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Comment by smokeyj | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the conventional wisdom of a post-communist society. The kind of society where bike mechanics don't invent flying machines.

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I really like this comment. I think it's a great demonstration, with actually historical example in how society undervalues some areas of the economy and certain jobs, and that inventiveness comes from everywhere.

I know some car mechanics that can take apart an engine in their sleep, and definitely have a knack for mechanics that many mechanical engineers would envy, even with their lack of mathematical training.

That's a real problem with the development of the society with "professional" and "managerial" classes. They try to protect their position by disempowering others. It used to be priests that protected their knowledge, now it's managers, engineers and other professionals.

I see the same in the IT department of my company. Some years ago the local techs could make a lot of changes but slowly corporate IT has taken away power from them and every little thing has to go through architects who then do exactly what the techs would have done anyway. Ford also had to pay more money because the assembly line jobs were so mindnumbingly boring that nobody wanted to do them.

A recurring theme of my career development discussions with my various managers throughout the years has been their gatekeeping. Everything is about them keeping their position at the top and pulling the ladder up behind them. “Oh you don’t really want to be a manager! People-management is a pain, and it’s so much less stress to just stay an individual contributor! Anyway you don’t have the background or pedigree for management...” Pretty much quoting Huxley’s alpha/beta class conditioning phrases.

Is this supposed to make sense?

The Wright brothers wee bicycle mechanics.

I meant more the post-communism part.

I didn’t get the post communist part either. But I connected with the idea that we are moving to a world where people think that innovation can only be produced by certain classes of people.

The Wright brothers lived at the same time that Kafka and Weber were writing about bureaucracies. It was the time of positivism; the belief that social sciences could usher in scientific societies led by technocrats. Bourgeois professionals of the less progressive inclination thought that people could be managed in a mechanical fashion (now only certain kinds of less socially aware engineers dare to admit to their self-serving professional biases in public).

I don’t think the turn of the 20th century was more egalitarian in the sense that you speak of.

I don’t think that time was more egalitarian. The Wright brothers are just an excellent example of innovation coming from people nobody expects it to come from. Even their methods were top notch.

Back then they had classes of people who thought innovation was theirs solely and we have that now too.

No, I don't think it makes any sense. It seems to be saying that a "post-communist society" is a place "where bike mechanics don't invent flying machines". This seems to imply that a communist society is the kind of place where bike mechanics do invent flying machines, which, historically, is laughably far from the truth. Those bike mechanics, first, had the money to be able to invest some of it in experimenting with flying, and second, did so in the hope of further profit. They were very much capitalists, not just in the society they lived in, but also in behavior and motivation.

Child’s play. True capitalists (1) hire wage labor to do the actual work, and (2) enlist the aid of the state to do all R&D and later use any technology that comes out of the research (socialize the costs (risks), privatize the profits).

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