of people that are there now.
Often media make similar claims about the current bands or people who self identify as anarchists and progressive --but ideologically they align more with neoliberalist ideas about free trade of goods, labor etc --with a Marxist bent this time (although I don't think that's been well thought out, given the implications)
I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand the rules of the game they're playing) and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation.
Free trade _does not_ benefit large companies. Large companies want, and generally get, favorable regulations and tariffs that make it hard for outsiders or for small guys.
I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.
What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation.
Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations.
We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.
However, if you're suggesting that Silicon Valley CEOs are in favor of libertarian free trade, I think I agree more with the article and disagree with you. Silicon Valley CEOs loyalty is not to free trade, it's to their globalist lifestyle and outlook on life. Indeed, most of these people seem to be hardcore monopolists, and with no shame for it either.
You mean regressive policies that hurt the poor, right?
The War on Poverty marked the end of the decline in the American poverty rate. The social welfare state gradually sapped American industrial vitality and the labour productivity growth that had been fueling wage gains across all income classes for decades.
Probably worth asking if you assert that American corporate taxes are the highest in the world: sometimes there are just major, major reality-based differences in the discourse and it's useless talking any further. I know I can't believe some of your axioms here, unfortunately.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
Excerpt: In 2014 the United States had the third highest general top marginal corporate income tax rate in the world at 39.1 percent (consisting of the 35% federal rate plus a combined state rate), exceeded only by Chad and the United Arab Emirates However, the average corporate tax rate in 2011 dipped to 12.1%, its lowest level since before World War I, largely due to the great recession and a bonus depreciation tax break.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/22_wage...
* For 1947-1972 it fell behind output by 0.2% per year, which sounds small, but that's 4.6% for the entire period.
* In 1972-1994 workers fell behind by another 4.1%
* In 1994-2005 (half the time) workers fell behind by another 2.9%
* In 2005-2014 (even less time) workers fell behind by another 4%
Over the entire span, workers' compensation has only increased 85% as much as productivity. More importantly, the gap is growing, not shrinking. Even using yearly figures to make differences look small, then grouping those numbers into oh-so-convenient unequal intervals, can't turn this into evidence of your original claim that wages have kept pace with productivity growth.
85% is a very high level of correlation. The original comment claimed:
>>But labor productivity growth doesn't cause any wage gains anymore,
Labour productivity growth obviously does cause wage gains. The data shows that the primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth has been a slowdown in labour productivity growth, not a decline in labour's share of revenue.
It's possible for both the original claim and your counterclaim to be untrue. Two lies don't make a truth. The original claim of no relationship is untrue. So is your "tracking very closely" counterclaim. There's a relationship, but it's not very strong and it's growing weaker.
> Labour productivity growth obviously does cause wage gains.
Cause? Without qualification? Not so fast, hoss. Sometimes productivity growth translates into wage increases. Other times either can change independently. The whole point - what those data really show - is that the relationship has been weakening.
85% is a strong correlation. I even posted the graph for others to make up their own mind. Calling my statement a lie, when it's based on your own subjective determination of what constitutes a close correlation, is hostile and unfair.
>Cause? Without qualification? Not so fast, hoss. Sometimes productivity growth translates into wage increases
Wage growth can only come from productivity growth on any sustained basis, so yes, the latter caused the former.
To quote the top-level comment that started this thread (and which was apparently OK with everyone): bullshit. Wage growth can come increased availability of resources or funds, from regulation, from many sources besides productivity growth. Productivity growth can actually drive wage decreases, e.g. when automation makes jobs obsolete and its practitioners end up doing menial work instead. Typesetting is an example that has affected my own family. To pick another one, do you suppose that all of the long-term increase in finance-industry wage growth has been because of productivity? That repealing Glass-Steagall, or tax laws favoring certain investment vehicles and funneling trillions into mutual funds had nothing to do with it? That would be naive. The people making all that money certainly know better.
If that claim is the basis of your argument or economic beliefs, then I feel sorry for you because you're building on quicksand.
First you accuse me of lying when I was being completely honest, then you call another claim of mine "bullshit". You're being rude. Please stop if you want to carry on the discussion.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...
You said something about the regressive policies that hurt the poor. You haven't shown any evidence for this claim.
If social programs reduced poverty these aren't the stats you'd see.
Cutting the Poverty Rate from about 22% to about 12% is hurting the poor. Got it.
