Did you read OP? In context, the idea is clearly that Facebook violated some sort of contract with its users.
183 karma · joined December 18, 2017
I have no idea what charges the Eastern District of NY might be seeking pursuant to these data deals, but maybe something like mail/wire fraud or honest services fraud? Again IANAL, but those are fairly broad and the government could make the case that Facebook fraudulently breached its duties to its users.
This largely depends on the conception of freedom in question. If freedom implies that individuals as a result of a the proliferation of human rights are able to live atomistic lives without much interaction with most anyone else than the state and their employers, then I agree. The last ~100 years is empirical evidence of this.
If, however, freedom implies that beyond a few obligations and non-intrusive rights (e.g. a right to free speech doesnt impose on anyone else, whereas a right to education or health care does), then freedom and community are correlated goods. We can see the evidence of this in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville for instance wrote extensively about how in America, people organically formed their own communities in the absence of de jure social classes (beyond citizen and slave, which he found grotesque), and that this was a unique aspect of the relative freedom found in America at the time.
All of this is to say that the conception of freedom dictates the cohesion and veracity and quantity of organic communities. Or, perhaps stated another way, there is a trade-off between organic community and both inclusion and state intervention in private arrangements.
I don't think we disagree much here.
I agree that medicine in particular is hard on its own. I'm not entirely sure about law, because the legal profession has only become highly-credentialed (in the US at least, which is the subject of this article) relatively recently. Regardless, to not make the trap of my b-school friend, I don't know enough to dispute whether law is super hard. I suspect it's not easy.
(Just as an aside, I'll note that from what I do know about medicine and law, both professions also require an extremely logical approach. I suspect certain specialties in medicine like surgery or anesthesiology or oncology are much harder than programming for various reasons. From cursory web searches, these specialties appear to earn much more than programmers do, and even much more than other physicians.)
Thus, assuming that medicine and law are also very hard (on the same order of difficulty as programming), we can likely say that even without licensing and credentialing requirements, entering the medical or legal professions would be hard.
I suspect we have slightly different ideas when using the term "barriers to entry". Indeed, I might have made a better argument if I had said programming has "high" barriers to entry, since what I'm talking about is clearly a continuum and not a boolean. C'est la vie. When I use "barriers to entry" as a concept, I'm using it broadly. To me, it encapsulates not only legal or political costs, but any cost, which is why I mentioned building a power plant or a semiconductor fab. I am using it the same way I see it used in the various economics literature. In this case, I suspect the cost is that most people seem to feel uncomfortable thinking abstractly and logically, and haven't refined those skills over time. Alternatively, high capital costs are a common contributor to barriers to entry in economic analysis. "Human capital" (another econ term) is exactly how I'd categorize the learning required to practice programming, whether it is acquired through formal training or self-direction.
As far as the self-congratulation, I agree, although that was not my intention. As long as I stay a few standard deviations from Erik Meijer[1] (whom I otherwise deeply respect), I'll consider it a success. ;)
That said, I have no patience for the "smartest boy" syndrome or the, as you say, "LeetCode-like problems" given in interviews.
I suspect that these interviews do "work" in the sense that they successfully filter those who know what they're doing (albeit rejecting numerous ones who do as well), but they run the risk of encouraging elitism, rockstars and "smartest boy" cultures. (I also think programmers are uniquely bad a hiring because when we can't reduce a problem to something solvable by an algorithm, we tend to try to find the cheapest heuristic.)
> The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.
+1024
I have said quite a few times that the best CS program is one where you learn how to learn without being spoon fed. In fact, I know a couple great programmers who were _not_ CS (one studied econ; the other, physics), and they similarly learned how to learn without being spoon fed.
To use a non-software example, there are barriers to entry to chip manufacturers and power companies even under anarchy. Fabs are tremendously hard to build. Power plants are extremely hard to build. Building up knowledge and skills about computers is also very hard, especially when our genes don't seem to guide us toward thinking highly logically.
And programming is hard because it requires us to understand a bunch of modular systems and then the systems they're built on, all the way down, and in some cases, all the way up. Then, we have to understand the whole integrated system of the individual modules. Not all programming problems require this level of difficulty, but these problems do exist. I've been on teams where I'm the only one who understands what the OS is doing or the CPU is doing or what the network is doing or why some other distributed component might have stopped working. Most of my teammates in these cases seemed to enjoy programming, but didn't care to become overall experts in computers as a whole.
I once had a top-tier business school grad friend claim that programming really isn't that hard and that we're all whiners. He is a genuinely smart person. Today, he himself is trying to code in JavaScript on the client side. He's a friend so I help him, but the problems he has are junior-level or even entry-level. Suffice it to say, I haven't heard much more about how programmers are "whiners" when we say programming is hard.
