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Comment by vletal | Hacker News Reader

My life goal was to attend one of these elite universities. I desired to work at companies such as Google or Apple.

After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that

1. I am much less special then I thought

2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same

3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bubble, some of them graduated from the best universities in the world, "left the system" and focus on doing creative small thing's in their everyday life, instead of pursuing their parents dreams

4. Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair

5. I will do my best to teach my kinds to strive for understanding, a love for beauty and a complexity of the world, instead of focusing on grades and stuff

6. The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action. Not a representative sample though. Just ruining my illusion.

View on HN

Regarding 6. sometimes companies, especially start-ups hire those people not for their abilities, but to be able to tell investors they hire top uni educated workforce. They are more for PR than actual work. Sometimes it is frustrating, if they get paid the same as people who actually do work.

You made me remember how my boss boasted having top talent (meaning 2 out of 50) of Cambridge and UCL graduates in the company.

Ugh this has become common in Silicon Valley. “We have a brilliant team of engineers who previously worked at FAANGUberAirBnB”…it’s sickening.

So is what the companies say about their board members and their C suite. I guess it could just be a reflection of facts but I fear this will lead to future startups hiring purely on this sort of credentialisms.

There is nothing wrong with using branding as a heuristic. Everyone does it when they prefer buying one brand over another. People do not have enough time or information to make fully informed decisions about each and every thing, including other people.

There is a lot wrong with credentialism. Branding is fine for products. We already have rampant credentialism based on University pedigree and this appears to extend that to careers.

Human labor is a product too, in this context. Credentialing is a consequence of people having to make decisions with limited resources. There is no reality where it will not exist, in some form or another. It existed before Google/Apple/Facebook, and it will exist after as long as it is advantageous to try and filter what you are buying.

I know why credentialism will arise. Just because it “will exist” doesn’t mean that we accept it.

Why not accept it (and try to improve it)? It seems futile given the basic fact that it is impossible to have perfect information about the decisions you make. Therefore the options are to make decisions completely randomly, or use some Bayesian probability to try to make better bets.

The assertion here is that the effect of these signals on the chances of success are not very large and in fact the systemic prejudices they create against otherwise qualified pool of candidates, and the pressure they create for people to obtain these (arguably meaningless) credentials has a worse overall effect on the labor pool.

So these signals wouldn’t really help you make better bets, and they have bad side effects, which is why we need to bin them.

"All our quants come from Ivy League schools like MIT" is a similar play in finance.

> Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair

It's always going to be unfair. Attempts to fix it always result in some other unfairness.

The real thing that works is freedom, i.e. not having the law artificially holding you back. Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.

That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.

The US Constitution says nothing about things being fair. It talks a lot about rights, though, which is what freedom is about.

Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.

And the US isn't a good example of a country where people have a fair chance at success in life IMO.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.

In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when facing GIs in WW2.

Of course, with free markets and prosperity, the Germans and Japanese have since caught up.

(In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.)

> In WW2, the US was able to..

This even understates it. WW2 resulted in the US being the major world power due to everything you list and more. A true historical turning point.

The US could do all that because they removed the free market from the economy. Everything was turned into a planned economy to feed the war effort. Free markets would have completely failed in this case.

Um, the government contracted with and paid private companies to produce armaments, because B-17s are of no use to consumers.

> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.

The US nationalized many industries during WWII.

From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1]

"In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. Bondholders and stockholders were compensated, and railroads were returned to private ownership in 1920, after the war ended.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain."

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13...

Edit: this appears to be a definitive account of wartime nationalization.

Industrialists in Olive Drab https://www.amazon.com/Industrialists-Olive-Drab-Operations-...

"the individual most closely involved with this effort, recounts the unique story of Ohly and his compatriots who were charged with the mission of guaranteeing that private companies sustained the vital war production of weapons, munitions, and other materiel needed by America's fighting men and the Allies to achieve victory overseas"

Full PDF: https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-32-1/CMH_Pub_70-3...

-------

Rather, it was having access to 1) continent-wide natural resources and 2) no combat theatre domestically which would have disrupted manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, not to mention civilian life and morale.

The book you cite doesn't seem to support your argument.

Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry.

Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as being against capitalism and free markets; they want to replace individuals "voting with their wallet" by collectively taking control from management via committees of (frequently communist leaning or outright communist) representatives of the workers.

Thirdly, it says quite clearly that as late as 1943 the War Department had done so few of these seizures that it amounted to "barely a dozen". By the end of the war they had seized around 60. That's a drop in the ocean of the US economy, which is why it's not well known.

So this example doesn't really seem to argue against the notion that the US won because of free market capitalism. The only places where they had to step in and become authoritarian (very briefly) were places where capitalism was breaking down thanks to communist agitation.