More extreme poverty began to increase decades into the War on Poverty, when social programs were far larger than they were at the beginning.
And in addition, there has been a major increase in single parenthood, which a lot of research indicates is largely a result of government low income subsidies making single parent households more economically viable. Single-parent households are associated with much worse socioeconomic outcomes that increase future poverty, incarceration and government dependency.
So my conclusion is that these policies are most likely harming the poor, by wiping out the poverty reduction that would otherwise be happening, and moreover, that there is very good reason to doubt that they're "progressive".
>>Cutting the Poverty Rate from about 22% to about 12% is hurting the poor. Got it.
The poverty rate was declining before the War on Poverty began. There's no reason to conclude that it is responsible for the continuation of that trend for a decade longer. There's plenty of reason to blame it for the cessation of that trend of declining poverty rates, rising wages and low rates of single parenthood.
There are countries out there (including America) where you can get long-term stay papers or citizenship by simply investing into the country. You're essentially "buying" your way in. Most of the necessary amounts are probably "peanuts" for the celebrities and tech-leaders we have today.
Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but usually they are. We're more caricatures than snowflakes. That's why there's mainstream music and movies, and most go through the same limited number of stages in life with utmost predictability.
When money is involved that's doubly so. And if Marx's not your thing (although the notion that class/position/economic factors greatly shape the man is much older than Marxism -- heck, the aristocracy believed the exact same thing), here's Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
In other words, they can have all the other thoughts they like -- as long they fit in with their role and don't come at odds with it (In other words: "any color you like as long as it is black").
This leaves them with a more limited set of corporate compatible set of thoughts. If they're gonna be buddhists, for example, they'd be the kind of "buddhists" for which driving expensive sports cars, managing people, and selling commercial trite products is a-ok for.
I mentioned mainstream movies above and it's similar: the majority loves them and flocks to them. But still some would legitimately rather watch a Tarkovsky or some really obscure creators.
To quote myself above: "Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but _usually_ they are" (emphasis mine). In other words, you can find one Hanauer. Heck, you could find 10 Hanauers. But I doubt you can find 10,000 or even 100. Most of the SV bosses beliefs are determined by their wealth/role/position.
Heck, even old Marx (to whom they idea that people's class/position etc determines their values/beliefs was attributed above [1]) very well knew that. His friend Engels was a wealthy industrialist heir, but very much a communist. And Kropotkin was a prince from a wealthy family -- but ended an anarchist. The overwhelming majority of industrialists and princes however never made those jumps to the other side.
[1] And he indeed wrote it and popularized it, but it was not uniquely his.
So on one hand I disagree with your "hard to find 100 Hanauer" point, but it does not mean your bigger point is wrong, just that it may not come simply from their job, but maybe education/social environment.
The actual Karl Marx, on the other hand, didn't think that people's beliefs were determined by their social class. Rather that their behavior was ultimately determined by their social class regardless of any personal beliefs.
It's true that free trade in principle doesn't benefit large companies. But in principle, it doesn't hurt them either. Free trade and largeness can be largely orthogonal issues. And so can largeness and market power.
Sorta true, but if you are in an industry with a low entry cost (hypothetical example) dairy farming, and you have a large herd and facilities. Another smaller dairy farmer comes into the market. You see that they are taking some of your business. So you call your friend Mr. Mayor and voice your concerns about how $expensive_compliance_regualtiob is necessary to "protect consumers" and a law gets passed. Your competitors cannot to afford the afore mentioned new process and are as such drive. Out of business.
So, are big companies hurt by free trade? No, it's how most get started. But once in power, they will lobby to make sure they maintain it
People's values and beliefs usually model the reinforcement signals they've actually received, not the distribution of all such signals that a human being in our world can receive.
So yes, their values and beliefs will tend to support their interests. That is, after all, what values and beliefs are for.
> "Every American think's they are a future millionaire and from this delusion they blindly defend the rights of millionaires to their own detriment."
This sounds clever but it's based on the (fallacious) assumption that everyone's political position should be reflective of their current economic status - or that the government's economic policy should be defensive of one's current economic status - and not doing so is acting against your self-interest.
But it's entirely possible to support a political position that is advantageous to people outside of your own short-term direct self-interest, because you see it as the most beneficial to the most amount of people in the country - and ultimately to yourself, family, friends, and country in the longrun.
