Good for these people. They are essentially moving our society forward.
To me, in that light, neither the "depredations" of owners and investors nor the "coercion" of labor unions is really a problem; it's just the natural give and take of the market at work.
The real problem is the late 20th century stigma labor organization has acquired. Without labor organization, the market system doesn't work.
Giving a generous maternity leave is "leaving value on the table". Evading taxes via the double-irish or contractor/employee loopholes is "creating shareholder value".
It's like Gordon Gekko and George Orwell collaborated.
I think the stigma is well-deserved. Indeed they are rife with corruption and often create very odd incentives.
Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value. People focus on the drawbacks and it's much easier to convince them that we're all better off without unions.
Unless you're arguing for the elimination of the market system, "this structure in a market economy is prone to corruption" isn't a dispositive argument, or really an argument at all.
Similarly, ownership and capital has a tendency to view labor as a black-box machine. If the machine, when operated in Indonesia, produces comparable financial results, what's the point in running the machine in the US? And so pretty much ever job that can be outsourced is outsourced.
Management can have the worst of both worlds. Most managers are hired guns. A ten-year stint at the helm of a company is a respectable tenure, but it's a short period of time compared to the life of some firms. Management in large firms routinely harms both employees and the long-term prospects of the firm by optimizing for short-term metric gains that boost their own compensation.
There's no part of the system that works flawlessly, or isn't freighted with obvious problems. It's kind of a miracle that things work at all. Nevertheless, they often do. And they work better for everyone when all the stakeholders are organized and engaged.
There're always issues of misaligned or perverse incentives. Although I have no illusions about union leaders having a particular interest in company success, it's not worse than company management having no particular interest in company success. And, since they have less power, they have less of a negative impact on the company and society in general.
The problem is when the company is a monopoly, which should be carefully monitored.
Because his fact-free attack is demonstrably wrong. The majority of unions are invested in the companies they provide labor for. By way of example, Germany has unions that are evidently committed to the company's existence - to the extent that labor being represented at board level is not unusual. That is the kind of, ahem, synergy that should exist between capital and labor, but is anathema in the US.
In contrast, some executives are effectively mercenaries with no interest in the long-term survival of companies, they work on very short horizons, but I never hear anyone demanding that management is toxic and shouldn't exist.
If we aren't discouraging the first, why the second?
Are you asserting that unions are significantly more corrupt than the average corporation, government or charity or just that human institutions in general have a problem with corruption?
Unions - the folks who brought you the weekend. (That's a button and bumper sticker.) Also the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week, which the US somehow lost.
"Unions - the folks who bought you immigration quotas" would be equally accurate, but I guess they don't want to remind people of that.
Republicans call themselves The party of Lincoln, Bell labs reminding people they invented the semiconductor, etc. Hearkening back to something you did a long time ago seems like a purposeful hand wave away from the present or recent history.
Unions are constantly fighting to make sure that the pilots of commercial planes are allowed to get enough sleep and not be totally exhausted while flying. And to make sure that flight attendants are only half-zombies...
If a pilot needs so much sleep that they can only safely work 18 hours per week, I'd hate to think how compromised a passenger's safety is when being shuttled around by a Taxi/Uber driver working 40-80 hours per week.
Do you have a source for any of those facts? Are you picking on 737 pilots for a reason, or do you really mean to imply this is the average for an Australian pilot?
It all seems unlikely to be true, given that their competitors in the US are limited to 290 working hours and 100 flight hours per month, though those are maximums and are typically reduced by things like flying in the early/late hours, flight connection times, etc. If this were true, it would be very hard for any Australian international airline to compete on long haul flights, and Qantas is doing quite well.
sources:
A summary: http://work.chron.com/duty-limitations-faa-pilot-17646.html
And from the FAA (US air transport regulator): https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...
As much as I would have liked these numbers to be false, they are sadly reality.
Whenever you think about some corrupt rent-seeking union bureaucrat being a drain on an efficient system, just think about Mayer's compensation package relative to the value she created. Unionized workers just want basic needs like health care and a chance to not retire in poverty. As a taxpayer who gets the bill for the externalized costs of labor extraction by executives, you probably also want this.
This is a very broad statement, which could just as easily be applied to management/capital.
So, no the problem with US manufacturing is mostly a question of MBA's not factory workers. The core issue is companies are not run based on Labor or Capital but a middle layer focused into very short term thinking.