To be fair, Roosevelt in his 1945 State of the Union Address advocated for imposing forced labor on American civilians. Fortunately, that went nowhere.

Many people working in the US today would disagree.

The fact that the forcing is done with debt and threats of homelessness and not at gunpoint is just an implementation detail.

How would you propose enforcing the fulfillment of (freely entered and completely voluntary) contracts?

> freely entered and completely voluntary) contracts

Muahahaha, good one!

> continent-wide natural resources

The USSR and China also had this access, and it didn't seem to do the trick for them. The US supplied the USSR.

Airplanes, tanks, food, etc. were not nationalized.

Both had a lot of internal rebellions and wars that took massive hits at the country.

Not to mention that both started way worse than the US at their respective times.

Don't forget the US Civil War, which was a catastrophe.

Which strongly suggests that the real problem is ideological polemics, which makes sense when you think about it.

The USA didn't stick to ideological capitalism, and implemented many "socialist" policies: welfare systems, public works projects, labour protections, public infrastructure, etc. etc.

The USSR did stick to ideological communism as they defined it. Markets weren't utilized at all. Freedom of thought was suppressed. Political purges were executed.

In the USA, something similar was tried with the "red scare", but thankfully plurality won out, and some of those "abhorrent" socialist policies became mainstays in "great capitalist America" as part of the New Deal, which is what saved the USA from its domestic communist movement.

Over the last few decades though, the USA seems to have forgotten this. Forgotten that what saved the USA was not rigid adherence to some pre-existing quasi-religious ideological/spiritual polemic (which both capitalism and communism are), but the willingness to implement and incorporate a wide basket of ideas as they were appropriate.

I should point out that the industrial bit of the USSR was the bit the Germans invaded first. The Soviets had to move their entire industrial heartland a thousand or so miles east out of harm's way and rebuild it before they could start producing stuff.

When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.

Also it's worth noting that the US has a bunch of nationalised/government controlled services that are privatised in the UK and other parts of Europe, including:

- Airports and airport security

- Postal service (USPS)

- Train operators (Amtrak)

- Insurance (FCIC, FEMA)

- Various municipal utilities and the TVA

- Various credit/financial/banking institutions

In the UK, we have privatised airports, mail, energy, telephony, water, train operators (though this is sort of changing), and don't have equivalents for many of the government owned finance organisations that the US has.

Additionally, many of the private industries in the US are far from free market. The UK's private healthcare industry is arguably more free market than the US's private healthcare industry, although has to compete with the NHS.

This isn't a criticism, just to remark that the US certainly isn't afraid of nationalisation and government owned services.

The US indeed has a very unfree health care system, and that is the source of the bulk of the problems with it, such as incredible costs.

It's not a coincidence that the industries heavily distorted by the government in the US are the costliest - health care and education. Ironically, this interference was all aimed at reducing cost.

Seizing and nationalising only work very well when you have something worth seizing and nationalising. And then only temporarily.

That's all nice and rosy but current picture is veering from this away more and more. Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth. And US, say compared to Europe is clearly class-based social system where divider is your wealth.

So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).

Your WWI remarks are not correct (any fresh joining recruits would compare well to starved demoralized decimated trench troops). Read some german WWI literature, they didn't care much US specifically joining the fight, it was just more enemies. If Australians would come, it would be the same.

> Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth.

I personally know several millionaires who arrived in America with a suitcase and a dream.

> class-based social system where divider is your wealth.

The usual definition of a class is legal privilege based on your parents. This does not exist in the US.

> So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).

People aren't desperately trampling 1000 miles and throwing their kids over the wall just to be poor. In America, they have freedom and a darn good chance to do well. Communist countries are different, they have to build walls to keep their citizens from escaping Utopia.

> Read some german WWI literature

I've read about WW1 from actual historians.

What do think the beaten down German soldiers would have thought encountering masses of American troops better equipped and far better fed than they ever were?

> The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.

This is not true, historians collectively agree that Korea has seen the most spectacular rise.

Also, your comment was spectacularly off-topic and anachronistic. A country being a manufacturing powerhouse during WW2 doesn't mean that immigrants have a fair chance today. First they need to be able to enter, then they need to be able to succeed. That's the topic.

> historians collectively agree

I'm not buying that.

S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more. Besides, SK's economy is free market, not communism.

> First they need to be able to enter,

100,000 per month are flooding over the border.

> then they need to be able to succeed.

Evidently they believe they can, or they wouldn't come.

As for around here in Seattle, there are immigrants everywhere. I jog through the park most days, and I hear languages from all over the world. They have their stereos blasting away, and large families with kids running around, and parked cars line the street. The smells coming from their cooking are delightful, I wish they'd offer me a bite :-)

Looks to me like they're doing very well. I have no idea how you can conclude that the American door to immigration is shut, or that they are doing badly.

