Tyler Cowen: Why Does the Tech Workforce Lean Left? | Hacker News Reader

Tyler Cowen: Why Does the Tech Workforce Lean Left?

bloomberg.com

4 pointstemp896410 comments

Did it lean left in the 90s? the 00s? It seems that the progressive turn happened after tech became mainstream and recruited hordes of all kinds of employees, and implemented diversity quotas

Well "left" and "right" are kinda under-specified terms, and a simplistic one-dimensional model does not even begin to capture the full range of political orientations, so it's kinda hard to talk about this. At one time the "tech world" seemed to skew fairly heavily libertarian relative to the general population, but libertarianism does not fit anywhere in particular on the one-dimensional left/right continuum. As many libertarians like to say "We are left of Left and right of Right at the same time."

All of that said, I don't think there's any question that has been something of a shift in the prevailing zeitgeist among "tech people". But properly categorizing, much less explaining, that is a job I'll leave for somebody else.

also "tech people" is underdetermined. Are there prominent founders who are 'woke'? prominent developers or technology pioneeers? Those tend to be generally individualist and libertarian

> Why Does the Tech Workforce Lean Left?

Why do cities lean left?

If the ideology of the right is based on individualism it's only natural that it cannot be the base of large social organizations.

The organization reaches a certain size and then collapses under the weight of its members who are all individualist free riders.

Organizations which are based on the ideology of the far left on the other hand don't ever get off the ground due to zero credence given to merit and assigning credit to whom credit is due.

At the end of the day data doesn't lie. GDP doesn't lie. The peak of mankind up to now are Western megalopolis (NYC, LA, London, Tokyo).

As a collective they lean left, it's undeniable. Similarly it's also undeniable that those who do great in such cities lean slightly right and have a bit of free riding and selfish-gene within them (but not so much, or in such great numbers that makes the whole thing collapse).

I worked in a UK office of a multinational tech company that's headquartered in the US, and observed that the "US left" culture that the company was immersed in was quite different to what I would consider to be left-wing in the UK.

For example, we would have diversity and inclusion trainings that went into great detail about racism categories in the US that don't really apply here in the UK, and topics like gender identity that I understand have become of paramount importance in the US, compared to other issues. This was the first time I encountered the term "latinx", which apparently no-one outside of the US really uses, particularly in Latin-American countries, but that the US left-wing has popularised over there.

On the other hand, the company was vehemently anti-union. Which is about as hard a position against the UK left-wing that you would find here. When visiting our US offices, I also heard colleagues who are nominally on the US left-wing side express what would be some very right-wing opinions from a UK perspective, relating to issues of class, property rights, and healthcare.

So I find it questionable that what is considered left-wing in US-based tech companies is really comparable to how it's understood elsewhere, by real leftists.

Does it lean left? Or does the vocal majority lean left? Are we not hearing from the center and right for fear of ridicule, shadow banning, deplatforming, etc?

I hear from the tech right all the time, they're the ones constantly complaining about censorship on social media, feminists and SJWs cucking tech leaders like RMS and Linus Torvalds and canceling speakers from tech conferences, women and POC in tech, diversity quotas, codes of conduct in F/OSS, etc.

For a group that's supposed to be quivering in oppressed silence, crushed under the bootheel of cacel culture and wokism, they seem very vocal to me.

This article is pretty ideology heavy and information free for an article that claims to be ideology free and just focusing on understanding.

I question the assumption. I’ve known plenty of centrists and right wingers in tech. They mostly kept their heads down and did the work. They only opened up to me over beers on rare social occasions. I suspect there’s a vocal minority of left and right leaning people, but the vast majority don’t give a crap and are somewhere in the middle and just want to tinker with computers. I fall into this last cohort, and know quite a few others who do.

I think it started to lean left when the conservatives started to become anti science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com