EX: Pensions look great for management as they can jump ship long before the bill is due.
You forgot the real reason anyone is paid more than nothing: because they could go somewhere else or do something else.
Also pay in different countries differs by productivity level much more than by any measure of unionization.
Capitalism is an inherently unstable system and only works with good regulation. I think a capitalist system only works as well as its regulation.
However, I think it is important for regulations to generally (not always) be structured on a sliding scale that is directly related to company size, i.e. the bigger the business, the more regulations it becomes subject to. Otherwise, regulations become a cudgel with which small businesses are beaten down because only the big established players can afford to comply. In today's age of regulatory capture in the USA, we are seeing this play out. Industries have been consolidating, and the productivity gains therefrom are not being passed onto the consumer via price cuts.
Government is always going to be an ongoing, adaptive process with back-and-forth struggles and adjudication between interested parties. Maybe we'll evolve into a more inherently cooperative species in the future, but you're definitely right about what the first business response is. :)
And I'm sure there are restaurant owners out there who aren't complete assholes.
Alternately, we could institute worker protections and support unions (which are necessary to develop the political will to institute worker protections) so they all have to treat you decently and everyone who works hard for a living can have a humane reasonable life.
And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.
The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.
has never existed in the history of modern civilization for more than 5 minutes. Ironically for your statement, the most unregulated markets are the most violent as they only occur after one government falls before institutions create themselves to deal with the chaotic state of unorganized and fearful humans.
It will be interesting to see if the digital economy brings with it any self-created software companies (purely software companies created and administered by self-writing software) which tries to avoid any attempts to shut it down.
Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
Only in the most extreme interpretation of the word.
"No person forced you to work for me. "
Maybe not, but the idea that I will be fired if I don't do what you say means that it's not entirely voluntary.
"I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the most."
Again, that's not voluntary. That's exploitation.
"If however I put a gun to your head and tell you to work 20 hours a day I actively make your options worse by force."
Guns are not the only way to exercise force. Company towns were full of force. Just not physical.
"such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head."
Guns are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy.
> Maybe not, but the idea that I will be fired if I don't do what you say means that it's not entirely voluntary.
Being fired is simply no longer engaging in the transaction where one party trades their money for the labour of the other party.
> Guns are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy.
I did not say that they were.
That won't make it any better. You're still hand waving away a lot of exploitation.
"Being fired is simply no longer engaging in the transaction where one party trades their money for the labour of the other party."
Which is a threat of force often used when the employer wants the employee to do something that may be unethical, or simply wrong (like making someone work 20 hours a day).
"I did not say that they were."
But the way you're phrasing things, and focusing on them, indicates that you believe that physical force is the only force that matters.
I'm not hand waving away any exploitation. I did not pass any moral judgement, for or against. I described what an unregulated market is. To do so I used the word "voluntary", and I explained what I meant by that word in that context. In particular, it does not include the use of a gun to make somebody give you their wallet.
I'm seriously amazed that we are having a whole discussion as a result of me saying that "unregulated market" doesn't mean that you can shoot people.
> Which is a threat of force often used when the employer wants the employee to do something that may be unethical, or simply wrong (like making someone work 20 hours a day).
Only if your definition of "threat of force" is so broad as to include not giving you money. Is it also a threat of force if an employee says that they will quit their job if they don't get a raise? It may be a threat, but a threat of _force_?
> But the way you're phrasing things, and focusing on them, indicates that you believe that physical force is the only force that matters.
That is not what you said. You said "_Guns_ are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy."
This inhumane treatment inevitably ends up with physical violence, because it is the only resort left when the dominant's autnority is questioned.
You don't need to trust me, just look at the events of labour-related violence in the US at the turn of 20th century. Observe what happened before the situation became violent, and you will realize that in dozens of examples, the mechanisms that led to violence are the same: a class of workers that were dispossessed of so many rights that physically removing them did not look despicable as a business option.
Here are a few examples to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Labor_Wars
Holding people captive is the opposite of voluntary.
> Here are a few examples to start with
First example: Colorado National Guard massacres workers who refuse to work.
Second example: a company, working together with the sheriff, kidnaps and kills people who refuse to work.
These examples do not show that the dispossessed have to resort to physical violence because that's their only resort left. The physical violence was initiated by the companies working together with the government.
Just read the description on Wikipedia:
> Those who went on strike were promptly evicted from their company homes, and they moved to tent villages prepared by the union. The tents were built on wood platforms and furnished with cast iron stoves on land leased by the union in preparation for a strike.
