Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 461 posts

Re: The Refragmentation

#391

Post by bitwize »

Graham leaves out one crucial thing:

A more equal society is a better society. Always. This was borne out in the work of Wilkinson and Pickett for their book The Spirit Level.

You may have less technology. You may have less innovation. Tough. Creating more of what Earl Dunovant called "cute and useful monkey tricks with energy and matter" at the expense of your fellow man and the planet does not put you ahead, and societies should not seek to optimize for monkey tricks over the betterment of their fellow man.

Inequality (along with the environment) may be the defining issue of the twenty-first century, and once recognition of inequality and its consequences goes mainstream, laissez-faire capitalism will join royalism in the dustbin of discredited political philosophies.

Re: The Refragmentation

#392

Post by ignasl »

bitwize wrote: post #391

Graham leaves out one crucial thing: A more equal society is a better society. Always. This was borne out in the work of Wilkinson and Pickett for their book The Spirit Level . You may have less technology. You may have less innovation. Tough. Creating more of what Earl Dunovant called "cute and useful monkey tricks with energy and matter" at the expense of your fellow man and the planet does not put you ahead, and s…

Oh great lets get back into the trees. Then we will be very advanced society.

Re: The Refragmentation

#393

Post by spectrum1234 »

bitwize wrote: post #391

Graham leaves out one crucial thing: A more equal society is a better society. Always. This was borne out in the work of Wilkinson and Pickett for their book The Spirit Level . You may have less technology. You may have less innovation. Tough. Creating more of what Earl Dunovant called "cute and useful monkey tricks with energy and matter" at the expense of your fellow man and the planet does not put you ahead, and s…

No he doesn't leave this out because as he says, he is just explaining things, not giving an opinion.

Re: The Refragmentation

#394

Post by [deleted] »

MawNicker wrote: post #337
landryraccoon wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the availability of capital or lack thereof is the main catalyst in this equation not technology. You mean if you can't afford a computer and an AWS account you can't get started? Sure, maybe not, but it's a far cry from the capital you needed in the 1960s to get started. I bet a lot of the readers of this forum know people personally that have made a million dollars or more with their laptop (to a first order appr…

Most of those people received educations costing upwards of $60,000.

[deleted]

Re: The Refragmentation

#395

Post by easuter »

clarkmoody wrote: post #149
sce wrote: post #32

Regarding income inequality, I recommend listening to some of the speeches/debates with Bernie Sanders. E.g. he argues that the greatest receiver of welfare in the US is the wal-Mart family, because they get even richer paying their workers so little that the workers have to live on welfare. (In other words the welfare is "paying" the workers so that Wal-Mart don't have to.) He proposes to rise the minimum wage. http…

Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms. Walmart is operating within the legal employment framework set up by the government, including the welfare state and the minimum wage. That will not change by raising the minimum wage. Rather, Walmart will simply add a…

> Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms.

While technically true, you're ignoring a ton of other factors such as the lack of any other alternative employment or the lack of financial capability to move to an area where more employment exists.

When the only jobs available are McJobs, then that is what you are compelled to do, to support yourself and your family - regardless of your intelligence or qualifications because someone else is ready to take your place if you don't accept the job. You have no power to negotiate a higher salary regardless of whether or not you deserve it.

It is a very hard rut to pull yourself out of and stay free from. Companies like Walmart exploit this as much as they can, and have no reason to change their behaviour unless forced to do so.

Re: The Refragmentation

#396

Post by mhaymo »

zanny wrote: post #381
mhaymo wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a supermajority of novel innovation comes from people at the bottom becoming rich, not the rich getting richer. Citation needed? As PG points out, most startup founders are not poor. They take the risk of innovating not because they are desperate, but because they see a large upside. Reducing that upside will certainly reduce the motivation to innovate at the margins. The only question is how much does it reduce mo…

Poor is relative. We are talking about the difference between having a safety net at your parents house where they have a combined income of 300k and might have a cleaning maid every weekend versus a billionaire CEO with penthouses in four cities and his own airplane. One is middle class, the other is extremely rich.

So the focus on "inequality" is a focus on large wealth at the expense of thinking about poverty, to the degree that you call 6-figure earners "people at the bottom". I'm still not convinced that a "supermajority" of innovation does not involve the very rich. Much innovation today comes from companies like Google, Apple, SpaceX, lead by very wealthy leaders.

Even if you were right, the point remains that limiting the upside of risk-taking also reduces the incentives for middle-class people to innovate.

Re: The Refragmentation

#397

Post by sawwit »

ignasl wrote: post #392
bitwize wrote: post #391

Graham leaves out one crucial thing: A more equal society is a better society. Always. This was borne out in the work of Wilkinson and Pickett for their book The Spirit Level . You may have less technology. You may have less innovation. Tough. Creating more of what Earl Dunovant called "cute and useful monkey tricks with energy and matter" at the expense of your fellow man and the planet does not put you ahead, and s…

Oh great lets get back into the trees. Then we will be very advanced society.

