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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

As a class, they have a set of similar incentives (grow/retain resources and power networks) that lead to similar actions (avoid taxation, buy influence, weaken regulators, etc). They may cooperate at times, but they are not a coherent organization with a roster, votes, and leadership.

As individuals, they are dangerous competitors, and they can’t afford to trust each other too much without some kind of mutual leverage. This could be in the form of mutual equity holdings, blackmail, complex arrangements where each party has exposure, whatever. But even then, trust has limits.

There’s no cabal that runs things with rules and elections at this level. It’s all individuals who are immersed in the systems that made them wealthy. Those systems tend to lead to certain behaviors. That’s it.

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You could make this statement about any group at all. And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.

To a degree, yes, it’s why looking at people on the level of groups is not that useful for predicting individual behavior and beliefs, only aggregate behavior and beliefs.

However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.

  > You could make this statement about any group at all.

Yes, that's the point

  > And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.

You have bad priors. That would only happen if groups could only have singular and simple goals. It requires those goals to be mutually exclusive. Because as soon as they overlap, even just a little, cooperation becomes an effective strategy.

Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation

Nobody is suggesting nobody or group cooperates on anything ever. This comment could go in the definition section of "strawman". My comment was in response to the idea that there is "a conspiracy of the elite". It's just an absurd idea to anyone who has spent time in the world working with people, both "elite" and non "elite".

In the bay area you'll find thousands and thousands of people who have worked at a company run by a billionaire founder. They will tell you said billionaire founder can't even get everyone in the company to conspire to row in the same direction.

But the comment above wasn't about an explicit conspiracy, with billionaires meeting in dark rooms colluding. It was about implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy, where objectives align. My comment is defending the latter

Maybe I'm overindexing on "they steer" and "effective strategy" - it still reads that this group has way more control and deliberate planning than they do.

And, "implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The word "conspiracy" has a definition.

If all you are saying is "sometimes billionaires are aligned" - sure. Sometimes politicians are aligned. Sometimes teammates are aligned. If one wants a platitude with some predictive power "people are self interested" is going to work more often.

“People are self interested” works fine as long as you extend the analysis to include the class dimension. People in a specific class are generally going to advocate on behalf of that class, because it benefits them to do so. No conspiracy needed.

Exactly, there is no conspiracy, there’s just multiple actors moving predictably in the same direction, and sometimes coordinating weakly. I don’t know how my comments could have been read otherwise.

Except there are also explicit conspiracies like Jobs calling around to stop "poaching" or Zuck leaning over to Trump and asking how much.

True, but these are generally limited agreements among a few individuals (at most a small handful at the top). Pulling off a big conspiracy between many powerful competing actors carries too much risk of defection. It may be possible but it’s certainly rare.

I do think that these limited agreements may be copied by other people in similar contexts, for instance there were other tech firms who made similar agreements with their own competitors. And the big tech anti-poaching agreements may have themselves been copied from similar agreements made in other industries, such as finance and fast food. The illegal conduct probably spread organically through word of mouth, as execs and board members informally exchange this sort of “best practice” with each other.

It’s likely that big shareholders or board members could hold private meetings to advise the CEOs of their companies on how to pull off this sort of trick, if they think it would help the stock price. Given how many people sit on multiple boards, this could be seen as a sort of conspiracy. It’s still very informal and of course it’s nearly impossible to prove.

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