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Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

economist.com

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Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#21

Post by mattnewton »

dbroockman wrote: post #14
mattnewton wrote: post #9

I think more simplistically: when you take this group of people and average them out what you get are beliefs that benefit the large companies they represent. That's the signal that is correlated with running a big tech company, and the rest is probably mostly noise. That's all really, they aren't for or against free trade in aggregate, they are for their company trading profitably, on average.

Author of the study they were writing about here. That is the original expectation I had coming in, but I don't think what we find is totally consistent with that (although some is). We talk about that in the paper. Study here: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers... .

Thanks for the link! I'll have to actually read the study. The article alone did not give me the sense this was incomplete.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#22

Post by jnbiche »

malandrew wrote: post #15
civilian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand t…

Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foisted upon them, they make sure to take the time to influence what regulation they are subject to so that it benefits them and becomes a barrier to entry for new entrants.

> Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations

I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#23

Post by JPKab »

Shivetya wrote: post #8

their categories are broad enough to arrive at any result they wanted. still I never ever considered any of the SV bosses to anything close to libertarians.

I think that SV founders fall into a pretty solid category of people who were raised by educated, successful people.

My main concern with this is that people raised by successful, hard-working people don't understand poverty and the culture around it.

Zuckerberg is a perfect example. He's a guy who preaches about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, but he grew up in an upper middle class suburb that was lily white and had no diversity itself.

As a guy who grew up in a working class family with major cultural dysfunction that was mirrored by people all around me, I recognize that the typical "solutions" tossed out by these people are useless.

I WISH that the only reason minorities were underrepresented in tech was racism. The real reason is the culture of poverty. This spans race. How many white people from trailer parks in West Virginia or Kentucky do you encounter in the tech scene? Probably a similar number to black people from poor inner-city neighborhoods. Almost none.

In fact, when you encounter minorities in SV, they are typically from middle class families with college-educated parents. It's a perfect example of why the "surface" aspects of diversity are not only a bad metric, but one that contributes to the problem by acting as a red herring from true root causes.

Yet the SV CEOs think they know everything because they built a web app that streams music.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#25

Post by aaron-lebo »

JPKab wrote: post #23
Shivetya wrote: post #8

their categories are broad enough to arrive at any result they wanted. still I never ever considered any of the SV bosses to anything close to libertarians.

I think that SV founders fall into a pretty solid category of people who were raised by educated, successful people. My main concern with this is that people raised by successful, hard-working people don't understand poverty and the culture around it. Zuckerberg is a perfect example. He's a guy who preaches about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, but he grew up in an upper middle class suburb that was lily white a…

Exactly. It drives me crazy to hear people who never moved 20 minutes outside of downtown Manhattan and went to a 30k a year high school act like they possibly understand what it's like to be working class or that they can begin to diagnose major issues in society. They've never seen anything but the upper crust of it.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#27

Post by CryptoPunk »

jnbiche wrote: post #19
civilian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand t…

I strongly agree with your argument regarding economic-class determinism or whatever it's called. After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson). However, if you're suggesting that Silicon Valley CEOs are in favor of libertarian free trade, I think I agree more with the article and disagree with you. Silicon Valley CEOs lo…

>>After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson).

You mean regressive policies that hurt the poor, right?

The War on Poverty marked the end of the decline in the American poverty rate. The social welfare state gradually sapped American industrial vitality and the labour productivity growth that had been fueling wage gains across all income classes for decades.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#28

Post by enraged_camel »

raldi wrote: post #16

The stereotypical right-wing position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's get rid of it" The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run" The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"

>>The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run"

No, it is "This government program is poorly-run probably because it is severely underfunded."

After all, "government is poorly-run" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is used to justify spending cuts, which does in fact result in performance problems.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#29

Post by Florin_Andrei »

civilian wrote: post #10
mattnewton wrote: post #9

I think more simplistically: when you take this group of people and average them out what you get are beliefs that benefit the large companies they represent. That's the signal that is correlated with running a big tech company, and the rest is probably mostly noise. That's all really, they aren't for or against free trade in aggregate, they are for their company trading profitably, on average.

Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand t…

> People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand the rules of the game they're playing) and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation.

The amount of libertarian bullshit in that statement ought be enough to fertilize the soil in the whole great state of Idaho for a decade at least.

Re: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians

#30

Post by hibikir »

malandrew wrote: post #15
civilian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand t…

Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foisted upon them, they make sure to take the time to influence what regulation they are subject to so that it benefits them and becomes a barrier to entry for new entrants.

The regulation doesn't have to be foisted upon them at all: Regulation that just harms new companies, or competitors of a very different shape, is introduced at the behalf of industry groups all the time.

What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation.

Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations.

We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.

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