Ask them for a bite. There's a collective spirit to food in a lot of cultures - particularly the poor ones.

> S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more.

You can't talk about countries with relative sizes and use absolute numbers. If you want to use this fallacy, I can tell you that the US is dwarfed by the whole of Asia.

Anyway, the original argument was that the USA isn't a country where everyone has a fair chance, but you absolutely want to turn it into anti-communist, pro-free-market propaganda.

> The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class.

Emphasis here is on the past tense.

There are several reasons to challenge this:

1. The USA had (and still has) unprecedented resources per population. Why is your claim not still the case?

2. Immigrants tend to be people with the means to immigrate. That's rarely people in relative poverty, unless you intended to mean slaves.

In the past, a lot of (non-slave) people immigrated to the USA precisely because they were impoverished -- for example, Irish fleeing the Great Famine, among many others.

> "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Whether those words are as appropriate today may be another matter, of course.

Something like 100,000 people per month are flooding into America via the southern border. What are they fleeing from?

crime fueled by America's War on Drugs.

I'm curious if that's a figure for the number who enter and remain long-term, or does it include those who are quickly detained and expelled? I.e. does the Mexican border account for a million-plus annual increase in overall US population?

> for example, Irish fleeing the Great Famine,

I understand this example to be of historical note because it was exceptional. Many people came over for the promise of farmland or gold or something that they could capitalise on.

They came because they were poor. For a fictionalized account of Swedish immigrants, see Moberg's novel "The Emigrants". You might dismiss it as fiction, but the preface writes:

"To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Smaland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth Century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies."

1. The USSR had (and has) much more resources per population. Japan achieved great wealth with insignificant natural resources.

2. Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. The money was to be made by cramming poor people in below decks. In colonial times, America was populated mostly by people escaping prosecution, indentured servants, sons who weren't first born and were not going to inherit anything, teens whose parents could not support them, etc. The Chinese and Japanese people came to escape poverty.

Furthermore, South America was and is rich in resources, but it remains poor. Nothing like the US happened there.

> Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing.

Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

> Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do.

"The median income of foreign-born households in 2016 was $53,200, compared to U.S. born resident’s median household income of $58,000."

That seems like middle class people to me.

Do we have different definitions of poor?

> too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.

Besides, have you seen those pictures of immigrants going through Ellis Island clutching their battered suitcases? Do they look like rich people to you?

> That seems like middle class people to me.

Yup. Came poor and moved up to middle class.

BTW, I am properly amused by your theory that the US became a superpower via rich people immigrating and transferring their money to the US. That doesn't even pass the sniff test.

> Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.

Where? Poor people get second-hand iPhones, or subscribe to plans that bill you in small installments over a few years. And even those who manage to save up and buy a new one - in a modern civilization, a smartphone is a basic necessity, right there after food and shelter.

> That seems like middle class people to me.

Seems like just below middle income, which is typically deep in the working class and pretty far from the petit bourgeoisie, the balance-of-capital-and-labor-dependence middle class between thr working and capitalist classes.

That's a fine definition, but puts middle class in at least the top 10%, if not comfortably the top 1%, by wealth and income.

My question was whether we have different definitions of poor - if you are distinguishing poor as everyone below middle class, and this is your definition of middle class, then you're simply claiming that everyone is poor.

Saying "poor people do X" now just boils down to "some people do X" [for example, the claim that poor people buy $1000 retail iPhones]. To me, that's not a very useful or interesting definition for this purpose.

> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli...

> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.

> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.

Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.

Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.

Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.

I'm not going to claim that living a subsistent lifestyle on your own land is a wonderful utopia - I don't think that.

But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this.

Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture

Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference.

They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.

When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.

Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.

During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.

Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.

> The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.

China has arguably beaten (or is close to beating) that in very recent history.

Perhaps - but they're doing it with free markets, not communism.

It’s funny that you are getting downvoted, what you are saying is not controversial and well accepted.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-...

If karma points meant anything, I'd probably write what people wanted to hear :-)

China is also seeing large numbers of people rising from abject poverty to a "western" more affluent lifestyle. I don't think that this is a terribly good yardstick for fairness and freedom in a society.

This rising is due to China turning away from communism and towards economic freedom.

Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.

Sure, that's probably an important reason. But free markets can exist in an unfree and unfair society.

I was careful to write economic freedom.

> China turning away from communism...

If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".

China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.

Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.

Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.

China even has a stock market. Isn't that the opposite of communism?

For suitable definitions of communism, a stock market is a good way to get the means of production into the hands of the workers: they can buy stocks and share ownership of the company they work for.

