Breaking Bad is the Ultimate Startup
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Actually that might be accurate.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...
The metaphor doesn't work around equity, non-competes, etc., unless you know a start-up that uses violence instead of legal documents and arbitration.
There is nothing romantic in BB,it's a gruesome description of a world you might want to avoid at all cost.
"But despite these cautionary endings, they don’t sell Scarface and Godfather t-shirts at every tourist shop in Manhattan because people like to remind themselves about the dangers of hubris. Stories and the characters in them are more than lessons, and a narrative’s most ideologically weighty elements don’t map onto a seventh grade worksheet about major themes. Long after we’re done watching we hold moments with us: shot angles and character dynamics, snippets of dialog and unquestioned premises. The point of critically examining cultural objects like Breaking Bad isn’t to place them in categories good or bad, to predict the ending, or even to decode what’s “really” happening; the point is to pay attention to our attention, to look at how it’s being held, on what, and how someone’s making money on it. If pop criticism is to be good for anything, it’s that."
That's true from lessons learned from fact, too, as they are more often than not drawn from non-representative, skewed samples of facts, which are each individually true in isolation, but nevertheless support faulty lessons.
Good lessons -- drawn originally from systematic, careful study of fact -- OTOH, are often illustrated with carefully constructed fiction from which more people learn them from than do directly from the facts.
I see this story as cautionary tale for underdogs to not try to break free out of grips of existing "natural" state. Try and pay for the consequences. Just get second job and try to be happy
Capitalism has holes in it, and it's up to everyone to make sure they are doing things that are good for the world.
Whether sex is the ultimate motivation behind human affairs is something I'll leave to the Freudian psychologists.
This is why Zynga and Lockheed Martin exist.
Uh... who makes this assumption? As far as I know, no economist has ever assumed capitalism was for the "commmon good". The problem with even mentioning the "common good" is that it's subjective. It's sounds great in theory, but exactly who decides what's "good" for everyone else?
imho, Laissez-Faire is like Democracy, except people vote with dollars. So the whole "adults will be adults" idea is actually more accurate.
There's also Ayn Rand's money speech, where Francisco d'Anconia says, "And when men live by trade -- with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"
When I said "good," I meant in terms of freedom, quality of products, and diversity of products. I know those are vague terms as well, but I don't think there's much benefit to going any further into it than that.
* I agree that specialization increases productivity.
* I agree increased productivity is good.
* I agree meth is bad.
* I agree people have moral obligations to society.
* I agree ethics should influence macroeconomic policy.
* I don't see how Capitalism (an economic system) imposes (in top-down fashion) a moral obligation on what a company can and can't sell. My issue is one of scope resolution.
I think you're confusing "good" with "demand". Per pg, Capitalism tries to supply people with what they want. But what people want isn't always the best for them. E.g. I ate a doughnut the other day. Given I could have eaten a healthier yet equally tasty apple, eating the doughnut probably wasn't the best possible decision. But I wanted it, so I ate it. When I ate that doughnut, not once did I think "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't eat it." Nor do I imagine that Dunking Donuts ever thought "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't sell it."
A subsequent comment of yours suggests you didn't intend to imply an intrinsic between capitalism and the common good. But the way you originally framed your sentence strongly suggests otherwise.
some of what we do now under capitalism is quite considerably worse than anything that came before... specifically around the treatment of unemployed, homeless and 'bottom end of the spectrum' type people where we actively harass them and stop them from surviving because... well i don't really understand that particular desire for blind law and order to the letter, so i don't know.
unemployment was never a real problem until capitalist economy became the norm. a lot of the thinkers of the time foresaw that particular change as well...
No, its not. Its a system that evolved organically without any coherent philosophy, was criticized (and, in the process, named) by 19th Century socialists (who did have a coherent philosophy opposed to it), and since has evolved a number of different after-the-fact defenses (which often aren't even defending the same system, despite using the same name for it.)
i'm sure it evolved organically in the sense that it happened 'naturally' but i do disagree that it is the default human position - its a recent fad. its taking natural behaviour to one extreme interpretation of it.
not being utterly self-motivated, or altruism, is a very well attested human trait and we have a lot of the vital aspects of civilisation and society as a result of that drive. the ideal of pure capitalism could utterly inhibit such things from forming at all imo...
You mean, the same Wealth of Nations in which Smith urges, in government affairs, particular suspicion of the proposals of the merchant class (because their interest are not aligned with the common good) and argues that the general interest is most aligned with the interest of the landholding class, not merely reflecting, but advocating the value of the even-then fading feudal economic land-tenure structure which capitalism displaced as the capitalist class became both landholders and merchants?
Defenders of capitalism may like to quote Smith, but Smith was as much of a before-the-fact critic of capitalism (while certainly seeking change away from mercantilist protectionism) as Marx was an after-the-fact critic of it, and in many cases for similar reasons.
Furthermore, appeal to nature is a fallacy. Most of human history could be viewed as us trying to do BETTER than what's natural.
As for why some societies are more selfish and some more communal--that's a good question. I think it comes to which religions they develop. Abrahamic religions place great emphasis on the individual whereas many polytheist and indigenous religions are the opposite.
Now as to why those religions developed, that's anyone's best guess. Probably sheer luck and climate conditions
Capitalism came out of the industrial revolution and the process of enclosure by Britain, I'm not entirely sure that I buy it being a given, exactly, though it of course did happen.
Sadly, confusing beauty with morality has been a failing of Western thought since at least Aristotle. Just because capitalism is elegant doesn't mean it's "good" in a moral sense (or "evil" in a moral sense either).
That's why I react so negatively to associating capitalism with morality. It beocmes an excuse.
The real value in this particular analogy is for the author of the original article, not the reader.