Self-interest is often falsely perceived to be merely only about benefiting one's current direct/personal circumstances. Given that:
a) we're social beings
b) we all must live and survive within communities over an extended period of time
a natural side-effect of any one's self-interest within a economic/political system must itself factor other people's interests and external realities.
The exception of course is when an economic/social system attempts to reduce everyone to one imaginary class of people, and a singular self-interest - which is where the Marxism analogy comes in (which opens up another can of worms).
People who want to be tycoons some day tend to have those views. That's not the same as understanding economics, and is arguably detrimental to it.
Globalization hurt my business just as much as it helped. Yes, overseas sales, but my domestic sales just kept getting eroded as people live on less and less money, and it got to a point where I just got onto a Patreon model because my competitors in my industry were becoming too evil: I had to get disruptive in a big way because my industry sector was in a downward spiral of dishonesty, broken promises, DRM, and increasingly ruthless business behavior.
I expect major turmoil in that market within a few years, but I jumped off the train before it went into the ravine ;)
I think these days people who understand economics lean socialist, and I see unironic embracing of even more radical doctrines. Capitalism is following an easily observable trajectory as human worker productivity gains escalate year over year, and that trajectory is not 'upward'.
Have you actually read Marx? Nowhere does he make this claim, nor inspire this thought. I don't know where you're getting this from. Marx does not deny the indidual's individuality. Here's a little quote, which is a criticism from Marx of the very view you are accusing him of:
>The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
(From Theses on Feuerbach)
Please don't accuse us Marxists of the fallacies you can't back up. Besides, even if Marx was accused of economic determinism, it doesn't mean that the critics are right. In fact, here's yet another statement from one of the founders of Marxism (Marx's close friend Friedrich Engels):
"Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible."
Actually the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and yes, people in aggregate are pretty simple. If post-millennium Silicon Valley can be reduced to single idea, it is that predicting that simplicity is a business model.
The only way in which technology entrepreneurs deviate from what you would expect, is in their support for more redistribution. But all these people are not paying normal taxes, anyway. Why would they care? Also if you consider the risk of political or economic instability, then even redistribution might just be a self-interested policy stance.
I also think that it would enable more people to take the risk of trying something new if they knew that failing didn't mean destitution, and I think that we'd see significant upside from that in terms of economic competitiveness. I think I should be paying more taxes than I am to fund that, especially on unearned income.
Most tech people in favor of redistributive schemes like UBI are in favor of the later.
When I look at chart in the article (I haven't read the paper) I get really curious about how 'support for regulation' might break down by issue. A lot of the regulation that the Trump administration is rolling back are environment rules that are strongly net positive for our economy once you account for health care externalities. While many of the regulations that hurt the economy the most (e.g. restrictions on urban housing construction.) are unchallenged.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/gro...
How do you think the results would change if you broke "regulation" down by type e.g. environment/labor/business? I suspect there'd be a significant break between tech elite and the republican donor class on environmental/global warming issues. I also think there's a significant break between the tech elite and some democrats on zoning reform. Though I haven't conducted formal surveys :)
I think this is particularly interesting as it's the one issue were the tech elite didn't look like 'normal democrats' in your graphs - perhaps that outcome is more nuanced then the graphic shows.
Just remove "tech" and you get the same old story. "Same as it ever was..."
They go on to ask SV if 'they are libertarians' by asking if they believe in Minarchism--that the State should only provide police and military, which most libertarians themselves don't even agree is an ideal interpretation.
What a silly piece of work.
There's a whole lot of corporate and political pushback against libertarians, which is getting to be crazy. Google defunded Ron Paul's Youtube channel, which is ridiculous.
Libertarianism is not the opposite of globalism or socialism. In fact, there exist prominent libertarian socialists, Noam Chomsky for example. The reality is libertarianism is the opposite of authoritarianism.
The extreme fringe of libertarianism is anarchism and I think that is really what they were getting at. But most Libertarians as with any political affiliation are not at the fringe (though they may be the loudest).
This would be like judging all Republicans based on the Tea Party or all Democrats based on Socialism.
...but my overall point is that the tech elite is composed of a lot of rich white guys with connections, who naturally help each other out. Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandiose and not good for society. Sam is 33 and because he's a tech billionaire thinks that he should run the most developed economy in the world? He genuinely believes that people outside of tech and business know who he is? He's qualified, because he's shook hands with the best off of society for the past decade?