So far so good.
> Baldwin–Felts had a reputation for aggressive strike breaking. Agents shone searchlights on the tent villages at night and fired bullets into the tents at random, occasionally killing and maiming people. They used an improvised armored car, mounted with a machine gun the union called the "Death Special" to patrol the camp's perimeters. The steel-covered car was built in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company plant in Pueblo, Colorado from the chassis of a large touring sedan. Frequent sniper attacks on the tent colonies drove the miners to dig pits beneath the tents where they and their families could be better protected.
The workers were using their right to refuse to work! What the workers needed was precisely government enforcement of the law that you can't just go around shooting people. This is the exact opposite of what you implied it was.
Yet, you were saying that compelling me to work 20 hours a day, which would effectively give me no time at all to find another job, was perfectly fine and still voluntary.
In that context, claiming that a choice is possible for miners is an illusion. And as many examples illustrate, physical violence is merely one more step which can not perceived as fundamentally different from the previous ones.
This is why this violence was the natural next move whenever miners tried to unionize.
Once you've piled up all these kinds of domination schemes, it becomes hard for the owner to actually discern the difference between all of this and physical violence ; it is also a process of dehumanization that makes it much harder to consider the workers deserve safety. Therefore, violence that goes as far as deportation, mutilation or death becomes acceptable.
My point being, there is no instance of unfettered relations of power that don't end up like that.
I believe there's a large corpus of work on the various areas involved here, if you want a specific precision, I can try to find relevant infos.
The whole point of what I said was that in a free market the transactions have to be voluntary. Whatever your definition of voluntary, the precise meaning of which can be debated, it does not include opening sniper fire on people in order to make them work.
Exploitation is an incoherent doctrine. A moral crime, where the victim is strictly better off for having been victimized! A crime where each successful enforcement action makes all parties strictly worse off, but where the person who suffers most from enforcement is the "victim."
In a just world, someone who supports this doctrine would be made to suffer in proportion to the suffering they willfully and violently inflict on the most vulnerable by removing their access to "exploitative" situations.
Wanting people to enjoy a high standard of living is noble. Wanting to get there by banning all labor transactions that don't confer an uppper-class lifestyle is lunacy. Redistribute the income. Make direct provision for services. Whatever. Don't pat yourself on the back for removing the best option of someone with no options. That's about the vilest and most evil thing a human being can do. Give them better ones.
Property rights don't exist without some form of regulation.
> Property rights don't exist without some form of regulation.
If by regulation you mean any law whatsoever, certainly. That's not what people usually mean by unregulated market. When people say "unregulated car market" they don't mean a market in which I can steal your car. They could mean a market in which you can sell me a car without safety belts.
Another example is the minimum wage. Let's say that I want to offer to work for you for $5 an hour and you want to accept this offer. This is a transaction that we would both voluntarily engage in, but it is not allowed by the minimum wage law.
If we include stealing and unrestricted use of guns in the meaning of "unregulated market", then the word becomes all but useless. We have other words to describe those situations.
The concept of an unregulated market that includes land ownership is already nonsense because the system of land ownership is inherently non-voluntary. I never opted into the system where people can exclude me from certain parts of the earth; it was imposed on me with the threat of violence.
It comes from exactly that, and the system in which that occurred was not a free market.
> it was imposed on me with the threat of violence.
Absolutely, _the system_ is imposed with the threat of violence. I said that transactions within the system must be voluntary.
When your factory is producing noise pollution around it, is that a volutary transaction you have entered into with your neighbours? What about when it pollutes the air, or the water? What about transactions where both sides don't have perfect information? How can you voluntarily agree to a transaction in which you don't know what you're getting, but your counterparty does? What about the fact that most revealed preferences are largely fiction?
Voluntary transactions are pure fiction. Nothing actually operates on that principle. You can't construct a functioning society from them, without requiring an orgy of arbitrary logical and ethical gymnastics.
> Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. The word "voluntary" becomes completely useless with the meaning you describe. You can do the same to any word, even words such as "apple". If you let an apple rot it eventually becomes compost. Somewhere in between it stops being an apple. By the same type of reasoning you can conclude that "apples are pure fiction". These kind of language games are not very useful.
It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bearing in justice, are explained.
