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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#221

Post by nl »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
edanm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wait, some people start a pizza place or a grocery store or something similar. Those kinds of businesses are definitely new businesses, and people who start these kinds of businesses is what was traditionally meant by the word "entrepreneur". But startups are qualitatively different - they are usually started with the express (and usually only ) purpose of growing very large, very fast. Call them startups or not,…

Sure, but a start-up is more of a determination after the fact than something you decide to build. The only reason it works out for YC is because they start so many companies that a few of them due to the expected distribution end up being home runs. They still influence things as much as they can in that direction but there are absolutely no guarantees and quite a few of the go-big-or-go-home companies end up going…

The Steve Blank definition of a start-up is "a startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

It's possible to form other successful businesses of course. But I like the way this definition calls out the scalability as an important factor. It doesn't make you point about betting against it working any less valid though.

Re: The Refragmentation

#222

Post by swombat »

13thLetter wrote: post #206
Joeri wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically a…

That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich , and that doesn't even get into the political subte…

Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election.

For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.

Re: The Refragmentation

#223

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

curun1r wrote: post #173
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…

> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…

>He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM,

And on that, as on so much else, he's more than a little wrong.

Apple and Microsoft simply couldn't have happened without the mega-corps - not least HP, but also IBM, and Fairchild and its spin-offs - which only existed because of post-war military and civilian "socialist" state support for technology.

By the mid-70s that support had been influencing economic policy for more than forty years.

Apple was a product of that system, not a cause of it. Companies like Apple do not happen in a pure deregulated neoliberal market paradise because markets don't have the kind of strategic intelligence that can fund projects like Whirlwind, TX-0, and the original Arpanet - all of which are essential steps on the road to making an Apple or a Google.

>Absent a healthy middle class, which was created by the era of conformity and relative income equality, would there have been enough consumers to create a market for a $5k computer? As we see income inequality rise, are we not also going to see the opportunity for wealth creation diminish as capital congregates in the hands of a class that largely conserves it?

And this is why they can't happen. You can't build your economy by impoverishing your customers with hand-wavey idealism about "market rates." If you try that, at best you run out of customers, and at worst you get a violent revolution.

The smart way to understand the economy isn't as a number of acquisitive centres for a vague thing called "money", but as a way of amplifying collective intelligence and distributing the gains as widely as possible. Status games for their own sake - which include most purely speculative and acquisitive activity - are the opposite of collective intelligence because they concentrate acquisition instead of distributing it.

You can get localised negentropic blips in a speculative economy, but the overall trend will still decrease collective opportunity over the medium/long term rather than increasing it.

Re: The Refragmentation

#224

Post by golergka »

anigbrowl wrote: post #209
lkrubner wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum If that were true nobody would ever feel ripped off. People irrationally engage in inefficient transactions all the time. For example, people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to be (and admit that they are) acting irrationally than truly deriving so much social or chemical utility from puffing on cigarettes that it exceeds the risk-weighted disutility of lung…

The fact that someone got ripped off in an interaction doesn't say this interaction was a zero sum. It only says that said interaction was unequal.

Generating value out of nothing and ripping people off are not necessarily incombinable things.

Re: The Refragmentation

#225

Post by golergka »

pcmaffey wrote: post #134

"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 cr…

> top 1% of the population, which owns more than the rest of the 99% combined

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf

This study that I found (after just 3 minutes of googling, btw) says that top 1% own only 34.6%. Do you have a source for your figures?

Re: The Refragmentation

#226

Post by Retric »

golergka wrote: post #224
anigbrowl wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum If that were true nobody would ever feel ripped off. People irrationally engage in inefficient transactions all the time. For example, people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to be (and admit that they are) acting irrationally than truly deriving so much social or chemical utility from puffing on cigarettes that it exceeds the risk-weighted disutility of lung…

The fact that someone got ripped off in an interaction doesn't say this interaction was a zero sum. It only says that said interaction was unequal. Generating value out of nothing and ripping people off are not necessarily incombinable things.

Weath is never created from nothing.

Nature is zero sum, economies are not valued in those terms because people prefer houses to trees etc.

But, be careful: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2569

Re: The Refragmentation

#227

Post by hueving »

basicplus2 wrote: post #181

Imagine a society of four people, one grows rice for four, one grows chickens for four one grows vegetables for four, one builds and maintains houses for four there is no profit and there is equality. If one person is profiting... or in our world a person is profiting more than the others it is inequality in action. Progressive tax rates are the simplest solution. The thinking that one persons work is more important…

That's ridiculous because it eliminates all incentives to invest time in training.

Why would anyone risk harm and spend years training to be an expert welder when he/she will get the same results as some person that throws some seeds in the ground to grow food for 4 people?

The fact is that some people's work is more important than others. That's why society in general is willing to pay more. The kid that rips my ticket stubs at the theater doesn't deserve the same thing as a neurological surgeon that spent the first 30 years of life in training.

Re: The Refragmentation

#228

Post by golergka »

three14 wrote: post #124

One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. In every industry you can point to jobs being lost to automation, yet you still need many, many people in health care, or construction, or manufacturing, or police, or teaching, or mining, or working for utilities, etc. It's complete speculation to suggest that jobs are disappearing faster than th…

> replaced

This word implies creation of new jobs, but all examples that you discussed in the rest of your comment seem to be about the jobs that already exist, not new ones.

Re: The Refragmentation

#229

Post by golergka »

AstroChimpHam wrote: post #156

PG started off talking about the fragmentation in politics, and I wish he would have wrapped that back in at the end. It feels to me like the two party system in the US is dying now as the oligopolistic system of just a few big companies began dying in the 90s. The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting…

> The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years. Proponents of extreme reform on the other side don't want to vote for a moderate candidate. A Trump vs Clinton election is going to leave too many people without a candidate and force the beginning of the end of the two party system.

Two-party system is awful in representing people's opinions, but it's much better at another task, that might be even more important — reaching minimal acceptable compromise. Also, you might be overlooking another danger of multi-party system: political force that significantly over-powers all competition. Once something like this appears and gets the power over government, it gets the positive feedback effect and very often becomes a beginning of authoritarian and un-democratic regime. US and UK two-party systems server as a natural safeguard against such a thing happening.

Really, selecting the best possible leader and making best possible decisions are not necessarily the main tasks of a democracy.

Re: The Refragmentation

#230

Post by gotchange »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #129
gotchange wrote: post #101

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…

The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…

> A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force

Can you elaborate please on what kind of force at work? Market forces?

Also, do you have any idea why he's bringing up the subject of "social cohesion" repeatedly throughout the piece? Is social cohesion a hot button issue in the US now that warrants more attention from the general public?

Because I believe that as long as the country is not at war with or in a national state of emergency or in other words, citizens are facing any kind of existential threat, the talk about social cohesion is meaningless and could be divisive as the term is tainted with not so favorable concepts from nationalism, nativism and the likes.

> unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth

I don't want to discourage rich folks from creating wealth. I just want them for now to pay their fair share of taxes and close all the loopholes that fuel this income inequality gap and distribute more resources to the least privileged and most disfranchised groups in the society to alleviate their situation.

As for technology has an inequality bias to it, I have to disagree with this assertion and point out that the availability of capital or lack thereof is the main catalyst in this equation not technology.

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