Sorry, a stock market is the antithesis of communism. You're not going to redefine your way out of that one :-)

I don't claim to be an expert in politology, but what I remember from school seems to indicate that the common ownership of the means of production is the core idea of communism. I don't understand how a stock market is antithetical to that. As I see it, common ownership of the means of production can be achieved both with and without a stock market. Could you maybe elaborate your standpoint?

A stock market allows people to acquire ownership in companies, but it will be highly unequal: some of them will have more, some will have less, some will have none. That unequal ownership will generate correspondingly unequal rewards.

No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politically connected.

Appropriate taxation could lower the inequality in the stock markets.

Can you give us your definition of communism?

No! Why would it be?

> If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".

Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.

You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from, and sometimes that'll happen even if you do have those things. Holding on to an outdated view of what America is like is ... unhelpful.

> If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from

How do you then explain the existence of sanctuary cities?

To me at least, they seem like the exception that proves the rule. The fact that they exist with a name means that in general things aren't like that.

Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.

Coming through successfully, or arriving at the border?

One of the reasons Mexico is poor is because it had a disproportionately strong elite class dedicated to maintaining huge disparities in wealth through monopolies and more or less obvious slave labour.

When the industrial revolution rolled through town Mexico couldn't take advantage of it. Back then the US used to welcome anyone from anywhere with ambition and an interesting idea.

The contemporary US might want to take note.

just think in just 24 more years WW2 will have been over for a century.

> The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class.

Note that you're talking in the past tense.

Large parts of the world would love the chance to have the opportunities provided in the US despite this unfairness.

> Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.

In practice at the aggregate population level, that is such an important distinction, and leads to the kind of pay-for-play judicial system the US increasingly practices, which weakens the US' internal signaling on important inefficiencies to root out. The more money tokens you put into the system, the more "fair" treatment you obtain, regardless of the negative externalities imposed. This is not new in history and around the world, but US rule of law has been declining for decades [1], and I believe it bodes ill for the US.

[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/us-falls-out-of-top-...

Now that you mention it, the USSR did make many things more fair. They did it by hammering everyone down to the bottom.

That's more equal, is denying people the opportunity to rise actually more fair?

Yeah, trying to have a society that is fair and equal, is nothing but an systemised and institutionalised tall poppy syndrome that leads to stagnation

The USSR just replaced some inequalities with others. For instance there were lots of status-based perks, currencies and even exclusive stores. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_sto....

The meme about Soviet equality is pretty misleading. Their particular brand of autocracy increased inequality if anything, just expressed in different ways.

The USSR went from being a feudal society to an industrial society with a significant lead over the US in a number of areas, including rocketry and space, within a couple of generations. With a devastating world war in the middle.

There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.

You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.

As someone born in the USSR, this is an oversimplified view instead. You can claim that the USSR had some good science and engineering, and it did, but it wasn’t always to benefit the people and was definitely done by oppressing the people. Remember that the USSR was the country that marched a platoon of soldiers under a mushroom cloud (without telling them of course) to see what would happen to them in the name of science. It’s also the country to displaced a village by rolling in tanks and telling people to move into houses of the people living in the next village over, immediately, and giving no reason. This was done to detonate an underground nuke to see if a natural gas fire could be put out. It’s the country that refused to evacuate Pripyat after the Chernobyl accident because it would have looked bad. The USSR wasn’t some benevolent scientific community bent on bettering lives. Its scientific interests were primarily military-related.

Anti-social argument ad USSR is usually considered to be a fallacy common in the USA.

For example, Swiss are very social people. Up until recently they did not even have a minimal wage defined in some of the cantons, yet even the worst jobs are usually extremely well payed. I.e. a python developer has just like 2x more than a garbage man. Anything a human touches is expensive.

In European countries, even some of the Eastern ones, there is usually a top-notch single payer health care system. That's social.

You can also have a high quality state funded education systems. A social aspect of politics does not require you to go all dictatorial suppressing basic rights. Please stop using it. It's ridiculous.

Do you really want life to be more fair, though?

I think, across the board, people actually want mercy and grace. They’re not interested in fairness, they’re interested in help.

When they make mistakes, they want to be lifted up and forgiven. When they fall on hardship, even if their own making, they hope for help to recover.

Isn't that a type of fairness?

Not necessarily, no.

It's typically the story of the prodigal son in the bible : it's unfair that the son that squandered away his inheritance gets back and is celebrated, while the son that was wise and helped his father does not get anything special.

No. You're not entitled to these things. They are superfluous in that they go beyond mere justice and are like a gift.

It's just that fairness is the wrong goal to use, because things can always be seen as unfair from some point of view. It's better to simply try to make things more logical/less random, and also more productive.