It's basically ad-hoc law in benefit of the privileged. Bottom-up resistance is violence. Top-down violence/exploitation is a voluntary exchange.
The problem in the age of kings was that kings enjoyed special rights and the populace did not have property rights. The king could, and often did, take whatever he wanted without consent. We see the conflict between aristocracy and private property even in modern times. Consider how the aristocracy in the UK reacted to Thatcher's selling off government entities to the people who worked in those entities. The aristocracy reacted in horror when they saw ordinary "peasants" getting control of what were previously government entities controlled by the aristocracy. They desperately attempted to throw her out of the conservative party, and eventually succeeded.
I would also point out that the places on earth where the poor have relatively good lives are precisely the places with property rights, and that the places where the poor aren't even able to get a loaf of bread (e.g. north korea, venezuela, several countries in sub-saharan africa) are precisely the places without property rights.
I'm surprised by the extent to which the recent rise of socialism has even penetrated HN. I fear we need another 100 million cold bodies to relearn that lesson.
You do realize that even if the common people would have property rights during the age of kings it wouldn't matter? Neither will it in a modern version of it. The concentration of capital/property, and thus kings, would be inevitable. I'm sure this is a feature and not a bug given the demographics of libertarians.
Also you could've spared me the inevitable "Let's compare the idea I oppose by a measurement than I'm not willing to judge my own idea". I'm sure we could compile an equal body count of regimes calling themselves free market/market economy/capitalist or similar. But people using this body count rhetoric seldom accept such comparisons.
What libertarians believe is not relevant. I am not a libertarian and do not speak for them. I do not share their dogmatic understanding of the word voluntary. I agree that the meaning is not perfectly well defined and that there is a discussion to be had, but there are limits to which you can stretch its meaning. What of my description of voluntary is not widely accepted?
> You do realize that even if the common people would have property rights during the age of kings it wouldn't matter? Neither will it in a modern version of it.
Except for the fact that it has. Almost all aristocratic families in my country have gone all but bankrupt. They have had to transform their castles into hotels and museums in order to barely break even on the cost of the upkeep. In fact, many of these castles are receiving government help as monuments.
> I'm sure we could compile an equal body count of regimes calling themselves free market/market economy/capitalist or similar.
No, you cannot. There are a few, like the Pinochet regime, but the death toll is orders of magnitude off. In fact, although authoritarian politically, Chile did transform from the poorest country in Latin America into the richest. And it transitioned to democracy with very little violence.
However, I'll give you a starting point for compiling a list by the same yard stick; there was recently news coverage of an Indian politician accusing Churchill of genocide. It has been barely contested, and for good historical reason. And that's the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
You have also not pointed out what is ahistorical about my view, let alone provided evidence that it is in fact ahistorical.
That's a regulation, and for that to be binding, it needs to be backed up by coercion and violence.
In an unregulated market, whether or not one can shoot people, or whether or not transactions should be voluntary, would be decided like everything else by success or failure through competition in the marketplace.
You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
> You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
In what sense is that a market at all? Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. Unregulated market implies that all voluntary transactions are legal. A regulated market is a market in which some transactions are disallowed even if they are voluntary. Minimum wage, for example, makes it illegal for you to offer your services for $5 per hour.
That doesn't have to be true for all parties. Referring to your earlier comment, that "an unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people," I would claim that, yes it does - all that's needed is for someone to pay you to shoot people. Murder for hire, extortion, blackmail, piracy and slavery are all examples of valid markets with non-voluntary participation. Morally reprehensible, but still valid.
https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/a...
In the long run, the reduced profit margins caused by wages that are artificially high (above the rate that would be established by the free market) results in less investment (profits == compensation for investors), which means a slower rate of economic and wage growth.
>>If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history,
I encourage you to read a diverse set of perspectives. I'd argue that unions have more power than employers in being able to shape the historical narrative.
I'm not going to compare their power to employers' power, but it is definitely true that unions have been able to write their preferred version of history with labor law.
Notice how we never talk about the historical ties between labor unions and white supremacy. It's all right there in the public record - there's no denying that it happened - but it's always ignored in the public narrative.
In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power that is keeping wages at "artificial" levels is in fact that of employers.
Very few firms can engage in such behavior. A pact like this can only be maintained by a small number of very large firms, and only the firms party to the pact will abide by it, leaving the entire rest of the employer market in a competitive state.