This is not what OP is saying.

Re: The Refragmentation

#398

Post by wpietri »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #280
wpietri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exclusions certainly make things work better from the point of view of the excluders. Slavery, for example, worked wonderfully for the slavers. When we abolished slavery but kept former slaves from full participation in society, they mostly ended up as underpaid servants and laborers. Women restricted from earning a living on their own still had to survive somehow. Which in the 50s often meant attaching themselves to…

Nope. The economy is bigger than you are, and it's keenly in your enlightened self-interest to have each other person in your economy producing at maximum. The "excluders" in the antebellum South lived under a rather delusional post-hoc rationalization of slavery. John C. Clahoun wrote of this belief system at length. This was minimally modified in the Reconstruction South and after. My maternal grandmother raised 9…

Your comment aggressively misses my point.

In a broad, idealistic sense, yes, I would like each person in the economy producing at maximum. (Assuming we could agree on an ideal value metric, which I'm not sure we can.) There we agree.

But if I am narrowly self-interested (which many humans are), and if I value positional success over absolute wealth (which many do), then I am better off participating in a system of oppression where the value of other people's production is diverted into my pockets. Which is why the great bulk of human history takes place in those sorts of conditions.

> My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids.

Good for her, and I mean that sincerely. But it's not proof of anything. The question to ask isn't, "Can you name an outlier?" Instead try asking, "What was the average condition of women during the Depression." Or, "Would your family have been better off if women's labor hadn't been systematically devalued for centuries?"

Re: The Refragmentation

#399

Post by Mindphreaker »

Very interesting article. I mostly agree with the idea of social fragmentation. I think it is no coincidence that we like to call ourselves "individuals". Maybe the thought reflects our current zeitgeist but it seems almost natural (nowadays) for humans to emphasize our differences / our individualism. However, it seems very interesting, that as much as we like to differentiate ourselves we also tend to some kind of collectivism (e.g. trending sports, technology (iPhone/Android), etc.), even working for the same corporations (Google/Facebook/Apple...) which also appears contrary to the article. It may be true that the speed of change is accelerating but I can't agree with the idea that we already reached a fully fragmented society (yet) which is here to stay.

Another interesting part was the analogy to Ford's vertical integration. The trend definitely went from fully integrated mega corps to fragmented networks of corporations. The car industry is a perfect example. It would be exciting to know if PG thought about Tesla/SpaceX and it's current move towards a higher level of integration (producing more and more parts by themselves) in order to control the quality of their products. It may be sign that we are on the edge or maximum of fragmentation and there are trends emerging which pull us back into consolidation (maybe in another form than it used to).

Re: The Refragmentation

#400

Post by dcosson »

clarkmoody wrote: post #167
chrispeel wrote: post #20

It seems to me that much of the fragmentation that the post discusses is just economic specialization, which we should encourage (see Adam Smith). I do think it is reasonable that one limits the 'fragmentation', i.e. that one puts negative feedback in the economic loop in the form of a progressive tax. Negative feedback is used everywhere in electronics and even sometimes by the Fed to control interest rates. Even so…

As an engineer, you should be familiar with chaotic systems, which produce vastly different trajectories based on small changes in initial conditions. Very simple mechanical systems[1] exhibit chaotic tendencies. Control of such systems is possible on the small scale, but large scale chaotic systems may become uncontrollable. Now imagine an economy made of millions of people who all have different needs, desires, abi…

There are some bold claims here that you don't even make an attempt to back up with evidence.

On chaos, you seem to be arguing that a few select simple systems are chaotic, therefore a much larger system must also be chaotic. This doesn't make any sense, complexity != chaos. Think of something like an ant colony, millions of ants in an incredibly complex system, but the system as a whole tends toward very consistent behavior. Killing some of the ants or cutting off on supply of food makes no difference.

It's also incredibly vague to talk about this when there are billions or more inputs to a system like the US economy. Some variables might exhibit chaotic behavior, but that doesn't mean anything you do to the system has a completely unpredictable outcome.

> Now the State pushes thousands of policy changes per year into the system without ever really monitoring the response to a single change.

What? They monitor changes all the time. For instance, the white house is happy to tell you exactly how many more people have health insurance now thanks to obamacare. Many (maybe most?) of the policy changes are close to independent and effect only a small subset of people. And it is usually possible to statistically account for other factors that might be interfering with what you're trying to measure.

> have caused vast displacement, pain, and suffering in the form of economic turmoil and war.

Yet somehow we're living in the safest time in human history [1]

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_viole...

Post reply on HN