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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that the root cause is the financialization and rat-race-ification of everything.

You gotta go to college to make a good living.

You gotta go to a TOP college especially.

You gotta work your ass off in high school to get in.

And so everyone just is told their whole childhood to compete harder and harder in this race to the bottom and there's no more room for interesting experiences since a truly interesting experience isn't guaranteed to sound as good on an application as a boring "interesting experience" run-of-the-mill extracurricular schedule.

Leaving in room for insanity and creativity is counter to what this money-above-all-else societal push for undergrad education wants.

But hey, we gotta do that because if we don't, China will!

It's not the students who benefit from having to work twice as hard to get the same degree.

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The funny/sad thing is that mostly our society doesn't actually work that way -- we just believe that it does.

You can absolutely have a highly successful career and life, for a wide variety of definitions of successful, without attending a top college, and while having "interesting" life experiences for all sorts of definitions of interesting.

There are many paths through life even in our current bureaucracy-ridden society -- it's just that we very heavily oversell one specific one to the point that we make it destructively competitive.

(There are some paths, mostly in medicine and law, which actually+/- require the Standard Elite Collegiate Life Path, but many other happy and successful outcomes do not actually)

Most people aren't successful for the reasons they imagine, but more importantly - most people aren't unsuccessful for the reasons they imagine. The increasingly democratic views of what is and isn't successful are our society's greatest I'll, as much as I do hope people keep supporting the things they love and wish to be.

Indeed. You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life. Even if you wish to have a life containing moderate wealth, you still don't need that. (Up to you whether you believe that moderate wealth is either required or desirable for a "successful" life)

And even if you want "a good, respectable career", there are many paths to achieving that goal as well.

I feel that we have allowed too much "program thinking" to control our school-age children. We put them in the best preschool program we can afford, then run them through a carefully managed elementary program, finally we push them into an elite-college-prep high-schools program and then enroll them in a university degree program.

Afterward, is it a surprise that these kids graduate and expect to find pre-mapped "programs" to follow for the next part of their lives?

And bigger companies know this and will oblige -- intern programs, of course, and then new-grad programs and well-tended career ladder progression with a performance review program.

None of this is bad by itself, but it is unnecessarily limiting to look at life as a series of programs. It is allowing others to define success for you. Which is easy -- because deciding what the eff you want out of life is hard -- but it is so limiting.

Even if what you end up doing looks kinda like one of the programs, choosing the path yourself is so valuable.

> You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life.

Unless you're willing to live as a hermit in the wild or as a hobo/beggar on the streets - which if it suits you is fine, not taking that away - you don't have another choice because you all but need a very well paying job simply to afford a shack to live in.

The number one thing that forces young people into the crushing grinds of big corporate life is the enormous explosion of cost of living, particularly cost of housing and corresponding with it the complete disconnect between the minimum wage and the cost of living.

And yes there are "the trades" aka manual labor which also pay somewhat well, the problem with these is that you won't make it to retirement in these jobs and enjoy your retirement. The trades are brutal on your body and that brutality is rarely acknowledged.

There are other paths. You can operate all sorts of small independent businesses (not just "the trades"). It's a challenging path that requires lots of hustle and produces less reliable (but not necessarily lower) economic results.

Your comment reminds me of Steve Jobs amazing commencement address to the Stanford Class of 2005.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

I try to watch it once a year, especially with grad students and postdocs. Gets better each time.

I wonder what those 'democratic views' are where you live.

Here, there are many distinct views by the many political parties that are part of the democracy and can't really be lumped into one 'view'. The few commonalities between them (here) seem to be around the concept of "bad situations in life shouldn't mean you're screwed forever" and "if we work together when we can, it generally turns out better for everyone". I don't think those concepts (which might also be views) generally dictate the value of success, or describe what that success must be.

It really depends on your definition of success. If you know enough Stanford grads - you’d know that many of them will consider themselves failures in life if they haven’t founded and IPO/sold a company for $100m+. I know quite a few like this… I also know quite a few who did it and only think they’re a success in life because of said event.

Does nobody tell them that they are being ridiculous?

They will just look at you with an expression of pity and slight disgust.

At which point you can laugh while pissing on their Ferrari

There is in fact a quite famous example of this, involving some kind of medical device. I blame Stanford/SV culture for that one.

If you want to IPO a tech company and make a minimum of 9 figures, then going to Stanford is probably a part of the most reliable (or, at least, "least unreliable") path to doing so.

Or, at least, it was back when Stanford was the kind of place that it is in the process of not being anymore.

Even then, though, realistically if you're not already part of the "Stanford Set", following that path probably doesn't radically change your chances of success at that specific mission.

> there's no more room for interesting experiences

So people will become infantile and inexperienced. Between this and atomisation of society, the bill will come due. Aociao connections have massive value, beurocrats just dont know how to measure ir

Is it possible this is a consequence of proportionally fewer economic opportunities (i.e. increasing income/wealth gap)? Maybe the combination of low hanging fruit having been picked, and automation and technology allowing for massive economies of scale inevitably lead to a “big getting bigger” scenario. And because the lower hanging fruit has been picked, the risk and hence barrier to entry is very high for non conventional routes.

I think there's a really interesting question in there of "is it a cause, or an effect," that I honestly don't have a strong opinion on currently.

I would lean towards cause instead of effect, though.

So where you say, "low hanging fruit has been picked resulting in high barrier to entry," I say, "this zero-sum-game of maximizing academic profiles starting in preschool has resulted in higher barriers to entry because the less well-off you are, the harder it is to both know what to maximize and have the time to do it."