Even had the antitrust action not stopped this behavior, it's questionable how much of an impact this behavior had in restraining wage growth in Silicon Valley's tech sector, and how long the pact would have lasted given its informal nature, and the temptation to cheat due to the intense completion between those party to it.
If wages being below the natural, market rate, due to collusion between large firms is your concern, then the right solution is antitrust action. Unionisation in the current legal environment (where unions can affectively hold their firm hostage, and thus reduce labour market freedom) creates numerous unintended consequences that adversely affect industries.
>>In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power
Corporate earning growth is at historically low rates. Wages have stagnated because economic output growth has stagnated. See this comment:
And the same can't be said about the market power of unions?
> Corporate earning growth is at historically low rates.
Cherry picked statistic. Corporate earnings as a percent of GDP are record high. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik And your linked chart shows exactly my point, wages relative to productivity have been decreasing.
Obviously with anything like this you have a hard time showing a direct causation, which is why I am confused that you are claiming that you can prove a clear causation in the exact opposite direction that the economy has been moving.
Your argument surely requires a mythical perfect market without externalities?
Also low wages are not an externality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The point of letting the market modulate supply and demand is that it encourages an economically optimal allocation of resources.
If you'd like to have a more in depth discussion on this, perhaps you could post a thread in a more appropriate forum like Reddit and we can discuss it there.
The social cost of poverty is surely an externality. If you don't pay people enough to cover their healthcare, to give them the ability to provide a stable family environment or have a reasonable housing situation then the cost will have to be paid somewhere else in the system. And it probably will cost the economy more the further down the line it finally bubble up.
> The point of letting the market modulate supply and demand is that it encourages an economically optimal allocation of resources.
Only assuming a perfect market. Which is about as plausible a concept as a socialist paradise. The real world is messy and imperfect. People aren't rational actors. Laws are imperfect. Regulators are corrupt. Information doesn't flow everywhere equally. Monopolies and cartels exist.
There may be some externalities associated by poverty, but the same could extend to taxing corporations more. You don't reduce poverty by moving private wealth around by government fiat anyway.
>Only assuming a perfect market.
Free markets are an ideal to strive toward. The unattainability of the ideal isn't a reason to abandon its pursuit. Economies work better when the ideal is pursued and artificial barriers to contracting and private property rights aren't hoisted on people via legislation.
But I digress, if you'd like to discuss this in more detail, please post a thread in a more appropriate forum.
If you meant competitiveness of businesses, sure, it probably does that. But the logical conclusion for that line of reasoning ends up with us working in a Gulag.
Also, I recommend rereading your post with "labour" as "proletariat" and "investor" as "bourgeoisie". Hopefully you'll discover class consciousness.
If that were true we ought to make all income flat. Private property rights allows those who are the smartest investors of capital to generally control more of it. This leads to better capital allocation, which leads to more growth of wealth. Wealth has broad societal benefits through positive externalities so it's in our interest to see it expand, regardless of how it's distributed.
>Hopefully you'll discover class consciousness.
Marxist tribalism. There is a reason all Marxist economies fail to keep up with market economies.
what about the part where a single person can now add enough utility to the world and capture the entirety of sales and ownership of it without needing to own anything?
1. Isn't that a gain?
2. Who has taken it?
Or doesn't it count as "labor" anymore if you work for yourself? Isn't owning your own work in full, the ultimate triumph of the proletariat?
Piketty has nothing to say on this subject but I'm curious if after "two decades of reading about labor history" and given your participation here on HN (a forum of YCombinator, which enables anyone to become an entrepreneur) you have anything to say about whether this is a genuine gain. I also see you're C-level at upsolve.org - which helps low-income Americans.
Isn't the fact that in my estimation at least 80% of those Americans could theoretically learn to code within 6 months (for the remaining 20% it may be too difficult) and with minimal (or no) financial backing capture some part of some output on the Internet, a source of victory for labor?
If any of those "low-income Americans" build a web startup without funding (through perseverance and learning) then are they now 'evil', and taking from someone else? Who are they taking from in that case?
I am sure you agree that wealth is not a zero-sum gain, and I am sure you see it is difficult to apply theories of exploitation of the working class, to one-person startups.
What do you think about the movement toward a knowledge economy, and a lowering of the barriers to creating value and startups?
I am particularly interested in this because I did not receive satisfying answers from experts in this field. Thanks for any thoughts. (Genuinely interested.)