Sure, orchestrating a state that has 0 returns to bribery is likely not possible without complete anarchism. That being said, not every state is going to have ridiculous returns to bribery (or more generally, "bureaucracy hacking") that we see today.
Before he became public enemy #1 and his sketchy financial dealings were uncovered, what returns did Martin Shkreli get because of weird FDA rules about generics and clinical trials? There may be some aspects of the FDA that are beneficial such that the benefits outweigh the costs (although off the top of my head I can't think of any), but clearly a smaller FDA with less (arbitrary) rule-making and enforcement authority would not have allowed Shkreli to explode the price of Daraprim.
Shkreli is a single example, but this happens all the time. Environmental protection departments are reluctant to punish land developers because they depend on the various land developers' fees for their budget, but will go after individuals with exorbitant fines for relatively mundane infractions. And we could talk all day about the ridiculousness of zoning regulations and the various zoning commissars/bureaucrats who effectively make small-scale, grass-roots, spontaneous land development impossible, and essentially only allow large developers or corporations who can afford to navigate the legal minefield of zoning rules.
Ideally, I'd like to have the returns to bribery be zero, but if that's not possible, then somewhere less than one would be nice. I have seen no real estimates of the returns to bribery in the West today - I'm not even sure such research exists yet - but I would guess that the returns are significantly greater than 1.
The second sentence is 100% true and completely in line with Adam Smith's thinking and the overall Scottish Enlightenment.
The first sentence is an accurate summary of the article, but the article is slightly but profoundly wrong. Smith and his ilk probably would think that the (modern) idea of "state intervention" vs "state non-intervention" to be silly. By the time of Ricardo, JS Mill and Marx, "moral philosophers" like Smith were referred to as "political economists" because they understood that the state was the base layer on which the rest of society was built. After all, even if someone is a complete "market fundamentalist" today, he or she still depends on the state enforcing property rights, enforcing general criminal laws against theft, murder, rape, etc., and enforcing private causes of action like torts against neighbors who cause a nuisance, pollute, etc. Were Adam Smith alive today, he would be in favor of all of those "state interventions" in the market, as he seems to have been in his own time. (As a parallel, the concept of "civil society" has followed a similar arc: Originally, Aristotle meant a community bound under a common set of norms and the rule of law. Over time, the concept came to mean groups that exist "outside" or exclusive of the state.)
At the same time, he would have likely been against some of the more heavy-handed regulatory approaches that modern states use from agricultural planning to zoning rules, and he would be against them for the same reason that he disliked the Mercantile System in the 18th century: they give huge advantages to incumbents, they often fail to solve the problems they are organized to solve, and they depend on effectively arbitrary rule by the state.
In my opinion, modern thinking has overzealously accepted black-and-white dichotomies like "for or against state intervention" or defining huge enumerations of incontrovertible "rights." In reality, the intelligent question would be (and the one Smith, Hume, et al. seemed interested in), as your second sentence suggests, "How much should the state intervene so that outcomes are better than the alternative?"
From the man himself:
> All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.
Otherwise, an entire sub-field of economics (it would be a sub-field of "political economy" if that term were widespread today) is Public Choice, which demonstrates rather well that often state intervention is at the behest of the "merchant interests." Public Choice is a direct descendent of Adam Smith’s thinking. Indeed, the very term "state capture" that the author invokes frequently probably derived from "regulatory capture," a term Public Choice helped propagate.
There is also a misunderstanding that Smith’s "invisible hand" concept implies some sort of Utopian paradise, when in fact, Smith meant more that aspiring monopolists who are nonetheless in competition with each other (and often in cooperation with others) lead to an increase in social gains, which on its own seems paradoxical and is highly counterintuitive. Modern economics seems founded on maximizing or minimizing every possible variable of interest, so I suppose some people may actually argue that the invisible hand is a statement about maximization, which it definitely isn’t. In practice, the only people I see invoke the "Invisible Hand" in this manner are harsh critics of any sort of free enterprise regardless of the context, and always advocates of state intervention and thus regulatory capture ("[people] of the system", indeed).
I am most surprised that Smith's sympathies for labor do not appear in this essay, as they seem to be quite strong. Smith discusses the effects of specialization that happens during industrialization, and goes so far as to say it makes workers with repetitive tasks "stupid." In context, his sympathies are clearly with the worker.
I guess as someone with relatively Smithian-Hayekian views, I am missing the overall point of this article, other than to hand-wring that so-called Neoliberalism (I have never met a Neoliberal) is actually unrelated to Smith’s ideas and are a perversion. He is entirely unconvincing, even if one accepts for the sake of argument that "neoliberalism" exists as a coherent philosophy or even ideology (it doesn't).