It might be possible to make life more fair, but how much power would you need to grant an entity so that they could ensure this? How could that power be mis-used? Who gets to define what "fair" is?

We're being very vague here. What is unfair? Unfairness smells of injustice, and injustice entails entitlement (i.e., something is unjust when I do not receive something that is owed to me). But we haven't named the goods that we're supposedly entitled to. Where's the injustice? Or is it envy masquerading as righteous indignation?

> It's always going to be unfair.

Can I ask you a question without I swear any implicit judgement.

Do you gravitate towards conservative politicians?

Because I'm finding that this is the main distinction between Progressive and Conservative-minded people in today's western society. You can account for religion (there are religious leftists and atheist rightists). You can account for racism (there are plenty of racist liberals)

But I am developing a mental model (I'm sure it's not original, but I don't know enough about philosophy or sociology to determine who I should read with similar mindset) that the biggest difference is exactly the quote above.

Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.

Of course the implicit advantage of conservatism is if that enough people don't try, then it doesn't work, society does not become more fair, and conservatives get to point and say "see?"

And, on the flipside, you can spend a generation striving to achieve "real communism" like the USSR did claiming that true socialism is just around the corner, and never actually make any progress because the goal posts keep moving.

> Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.

And this is the key reason why I don't agree with you and why I will continue to fight for fairness and equality and equity improvements. I don't want to improve my own life at the expense of others. I think that is inherently selfish and defeatist. I'm a humanist, and I want my contributions go towards maximum optimizations across a multitude of humanity.

Not the poster you were asking, but I did appreciate the stress you put on trying to ask a non judgmental question and I thought I'd add a personal observation, which is: disillusioned progressives also think that way.

You try and you try to make society a fairer place to live in, but realise the system is so far gone that nothing you ever do will ever make a difference. So the morally correct and efficient thing to do is to expend those energies into helping you and yours, co-operate with those who extend mutually beneficial arrangements to you, and so on. Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly. Not that you disagree with the ideal, it's a great ideal, but it doesn't work in practice. Not that you wouldn't wish to follow it if you could (you would), but life has taught you that trying hurts you and yours.

Re: your mental model, I think there are a lot of studies and thinking that have gone into this, but I was immediately remidned of this old ted talk by Jonathan Haidt [0]. I am sure there are tons and tons more research on the topic.

[0] "The moral roots of liberals and conservatives" (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SOQduoLgRw)

> Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly.

Seems rather defeatist. Wouldn't you agree that different societies across the world vary in their levels of fairness? For that matter, how about different societies across time?

I wasn't suggesting to give up, rather it was a response to the poster above, who was trying to build some kind of mental model of how progressives viewed the world in contrast to conservatives. I was trying to highlight that there are progressives out there who are simply tired and just want their lives and the lives of their families to be OK.

And I think that's OK. Personally I tend to look at things negatively and push onwards anyway, but I also understand when people say they don't want too much negativity in their lives. So I get it.

That's all!

> I don't want to improve my own life at the expense of others.

That is not what freedom is about. Your comment implies that freedom is a zero-sum system. It most assuredly is not.

Under freedom, you (selfishly) prosper by creating value that other people want to give you money for. Stealing is zero-sum, this is not stealing.

(Wealth transfer programs are inherently zero-sum, and are unfair.)

No – since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum.

And freedom is not a system, it's simply the situation of being able to do what you want without being punished. The freedom to steal is a freedom, just one people generally shouldn't have.

> since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum

Neither claim has foundation.

> And freedom is not a system

Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using.

> Neither claim has foundation.

I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?

> Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using.

And yours is very idiosyncratic. And mostly redundant with "market economy", except a market economy doesn't technically require people to be selfish.

> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?

Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.

The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.

> Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.

Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company.

> The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China.

In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.

Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation.

The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.

Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.)

Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.

The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...

> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent.

Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.

Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.

Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.

The problem with that argument is that $42 million is a lot, lot less than $200 billion dollars, especially when divided across even just the population of the USA. Not even enough for a dollar per person - in fact, when you consider that's over something like a decade, it's probably more like a cent per person per year.

By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...

The problem is that again you are attacking an argument I did not make. At no point have I suggested "maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them" or that we could feed the entire population of the world using Bezos' clock budget, never mind enthused about US arts funding. At no point in this thread have I made any public policy recommendations at all.

I simply observed that it seems unreasonable to argue that a person saved from starvation by a marginal dollar doesn't feel more benefit from that marginal dollar than someone who wouldn't stoop to pick one off the street feels from marginal dollars that accrue to their bank accounts anyway. So some, but not all, redistribution can be positive sum.

