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Comment by csb6 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it’s discouraging. But Hacker News is a place for capitalists (self-identified) or wannabe capitalists to hold discussions, and the site is run by a venture capital firm, so makes sense. Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

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Well-informed, good-faith disagreement is possible on a range of topics, including this one.

I agree wholeheartedly, though I'm not seeing much disagreement or discussion, I'm just seeing downvotes on any comment that even suggests the remote possibility unions might actually be a good thing.

> Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

In theory unions are great. In practice America's implementation of unions end up as a crappy caricature of the theoretical one and are nothing like their European counterparts.

Maybe recently, with many American unions struggling just to survive, but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective and pioneering.

> but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective

So basically unions were good for ~50 years until the Mafia infiltrated the Teamsters?

Unions in the western world in the post-war period made historical compromises with industry that helped contribute to 30-40 years of relative labour peace and high middle class prosperity. They purged communists and other radicals from their ranks, took anti-Soviet positions, and adopted cooperative and conciliatory bargaining positions that gained higher pay and job security by dropping some of the more classic demands of shopfloor control and political change.

As a result unions started to look more like guilds than classic unions, they became managerial organizations like the businesses they were attached to, and they often lost legitimacy with their own memberships as a result.

When the economy started to contract in the 70s they weren't in a good position to fight, and their influence waned. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s they lost any kind of bargaining position -- nobody was afraid of the reds anymore, so they didn't need the unions or social democrats or Keynesian liberals to pacify the population and stomp out communist sympathy.

I think it's maybe a bit more subtle. In our industry there's what I call the "California Ideology" (after the classic essay: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo... which is a bit dated but still stands the test of time)

At one point this perspective was fairly counter cultural -- computing technology fused with Alvin Toffleresque third wavism, a tinge of libertarianism but without a suit and tie, some LSD, some cyberpunk, wear jeans to work, "change the world", etc. But that sheen is increasingly wearing off.

The reality under the surface dressing is we are part of an industry with deep military ties, and it doesn't matter if you wear jeans to work and get vegan treats in the cafe, there's nothing particularly radical about computing technology and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way.

We're part of a semi-managerial class that is doing on the whole pretty damn well financially, but there's no reason to expect that to last forever.

A lot of us ran around saying "information wants to be free" in the 90s and so on, it looked a bit naive to me then, but now it just looks comical and sad.

> and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way

There is a good argument to be made that increasing the GDP is a moral imperative [0]. I know it's increasingly trendy to think all of capitalism is evil and we should tear the whole global economic system down (and to tweet about it from your iPhone while sitting in your air conditioned home, eating your meal delivered by Doordash). As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be, and there are lots of things in the world that should be improved, it's also true that for the vast majority of people in the US and around the world, their living conditions today are much better than they would have been at any other time in history. Which is the simple result of compounding economic growth.

Talking about "changing the world" by building an app sounds a bit quaint and too self-serious these days, but I really don't think it's true that the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society.

[0] https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/essays/economic-growth-moral...

I don't fully agree with your point, but I've upvoted you anyways, because this is an entirely reasonable response argument to the points I made and that's how HN is supposed to work.

But please note I didn't say anything like "the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society." That's pretty ad hominem, and I don't think that, otherwise I wouldn't work in this industry.

Well I appreciate the good-faith discussion. And fair enough, I didn't intend to put words in your mouth, I was interpreting "not in any egalitarian or progressive way" as meaning "not in any positive way". But I can see how you might not have been making that strong of a claim.

> As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be

I just spent time with a friend who is working two jobs during the pandemic and cannot afford to live on their own in our relatively low cost of living city. They have to ride the bus for 2 hours to get to one job. This isn't even global inequality, this is an order of magnitude income difference between "haves" with high tech jobs that realistically produce no value, and "have nots" who actually make society function.

Well I'm sorry that your friend is having a tough time. But you really didn't respond to, much less refute, any of the main points of what I wrote here.

My point is extracting the maximum value from people by paying them almost nothing because it "increases the GDP" isn't a moral imperative. It's absurd on its face to say that growth at any expense is ethical because of some trickle down bullshit.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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