I have strong opinions about this. I worked at Hack Reactor the first year it was open and started the subreddit reddit.com/r/LearnJavaScript, so I have a lot of experience with helping people go from 0 to employed software engineer.
Your estimations and assumptions are pretty flawed here, IMHO. Here's why:
1) 80% of Americans can't learn to code, unless you start training them at a relatively young age. Older people are not good at learning (they _can_ be taught to learn better, but that is separate problem).
2) Even if 80% could, 6 months is not enough time without full-time investment therein.
3) How many Americans can spend 6 months coding full-time for no pay? The majority of Americans don't even have $1,000 in the bank. This is out of their reach.
4) Even if you had 6 months full-time, you'd need to be on a pretty directed schedule, probably set by some sort of mentor. This costs money.
None of this is to say that we couldn't create conditions, via government policies, to foster conditions more suited for enabling the sort of labor mobility you describe. I actually think that is what these unionized workers are doing via higher wages and more structured time off. They have taken more for themselves and thus expanded their range of opportunities.
> If any of those "low-income Americans" build a web startup without funding (through perseverance and learning) then are they now 'evil', and taking from someone else? Who are they taking from in that case?
Not many people can build a company. Like, it is fun to act like everyone in America is a potential entrepreneur, but, in reality, the vast majority of people don't want to start a startup. Period. Let's not deny these people a full stake in society and the economy just because they don't want to go for the jugular.
But this is a much higher standard than being able to put a web site up. It's the difference between learning accounting well enough to do accounting for someone - and learning Excel well enough to add your own business's costs up.
The former has much higher requirements.
So what I was really asking for is your perspective about someone starting an online business by themselves. Without learning any skill well enough to work as an employee for someone else, doing the same thing.
Basically I think that you summarize the difference here:
>Not many people can build a company. Like, it is fun to act like everyone in America is a potential entrepreneur,
I consider that point of view kind of patronizing. I think that yes, everyone (100% of people) can build a company. And, everyone in America is a potential entrepreneur. That's my perspective.
So, what is interesting is that you attack the premise, but have nothing to say about what happens to people who successfully "go for the jugular". For example, I asked if they are "bad" people if they make a successful online business; if they are then "taking" from someone. You don't answer, but essentially say it is a silly question.
Maybe so, but that reply does not offer a moral perspective on entrepreneurship.
I have a decent amount of experience. I actually think something like 90% of Americans could figure out how to code if they really wanted to. If we taught it in schools starting at age ~5, we could probably get to that number. It's not just that it's hard, it is that it costs money to learn to code. The cost is directly proportional to age.
> I consider that point of view kind of patronizing.
I realized it sounded patronizing when I wrote it, but I didn't want to get distracted explaining why I didn't feel patronizing when I wrote it, so I will explain here:
I agree that virtually 100% of people build a company. But you have to want to. My point was: The overwhelming majority of people don't actually want to. So I think any discussion of policies needs to take that fact into consideration. I'm not going to try to make policy based on the world I wish I lived in rather than the world I actually live in. I'm not going to punish people for not wanting to be entrepreneurs. The world needs its worker bees. Honor the working bee.
> have nothing to say about what happens to people who successfully "go for the jugular". For example, I asked if they are "bad" people if they make a successful online business; if they are then "taking" from someone. You don't answer, but essentially say it is a silly question.
I also honor entrepreneurship (I am ~5 startups in myself). I do not believe wealth is a zero-sum game.
Of course you are not a bad person if you build a successful business. Morality is about how you conduct yourself in the pursuit of success and what you do with the power you acquire.
Also thanks for the work you put into greater equality and fairness of outcomes. Entrepreneurship is probably a separate, different axis. (Even though it's the one I asked about.)
Also, as the article put it, in the short term, I think Google is putting themselves in a very weak position by making their expansion in San Jose. They could've picked a number of different tech hubs in the rest of the US, but instead chose San Jose. They'll be paying a much higher cost of labor for both engineering talent, plus the countless payoffs they'll need to make to local governments. But, I guess, it must all be worth it, otherwise they wouldn't have done.
If the tech giants paid even more than they do already, wouldn't that hurt everyone else even more than they already because of the competition over housing?
Unfortunately, At this point, the only politically feasible option is to escape the bay area.
In the absence of organizing, wages and conditions can get bid up if there is a shortage of workers for the jobs available. Maybe not so much for the US working class recently but SV programmers, Chinese factory workers and the like have seen their wages go up a lot.