251–260 of 461 posts
Should connect with the role of social media.
In particular, explains much of why the heck I, first, got a technical Ph.D. and then became an entrepreneur.
Did I mention very nicely done and full of good insight.
Gee, all that time people spent in courses in history, economics, political science, B-school, and STEM field education, and the really good stuff is right there in PG's essay!
This is perhaps not the best example, as a physicist in 1960 might've faced a choice between academia and Fairchild Semiconductor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> his essay [...] 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 Well put. The argument that general taxation disincentives innovation has never made any sense to me: no matter how high the tax rate, your post-tax income still scales linearly with your gross income. If your object i…
Devil's advocate: If more income takes more work, and I'm already rich, then the extra work is only worth it to me if I get a really substantial return, not just some minor increase. (In reality, only totally naive people believe that any billionaire cares at all about making more money for the sake of the money. It's actually about power and about irrational desire to be higher in the rankings compared to other bill…
Its important to distinguish enabling upward mobility through entrepreneurship and incentivizing that with reasonable taxes and stopping billionaire bank tycoons from buying houses of legislature with overseas bank accounts and ownership stake in half the multinational corporations in town.
It also contributes to why that wealth concentration is a problem, because it snowballs - in an unbiased economy with modest inflation the rich must reinvest somewhere to maintain their relative wealth or lose it. When you have enough to use force of law to distort the market so you don't have to take the same degree of risk in those investments, or even make them at all, you break the system.
So while wealth inequality is a symptom of globalized economic forces, that wealth inequality perpetuates itself in how it will be used to stymie innovation and promote selective growth for those first to get there.
Great essay. I would quibble with the following though: > [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating. The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity. Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means…
> success = ability * motivation * opportunity success = (ability * motivation * opportunity)^hugeDoseOfLuck There is no guaranteed formula for success, it is heavily luck dependent. Those who think otherwise are suffering from survivor-ship bias and/or the just world fallacy.
What does "Duplo" mean? "the Duplo economy" "Duplo world"
Notice that Duplo bricks are twice as long, twice as wide, and twice as tall as ordinary Lego. I wrote "double size" but they are, in a sense, eight times the size of ordinary Lego. They appear hugely larger. Also one tends to have far fewer Duplo bricks than Lego bricks ( 1/8 ?), about the same total volume, limited by storage space in the toy cupboard.
This lets the figurative use of the word Duplo serve double duty, both suggesting that the parts are eight times the size, while also suggesting that the grand total is about the same, there are just one eight as many of the big ones.
It is literally a childish metaphor, but still an apt one.
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…
My guess: Relax, what you want is well on the way. The biggies now, in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, are on the way to a land of commodity products, fungible work, high competition, and low profit margins.
Why? Because really powerful innovation they will need but don't much have.
The opportunity? For now, more in innovation.
The opportunity? Be the only guy who knows how to bake really good bread in a land of suddenly huge quantities of just dirt cheap wheat. Or, computer cycles, data storage bytes, data communications data rates per dollar are through the roof, and operating system, infrastructure, and OSS are all just dirt cheap. So, the challenge and the opportunity is to be innovative and make use of this dirt cheap wheat.
Or, 15 years ago, a Web server might have been on one or several single core processors with clock speed of 90 MHz. Now, for much less money can get an 8 core processor with a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Let's take that ratio in performance:
8 * 4000 / 90 = 356
Find something really good for the new computers to do, guys!
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When jobs move from a developed / high wage country to one with cheaper labor, they effectively disappear. That pattern then repeats until the job finally ends up in the least regulated sweatshop in the darkest corner of the planet. Eventually automation will 'outsource' that job too, thereby completing the defragging process. Does another job necessarily arise to replace each lost job? That's a question that only a…
This is exactly the taboo I'm talking about. Police, health care, mining, teaching, and surprisingly many others aren't going overseas right now. A lot of jobs are disappearing, and a lot aren't. Why assume that e.g. the American economy won't have enough jobs in the near future? There's no data on HN in all these discussions, and no real trends to extrapolate from except in very specific sectors.
We are pushing very hard for computer vision, which is the real barrier to practical robotics that could replace your electrician, plumber, nurse, miner, driver, etc. There is no sacred cow of labor besides what is mandated by the molasses slow state (because I would absolutely argue that learning systems like Khan's Academy, the availability of resources online, and the technological organizational potential of software solve all the criteria to substitute teachers with a security guard watching the kids while they listen to robo-instructor, solve the problems themselves, and ask the neural-net for help when they run into problems - and the kids are of course not all in the same room in an expensive upkeep building called a school). That kind of change though must also be culturally accepted since a lot of effort goes into separating public education from market forces.
Point is, the jobs that we could not send overseas have tremendous pressure on them as a result to be absolved entirely by AI, robotics, and software. It is why the pencil pusher desk job of 1980 - rows of typists at typewriters transcribing documents - went the way of the Dodo and did generate a ton of unemployment that we still have not seamlessly solved.
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> 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…
The middle class has shrunk because more people have become rich. So it seems that today there are greater opportunities to sell expensive hardware, particularly since even the lower classes are (in absolute terms) richer than the middle class of the Apple II era. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl... As for 5k products, like fancy drones, 3d printers or high end bicycles, was the apple II n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The middle class has shrunk because more people have become rich. So it seems that today there are greater opportunities to sell expensive hardware, particularly since even the lower classes are (in absolute terms) richer than the middle class of the Apple II era. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl... As for 5k products, like fancy drones, 3d printers or high end bicycles, was the apple II n…
Source for that first sentence?
He quotes Rockefeller in 1989: "The day of combination is here to stay." The amusing thing is that he writes this just as the era of fragmentation in the US is coming to a close. We have one winner in search - Google. We have one winner in social - Facebook. We're down to a few retail Internet providers, a few big banks, a few big airlines, a few telecom companies, and a few commercial real estate owners per city. Th…