Acknowledging the marginal utility of a [disposable] dollar to Bezos might be lower than that of someone earning less than subsistence seems both fairly obvious and not at all close to communism as the user I originally responded to suggests (Funnily enough, denying the validity of any sort of interpersonal utility comparison whatsoever actually does makes it impossible to make inefficiency arguments against communism or any other sort of government waste. Obviously millions of people behind the former Iron Curtain are wealthier today, but who's to say the Politburo members losing control over resources didn't suffer more?! I mean, that's silly, but so's arguing Bezos cares about loose change at least as much as the average poor person). Arguments against the idea that public might need education less than the wealthy needed to keep those dollars were pretty critical to there being a viable market and workforce for the Amazons of this world too.

If we actually want to discuss the efficiency and inefficiency of different forms of government and private [non]intervention it's much easier to do so without the unsupported and vaguely feudal assumption that no improvement on a status quo can be observed.

> No – since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum.

This is extraordinarily well-put. Thank you.

> Under freedom

You're confusing freedom with capitalism. Understandable, since we need to spend 40+ hours a week to earn our "right" to shelter, survival and general health. In other words: the right to exist and participate. That doesn't make us free - it makes us beholden to an employer if on the payroll, the market if self employed and the greater economic system in both cases.

If we were truly free, we would only spend time doing things we thought were actually inherently valuable. For some of us, that would mean accumulating wealth. For a great many others, that would be the Star Trek kind of life about exploring, arts and discovery. Then again, that kind of freedom will perhaps be relegated to utopian dreams for a long time yet.

The birds are free. Doesn’t mean they don’t have to work to feed themselves.

> it makes us beholden to an employer

Oh phooey. I've been an employer and employee many times. At no time was I "beholden" to my employer, and at no time were my employees "beholden" to me. It was a simple transaction - trading labor for money. Either party could (and sometimes did) walk away at any time for any reason they pleased.

I've even been fired more than once. Didn't matter, I just got another job. No employee ever genuflected to me, either.

> No employee ever genuflected to me

You're arguing in bad faith by making a caricature out of my argument. Please don't. I meant there is a clear dependency, like in software. Your app isn't free of dependencies if it imports other packages. It needs them to function. There's vendor lock-in.

> Either party could walk away

This might have been true for you, but doesn't generalise well. Yes, in theory people can walk away. In practice, they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage, survival, general life stability... etc.

It's not because you or I currently have a financial buffer and can survive stretches of unemployment that this is the case for the entire population. In case you missed it, a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).

Imagine you're a millennial with college debt in an area without a lot of jobs and analyse how free you really are to leave the one job you managed to get. How likely are you to get funding for a business? What's the tensile strength of your bootstraps?

You're entitled to look at it as a simple transaction, but the distribution of leverage for most people is distinctly asymmetrical, especially in anti-union countries like the US. So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-50...

> Yes, in theory people can walk away.

In practice, they do, all the time, in every place I've ever worked, including min wage jobs.

> they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage

That's because of stupid government laws. Besides, if you leave you get COBRA for 18 months or something like that.

> survival,

Not in the US. Don't exaggerate.

> general life stability...

> a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).

That doesn't mean they're poor. It's easy to have a quarter million dollar salary and spend 110% of it.

> in an area without a lot of jobs

Hop on the Bus, Gus. Go where the jobs are. My extended family moved all over the US for better jobs. Heck, I wound up in Seattle to get a better job. Cost me a couple hundred clams worth of gas driving my bucket of bolts there from Kansas. Heck, somehow the penniless migrants manage to travel all over the US to get work.

> So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.

The courts are heavily biased in favor of the worker in legal disputes. And have you ever seen the press take the side of Amazon in any dispute with labor? Or any company?

No one is suggesting that you are physically trapped in the job with shackles, but to insinuate everyone is in a position where they can just 'walk away' from their job is disingenuous at best, downright ignorant of the world at worst.

It's about the same level as 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps'.

Well, people I've employed walked away whenever they felt like it.

> ignorant of the world

I only speak of the US. Before the pandemic upended things, unemployment rates were very, very low in the US. That doesn't auger for employees being beholden to employers at all.

You clearly speak for a very select set of people.

Which is fine, but stop projecting that onto the vast majority who absolutely cannot walk away from work 'whenever they feel like it' if they've any sort of family or responsibilities.

You're talking about the US and people not being beholden to employers - I'm sorry, but that is absolute nonsense for basically the entire working class.

And their unfairness for the collective and individual betterment is arguably a good thing.

It could be and also could not be, it depends on where you draw the line. You want to incentivise strong people as much as possible (freedom), and also help weak people as much as possible (redistribution).

If you tip too far over to either side, it's going to be a bad thing, and there is probably a much better way to find the sweet spot than to argue over what is "fair".

Completely agreed!

> Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.

Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intrinsic value in fairness.