Why does he deserve that power? Why does Zuckerberg deserve to be president? What makes him qualified? He made a PHP app that got big. Come on. That's what all this boils down to: money and power and a lot of people value that more than anything else in life.
How about we be honest with ourselves as individuals and societies and stop enabling that?
What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat (as I guess most tech people would want to). Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that. But he won't be in front of Trump, he would be in front of many experiences politicians who actually have a clue about how one manages a country.
Yeah the republican primaries are more fair and balanced - we all saw what happened to Bernie in the democratic primaries.
I don't know what you saw, but I saw Clinton winning 55% of the vote.
So, where is this all coming from -- that Zuckerberg wants to run for president? I'll bet my house and every last penny I own, he does not want to be president, he will never run for president.
Oh, and he would never win. He's an insanely smart dude, but he hasn't got the charisma to win presidency.
(I do think that a lot of people on HN should run for some higher office in gov't, particularly tptacek and rayiner).
That's why I agree with you that he wouldn't run for president.
However, some of his actions are distinctly political.
http://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-202...
He hired "Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign", and prior to that he hired "David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run".
Your statement is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is actually "insanely smart". He's similar intelligence to a lot of people on HN, but people conflate power and success with visionary ability. Maybe he is that, or maybe he's just a relatively smart guy with lots of connections, a very favorable background, and the same hangups, limitations, biases, and delusions as everyone else.
My point was, the dude is not as clueless as the media and pundits portray him, and he did accomplish the impossible more than once in his life, most recently in the 2016 election.
The actual merits of Trump or Obama notwithstanding, it's been three election cycles now since without traditional career politician in the White House. I'm not sure I can fault tech billionaires for thinking that this might be a real emerging trend, rather than just a pair of consecutive flukes.
That is 100% traditional career politician in almost every way, it's just he was good enough to do it faster than most people.
Either way, if anything in U.S. politics is non-controversial... it should be the observation that three Presidential cycles in a row have been won by upstarts, whose credentials are strikingly out of place alongside their peers of the past century. That's not arguing equivalence, but ignoring all commonality is absurd.
Maybe it's attributable to being "good", or "lucky", or "racist", or some other factors of sheer coincidence. Or maybe it's a symptom of fundamental social or media shift, and signifies a new norm.
The Roman Republic had a concept, the New Man. W was not a New Man nor was his father. Neither were upstarts.
As old as this might make one feel, George W. Bush's last victory was four election cycles ago.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Governor of California. At least as far as the 'what makes him qualified' thing goes, apparently that's not a real concern for voters :)
I'm not sure the fault there was Grey Davis's. Seems there was skulduggery afoot (it's actually a really interesting story, and seemingly a perennial one)
The correct spelling is Gray Davis [1].
The rolling brownouts were caused by Enron [2] who was enabled by legislation (AB 1890) that his predecessor Pete Wilson signed in 1996 [3]. People went to jail for that. [4]
There were no massive deficits under Davis. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, there was a revenue decline but that's about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis
[2] https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/wec/enron...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Staff concludes that supply-demand imbalance, flawed
market design and inconsistent rules made possible
significant market manipulation as delineated in final
investigation report. Without underlying market
dysfunction, attempts to manipulate the market
would not be successful.
Et cetera.
Wilson enabled this although to be fair, he didn't foresee it. The CA energy crisis was the result of mid-90s neoliberal hubris. Like supply side voodoo economics, its lessons get quickly forgotten. Hubris is like that.
>Some critics, such as Arianna Huffington, alleged that Davis was lulled to inaction by campaign contributions from energy producers.[28] In addition, the California State Legislature would sometimes push Davis to act decisively by taking over power plants which were known to have been gamed and place them back under control of the utilities, ensuring a more steady supply and slapping the nose of the worst manipulators . Meanwhile, conservatives argued that Davis signed overpriced energy contracts, employed incompetent negotiators, and refused to allow prices to rise for residences statewide much like they did in San Diego, which they argue could have given Davis more leverage against the energy traders and encouraged more conservation.[29] More criticism is given in the book Conspiracy of Fools, which gives the details of a meeting between the governor and his officials; Clinton Administration Treasury officials; and energy executives, including market manipulators such as Enron, where Gray Davis disagreed with the treasury officials and energy executives<
The fact remains that the CA energy crisis was enabled by Republicans for the benefit of Ken Lay's Enron Corp. Then when it happened Republicans complained loudly and political advantage of their created crisis.
