The Refragmentation

No, I've worked for several small businesses over my 35 years after college, and none of them aspired to meteoric growth. I think they're the lions share of new businesses, but consistently overlooked because the media is interested only in businesses with meteoric growth or products that become the next new new thing.

I think the willful blinkering of business interests toward only the .001 percent business that's exploding RIGHT NOW is a greater contributor to the fragmentation of business today than the fading priorities of WWII ever was. The idolization of the Gambler on Wall Street (or in SV) has misdirected our priorities away from respecting those who seek to build a sustainable business where normal people want to make a sustainable living. Now the prevalence of jobs at yet another ephemeral startup or large corporation awaiting it's next merger/buyout has greatly destabilized the workplace, much less made the job of corporate leader/ visionary/ innovator next to impossible. Instead of creative invention, corporate CEOs now focus instead on cost cutting destruction, and Wall Street applauds.

I wouldn't call that fragmentation so much as disintegration.

"And as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase."

This seems to be the ontological point of his essay, which reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg.

But it misses the underlying point of wealth creation: if more people create more wealth, then naturally, there should be less poverty. Adding value to the world makes the pie bigger. The real issue is distribution. Our current economic model distributes wealth as a factor of capital, which is hoarded at the top and systematically protected. It would be silly to say that the top 1% of the population, which owns more than the rest of the 99% combined, creates more wealth or is more productive than everyone else on the planet. They just have a monopoly on capital.

This history is pretty well-written as far as it goes, but it's centered on the white American male worker's experience, and particularly on the sort of person who had a chance at being a manager.

It barely mentions women and doesn't mention the civil rights movement at all. A majority of Americans living at the time had no chance at being an executive at a large corporation.

There has never been a time when all workers were treated equally.

"if economics is darwinian"

How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for both parties to end up better off. But in nature, in the competition for finite resources, one often sees exchanges in which all species end up worse off. There are many documented cases where predators have been too successful, and killed off all their prey, and then gone extinct themselves -- a negative sum scenario that has no obvious comparison to economic exchanges among humans.

That's one of the reasons I like it. It's too controversial and complex a topic to be prescriptive about it, but it's such an important topic that it deserves to be laid out clearly and plainly. That's what PG is so good at, regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions. I feel like I could share this with anyone I know and they would get value out of it, and further, it would help us get on the same page when discussing our feelings about what to do (if anything) about it.