I think the right questions are: (1) how can we improve our average level of well-being, and (2) how can we reduce suffering?

So in my view, progressives incidentally get some important issues right including single-payer healthcare and environmental conservation. These policies tangibly improve our quality of life. But all the emphasis on equality, fairness, etc? Useless, in my view.

You can never make life fair for someone who is disabled. I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars. There are endless people taller, smarter, faster, younger, handsomer, healthier, etc., than me. Obsessing over the implicit and inevitable unfairness of that is a total waste of time and energy.

More generally, no two people are the same. It's not possible to make it fair even for two people, let alone billions.

That's a strawman. No one's claiming we can achieve total equality.

> No one's claiming we can achieve total equality

I haven't seen any end to raising the bar. Where do you think it should end?

Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.

It's not uncommon among leftist to suggest systemic punishments and disadvantages for people who are born with certain physical and/or mental strengths and talents.

The Seattle school district decided to get rid of their gifted programs because it was unfair and increased inequality.

Seems like they reversed course though.[1]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/gifted-programs-worse...

That could be reasonable if the resources used for that are reallocated to students who are behind.

At our nearby state high school, during physical education class, they didn’t allow people to lap anyone during running periods because it was unfair to those not fit.

You can imagine what that looked like and who was walking around the gym with everyone else following slowly.

That isn't redistribution -- redistribution requires that someone actually gains something. That's plain stupid.

Whoever made that decision didn't go too far, they went into a completely wrong direction.

Yeah but the point is that any attempt of redistribution in the name of fairness, is also equally unfair from the opposite perspective. So there is no way to make anything "more fair", if you take from one person to give to another, it's always unfair for one of them.

It feels unfair to one of them. That doesn't mean it is.

> I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars.

That's a decision that thousands of americans make every year they can't afford the healthcare they need to keep them healthy.

Those that can still work ridiculous hours damaging their health for far less than $1b - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/opinion/work-hours-us-hea...

I absolutely agree, the idea of a fair society needs to go away, it's just a dead end that only leads to fighting over crumbs and stifling productivity, what we need to do is get rid of jealousy and resentment.

> how can we improve our average level of well-being

What average?

MEAN:

Two systems of 100 people

System 1: 1 person with $10m and 99 people with nothing (mean=100k)

System 2: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k)

The latter is far far better despite on mean being worse.

MEDIAN:

Two systems of 100 people

System 1: 51 person with $1m and 49 people with nothing (median=$1m)

System 2: 100 people with $250k (median=250k)

The latter is better despite median being worse.

If you want to decide if a system is fair or not, think which system you'd like to live in if you rolled a D10 and ended up being born into the decile you landed in. Roll a 10 in america and it's great. Roll a 1 and you're collecting cans and hoping you don't get an ingrowing toenail.

Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end.

In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98 people with $60k and 2 people with $10m (mean=259k)

And then people argue that System 2 is worse because the small increase for the most people is not worth the humiliation of some times seeing a person with 10m which is unfair.

Personally I much prefer System 2 and I'm happy that I have 60k instead of 50k. Money is just a tool to give me freedom, and 60k means more freedom than 50k, so I'll take that deal any day.

The rich guys who have 10 houses or whatever, doesn't bother me at all, I simply don't care, and I'm sure that they are not much happier. Exactly the same way that I don't spend my time grudging over the fact that some guys are 100 times more handsome and charming and talented than me

Those rich guys owning those houses pushes up the price of the houses and means you can't afford it, or you have to work 80 hours a week to afford it.

That's not a good position to be in.

Except it's not, system 2 might have 90 people with 60k and 2 people with 10m, but there's also 8 people with less than nothing.

I'm far more interested in the quality of live of the 5th, 10th and 25th percentile than the 50th, 90th and 99th.

Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work, and the less money you will have overall.

If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution.

What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist, so there's always a trade off to be made, and when people ask for less inequality, that will also mean less money overall, and also less for you if you are in the middle.

> Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work

You'll have to back that claim up

> everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist

Well I don't care about the mean - not much use if Rockerfeller takes 90% of the income of a country and the rest have to deal with the 10% even if the mean is high. I care about how much money I have (specifcally what goods and services I can get with it), and how that is affected when various things happen (someone crashes their car into me, I get a cancer diagnosis, find that the CEO has been running the company into the ground and we're all laid off)

During the Great Compression, income inequality dropped dramatically, while the median increased. This was driven by policies like strong unions, the New Deal and Price Controls, and resulted in America's golden age, where the working and middle classes were far better off in 1960 than they were in 1930.

Yeah but all these sucessful policies driven by strong unions happen in the aftermath of winning a major war, do you think this is a coincidence?

> Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much

In reality this doesn't happen.

This is what has happened to all of the failed communist countries.