That being said, the point of campaigning for office is to demonstrate why you deserve the votes. Nothing wrong with a young successful guy giving it a try. Who knows - maybe the qualities that made him successful would translate well to governing. If anything, I think we should encourage more non-lawyers to run!
California ranks #8 in GDP per capita in the US among states. It's around $59,000 for 2017, which is high globally but not particularly high vs the overall US figure of ~$57,000.
California ranks near the bottom in education and is 35th in poverty rate.
The title of most developed US state goes to Massachusetts most likely. It has a super high GDP per capita and median income, and is generally highly developed in most regards including education, poverty, and median standard of living. The problem is, it's the size of a Scandinavian nation. New Hampshire is even worse: they have one of the world's highest median incomes and GDP per capita figures, but only 1.3 million people.
Really agree with this post
https://medium.com/@russroberts/the-world-turned-upside-down...
the candidates you mentioned only did well in limited/specific geographies (such as their home state). i followed the primaries on both sides, and had you consolidated the votes to trump vs other, trump would have won. its also very unlikely that 'other' would all vote for 'other' if they weren't specifically allowed to vote for someone like Cruz.
That is because the other candidates all took their own piece of the pie. The republican and democratic primaries were very similar. You had someone framed as a populist outsider who was selling themselves on their ability to fix the system. On the democratic side you had one other establishment candidate who more or less campaigned on the status quo. On the republican side you had numerous establishment candidates that basically campaigned on the status quo who split the vote and several outsider candidates that never had much support at all. The democratic side was consolidated much earlier around their candidate. The republican side never consolidated around an establishment candidate because it was never clear which establishment candidate was the favorite. This allowed Trump to succeed with his consistent 20-30% of republicans in early primaries.
The bar is not terribly high and I think successful tech leaders are probably more qualified than anyone else that shows up.
I think the idea of having representatives and leaders is a bit old fashioned to begin with. But if we are going to have them, they should be the most competent intelligent people we can find from outside of politics.
More effective communication across borders and languages will build trust and create opportunities for hardworking and talented individuals around the world. Bureaucratic obstacles that prevent this level of decentralized operation today, like visa restrictions and regulations around money transfers, will become either irrelevant or be circumvented as digital solutions are discovered.
Imagine all of your accounts -- Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, Netflix, New York Times subscription -- linked to an "official profile." Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results.
People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.
Oh, and if any of you disagree with them, don't worry. They made a point of saying they can't be held responsible, and that boycotting their products or refusing to work for them will hurt you more than them.
It is, after all, much easier to blame a single product or company for a particularly evil application of technology than to acknowledge the limitations of personal responsibility.
Certain subsections of the technology industry that receive particularly negative attention will have trouble recruiting engineers or attracting users to and monetizing their products, despite the fact that such atrophying will not solve the problem (and will only hurt the community of users in the end, by denying them the full benefits of innovation.)
Don't be evil. Don't be Google.
This is pretty damn terrifying.
Who is the authority on what qualifies as a "myth" or a "lie"?
We're coming closer to a Ministry of Truth every single day. And people who I would otherwise call 'smart' are actively cheering for it if it protects their own sacred belifs
I suppose it could be used by some as a dogwhistle, but it seems there's also a meaningful set of ideas that can be represented by that term.
That's not what 'globalist' means outside of the fringes. It's certainly not the way the linked article uses it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_antisemitism#Anti-globaliz...
Aren't libertarians also globalists?
(I am not asking for full answer.. you can point me books or links)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates#18th.E2.80.931...
Libertarianism and globalism are not mutually exclusive. There's a whole spectrum of libertarians from anarcho-capitalists to libertarian socialists (I'm somewhere in the middle-left, I'd reckon). The unifying trait is the belief that individual freedom is paramount.
The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run"
The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"
Until the Gray-Triber realizes that there's no real feedback loop between policy effectiveness and actual policy and end up as either a resigned left-winger or bitter right-winger
No, it is "This government program is poorly-run probably because it is severely underfunded."
After all, "government is poorly-run" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is used to justify spending cuts, which does in fact result in performance problems.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." -Grover Norquist, 2001
Oh wait, studies require funding too, so we can't have those.
I mean do you honestly believe that a Republican would propose increasing funding of a non-military, non-security agency if they were shown hard evidence that said agency's problems were in fact caused by lack of money?
Anecdotally, I've worked as a business analyst with many government agencies, and I've found that in most cases they are underfunded, sometimes horrifyingly so.