I see it as a "everyone's defecting in a prisoner's dilemma resulting in everyone having a worse time" game theory problem.

If you try to be "merit" based but don't have reliable ways of separating "merit" from "grinding" then you're gonna end up with a lot of grinders as people figure it out.

When I write the low hanging fruit has been picked, I mean things like online marketplaces and digital communications expanding the competition to the whole country or world even.

Whereas before, there were regional arbitrage opportunities due to difficulties in scaling, these arbitrage opportunities are greatly reduced because information flies fast and far, and bigger players can take advantage first.

In a situation like this, people may notice that the decreasing probabilities of “getting ahead” via non traditional means and stick to obtaining the “elite” signaling and joining the big entities that are growing.

Most people in the US don't go to college. If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.

> If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.

I don't believe that theory, but I do believe a theory that has similar results: adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work, and the main way that new workers have been added to existing fields in the past 100 years is to encourage women to join those fields.

Edit: Actually there are two theories that explain this pattern. The other theory is basically that feminism encourages young women and girls to pursue glamorous, high-status careers, but if you're choosing a career based on how glamorous it is, and it takes a long time to get into it, by the time you're there, the glamor has moved on. This also explains why low-status male-dominant careers can remain male-dominant for just as long as they remain low-status--these fields are consistently even lower status than fields that are predominantly female.

> adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work

This is the lump of labor fallacy. If you don't have "enough" software engineers, then adding more makes them all more valuable; some of them can work on productivity tools for the rest, some of them can attract new customers, some of the juniors are needed to turn into senoirs, and so on.

It's similar to Henry Ford paying his workers more so they could afford to buy the cars.

> afford to buy the cars

Maybe that is a red herring and what Ford got from higher wage was workers that cared about the work they did and made sure the quality was good, as the workers would otherwise end up in a lower-paying job.

When you make "revolutions" such as the first good assembly line, workers that care make a big difference. Faults on assemble lines can be much more expensive than high wage.

What Ford got from his well paid people is they didn't quit. Even though assembly lines are easy to train, he still was losing a lot of people because working the same station for months is boring, and so he was constantly having to recruit and train people.

Don't let the above take away from the other factors you mention. The total situation is complex.

Paying your own employees enough for them to buy your product is the perpetual motion machine of business models in the sense that it doesn't actually work. You need other sources of revenue to survive.

Cars used to be luxury goods and the idea of common people like factory workers driving cars absolutely blew people's minds, even if they were the best paid factory workers. The majority of Ford's innovation here was in reducing the cost of manufacturing rather than by paying his workers more. Another point is that assembly line work can be alienating, and being able to own the finished product is probably a decent remedy for that type of alienation.

It is not related to either the lump of labor fallacy, nor how Henry Ford payed his workers. It’s simply the laws of supply and demand. If you increase the supply of something, the equilibrium prices decreases. This is true in basically all cases, except where there are highly unique confounding factors.

If your argument is based on the premise that the laws of supply and demand are wrong, then you can pretty much guarantee that it’s actually your argument that’s wrong every single time.

They aren’t useful for analyzing labor as if it’s an inanimate object. Labor is what produces demand in the first place, so you get partial equilibrium results if you don’t acknowledge that.

It’s very common to do it wrong, it’s one of the most common excuses people have for saying immigrants take your jobs. Strangely, they don’t say having children takes your jobs.

> Strangely, they don’t say having children takes your jobs.

Because if you have children, you have about 20 years to progress far enough in your career that a brand new hire isn't going to take your job. Also, as a society, somebody needs to be working after the old people retire.

Immigration is more complicated, but it is possible for immigration to depress pay or even deprive people of jobs, if you had enough immigrants with all the same qualifications. In the early years of Israel, for instance, Israel had far more physicians per capita than they actually required and many of them had to take other jobs.

> In the early years of Israel, for instance, Israel had far more physicians per capita than they actually required and many of them had to take other jobs.

That'd be a good problem for the US - we don't have enough of them because we restrict immigration and licensing so strictly. But yes, some of them do end up taking other jobs and starting businesses and it works out in the end. More people = more economy.

Of course, adding more of some inanimate objects can increase demand for them because of things like network effects, and there's nothing surprising about that. A phone or a gold bar isn't very valuable if there's only one of them in the world; nobody's going to want it.

> That'd be a good problem for the US - we don't have enough of them because we restrict immigration and licensing so strictly.

As a consequence of regulatory capture by the AMA, who don't want their pay to go down. Which furthers my point that their pay would go down, assuming that the AMA aren't total idiots ;)

Yeah degree inflation is really hard on you if for whatever reason you buy into that. The Meritocracy Trap is a good read if you want to witness the existential horror of someone that realizes it's a thing when they come out on the other side.

I don't know where you're going with "if for whatever reason you buy into that" or whatever.

But it's just mathematics. Normalization, basically. If there are X high school seniors in the country, and Y incoming seats in Stanford's next class, you can't take everyone. So if everyone works harder on their profile it's the same as if nobody does.

I don't think it's in question that this has happened. I would also go a bit further and say that I believe that assembly-lining more "directed" academic effort into every bit of students' time is going to be counter-productive for innovation and creativity, since those are by nature more spontaneous.

The word "meritocracy" itself was invented for a book about how it's a bad idea that can't work, so it's a surprise to see anyone legitimately trying to do it. See: Goodhart's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy — thanks for the pointer!

I put it up to the helicopter-parenting mentality on the part of administrators. Make things safe and predictable, treat 18-22 year olds like either children or 50-year olds

Perhaps Stanford was culturally co-opted.

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