[citation needed]

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Germany, hellholes like that where you can't even have the joy of going bankrupt because your kid got shot at school and you need to pay for the surgery

>Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be.

Is this the case? I would think most adults have realized that nature does not do fair, and it cannot be made fair.

I was under the impression that "progressivism" is more about raising the floor for quality of life, not about making things fair. So as to avoid the situations of favelas next to high rise condos with pools on their balconies.

My experience suggests most progressives don’t realize that:

- they tend to be young;

- political activists who have done nothing else;

- or drug addicts.

I can count on my fingers the number of serious progressives I’ve met who aren’t one of those things during my entire life in Seattle.

The “progressive” movement is why we have addicts encamped at a school — they’re so out of touch with reality, they view that as “compassion”.

Meanwhile, most adults realize police sweeps don’t solve homelessness, but they do prevent violent drug addicts leaving used needles all over the children’s playground.

>The “progressive” movement is why we have addicts encamped at a school — they’re so out of touch with reality, they view that as “compassion”.

I would not classify that as progressivism. Things like voting rights and ranked choice voting, progressive taxation, environmental protection, increasing educational opportunities for all, more nutritional options for food at schools, access to mental and all other healthcare, etc would fall under progressivism in my book. Of course, I'm not the arbiter of what is and is not deemed progressive, but generally I was under the impression that the goals were to keep the bottom quintiles moving forward, not letting drug addicts establish camps on or near school grounds.

As someone that has moved from fairly hard left to centre (though probably considered far right by some), to me the difference is that progressives think they can make the world better, conservatives think that such actions are likely to make things worse. Thomas Sowell brings a lot of evidence based arguments to such discussions.

You might enjoy reading about the left/right dichotomy of whether ‘free will’ is believed to exist.

e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318842505_Political...

I had a teacher in high school that liked to dole out life advice. Even looking back decades later, most of it was actually pretty good. One of them was:

You can be smart -or- hard-working and do fine anywhere. But you will always be bested by those who are smart -and- hard working.

> The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action.

Talk is easy but action is hard. There's a chance they never actually had to "put up or shut up" before in their life. And if that's true, there's going to be a strong aversion to actually taking action because that's when they might actually fail -- potentially for the first time in their life.

#3 and #5 are by-products of extreme privilege. Take your average bootcamper, they usually rack up a huge bill majoring in something in college (often a literal dream major), then somehow field a 17k check to just waltz over to tech when they need an office job finally.

Not everyone can do this. You have to be really lucky to play games like that and still be fine.

The same goes for ‘going off to start my own food truck’. These options don’t exist for people that can only afford one solid go at this.

> #3 and #5 are by-products of extreme privilege.

Just to clarify, Czech Technical University is free (for Czech citizens) - I also graduated there. I understand what you're saying, but I am somehow repulsed by the idea that such a system is considered a "privilege". It doesn't have to be a privilege. If you don't have good public universities in your country, you should consider getting involved in politics.

My point was mostly centered around freedom. Everyone knows the rules of the game. Those who can’t toy around, play the game straight and narrow (good grades, stay focused on one concentration, and hope you picked well).

It’s a luxury to try one thing or another, no matter the cost (cash and time), and still land in an ideal situation as life progresses.

#5 - I think that grading is not a good feedback for many disadvantaged kids and their parents. I was being told that without good grades I will not land a good job. This kind of advice is worthless for a 12yo and not really true. Having a good attitude towards learning is an universally more applicable and could lead to a thriving society when applied generally.

I completely agree. And that's why I'm sending my children to a Waldorf school without grading.

I went to a country top school and I learnt the exact same lessons but with a jaded view of the world that comes with it :)

Don't be too firm in the belief that you yourself learned this in spite of your experience. Perhaps you learned it because of. We tend to appreciate and yearn for the things we don't have, the things we are too busy doing "work" to enjoy.

It does sound "better" to not worry about what -- now -- seems unimportant, but if your kids will grow up in capitalist society, it is critical that they have a focus on competing. Success is doled out in a pareto distribution. If you aren't already starting from the top, you have a very, very long uphill climb. Which will get worse. It's hard to enjoy the beauty of the world on an artist's salary.

#6 Getting fired isn't necessarily failure. These guys certainly have fallbacks. I'm sure they've learned from the firings. Maybe at their next role they will be superstars due to this experience?

In summary I think you are unfairly diminishing the value of an Oxford or other elite education. Partly or mostly because of the disillusionment. But it's not just about the academic/education part of the experience. Actually that's the least important part. Maybe when they were founded, it was quite important. Nowadays the internet gives us so much access to information that filtering it is more important than being spoon fed it. That doesn't mean elite universities aren't very important social signals and don't convey unfair advantages.

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