More likely than not, an honest analysis would see the 80/20 rule show up, dozens of needless and redundant positions will be exposed, and when presented with the data the agency is most likely to scoff at the idea of cutting headcount and spending through efficiency as that means a smaller budget for next year. A fun example of this is Detroit Water and Sewer's egregious spending on asinine positions such as a farrier, despite having no horses.
E.g. Crime in inner-city neighbourhoods. It's 2017, we should be able to put cameras (facial-recognition and license-plate-reading) at every street corner, inside every store, track every single gang-member, and subsequently institute curfews for them that would probably eliminate 90% of crime. But, we don't. We skirt around the issue, we try fix it using "round-about" "ways, means, incentives" and all other manner of things instead of tackling a problem head-on with near-unlimited funding. If it was up to me, I'd ramp up funding to a ridiculous degree, and then start scaling back after the problem is solved. Not the other way around, whereby the program and society as a whole has to beg politicians and the rest of us to fund things properly.
Think it's more like "Lets spend more money to fix it".
It's worth it to pay attention to voices most critical of the biggest, most broken government program.
The rest is quibbling over minutiae.
I guess it all comes down to your definition of "poorly run".
Just skimming google for Gray Tribe stuff and seeing that it's basically another name for 'libertarian tech workers', this isn't their stereotype. The stereotypical libertarian position on government programs, poorly-run or not, is the same as the right-wing position: "let's get rid of it".
To be honest, the OP's description where the favoured group was clearly superior than the dumb-as-rocks alternatives reminded me of a book I once saw. The author had decided that since there were 13 lunar months in a year, there should be 13 zodiac signs. So she invented a new one - the spider. It's defining features were 'magic' and 'mystery' and it was just all-around better than the other signs... and conveniently her birthday happened to fall in the range of this new sign. :)
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
[2] https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/three-modern-g...
I think it's a pretty good idea.
"Liberal" has an existing meaning which has been warped by American politics. Both the American parties have a liberal heritage. Republicans are conservative liberals, and Democrats are largely progressive liberals. Libertarianism is a reactionary liberal ideology that seeks to return to a freer, less-regulated market.
The confusion happened due to FDR. He ran on a progressive platform but the term "progressive" was poisoned in American politics at the time, so he called himself "liberal".
There is already a term for what you're describing, simply "left-libertarianism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
Liberal markets + social safety net sounds like garden variety Nordic model democracy to me. The term "left-libertarian" is usually ascribed to groups like Catalonian anarchists or Zapatistas.
The latter would destroy or corrupt the former. It's a horrible idea.
My main concern with this is that people raised by successful, hard-working people don't understand poverty and the culture around it.
Zuckerberg is a perfect example. He's a guy who preaches about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, but he grew up in an upper middle class suburb that was lily white and had no diversity itself.
As a guy who grew up in a working class family with major cultural dysfunction that was mirrored by people all around me, I recognize that the typical "solutions" tossed out by these people are useless.
I WISH that the only reason minorities were underrepresented in tech was racism. The real reason is the culture of poverty. This spans race. How many white people from trailer parks in West Virginia or Kentucky do you encounter in the tech scene? Probably a similar number to black people from poor inner-city neighborhoods. Almost none.
In fact, when you encounter minorities in SV, they are typically from middle class families with college-educated parents. It's a perfect example of why the "surface" aspects of diversity are not only a bad metric, but one that contributes to the problem by acting as a red herring from true root causes.
Yet the SV CEOs think they know everything because they built a web app that streams music.
That's a bold claim.
Sometimes I wonder how the conversation would shift if Silicon Valley were instead Silicon Delta or someplace else Southern. For instance Atlanta has a fairly robust black middle class and has long been a hub in the South. Would we be having the same kinds of conversations about minority representation if Silicon Valley were centered in a region that gave a geographic advantage to another minority? In the same way that half of the Asian population is concentrated on the West Coast, half of the Black population is concentrated in the south, as well as a good chunk of the black middle class. Would we see a lot more black people in tech if the tech industry called Atlanta rather than San Francisco home?
Even so, could decentralization and remote work be seen as an avenue to increase diversity? I don't know the answers to these questions but I would love to see stuff where researchers have asked them.
that explains most traits attributed by OP to the SV people.
(Of course, I'll admit, neither has "true" Communism ... or so its supporters claim.)