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how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"
Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
The US doesn’t care about productivity but more about maintaining some sort of class system. It took me a while to realize this. Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. I never actually understood this.
If you grow up middle class or better then it’s pretty much impossible to make good decisions and end up poor. The incorrect “moral failure” mindset comes from projecting this belief onto people who grew up in poverty and never had a chance.
how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"
how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"
Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter.
I see it everywhere. In academia, most big PIs I've met don't care about pushing knowledge frontiers. It's about their own careers, putting their names on as many manuscripts as possible and securing funding to hire more and more people.
In my neighbourhood teens are systematically breaching COVID restrictions with huge illegal parties, spreading disease and therefore causing fatalities. Since the odds of having severe COVID are low for them, they don't care.
The local power plant was scamming with their emissions in a VW-like way, by tampering CO2 meters in their chimneys.
I could go on and on.
How can we address these behaviors? Pg has said somewhere I can't find now that scaling big companies is still an unsolved problem, and that solutions are welcome. I think it's the same class of issue. Once you are big enough to require a layer of middle management, you won't be able to filter out the selfish ones.
* Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making.
* Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking.
* Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being.
It used to be a joke that you can remove poverty by giving people money. It was common to think that patronizing is the only way because poor are lazy bums and lower beings who need to be managed. Same data with same correlations as before. It's just the direction of causality that may need to change.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees.
I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees like that, you would be just as successful". That seems a bit silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
How so? That sounds like overreaching conclusions. You might as well say "monarchy is responsible for the scientific and industrial revolutions", or "Christianity has created the Renaissance", just because those pairs of complex changes in society and history happened concurrently in time.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
> The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money [...] This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter. I see it eve…
It's individualism for me now. Me, my friends, the neighbours.
Everyone else, figure it out, I'm not your pawn.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
The company I work for recently got acquired and the entire culture changed to one of "fuck the engineers, only contracts matter, engineers are just butts in seats, the more the better (quality not required)".
My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slight bonus.
At this point, I have had all productivity beaten out of me. I really don't understand the mindset.
It's been a crash course on how to take a wonderful company and burn it to the ground in a matter of less than 2 years. Most of my coworkers have moved on at this point, and each contract they got out of it has now failed. So what the fuck was even the point?
How do you have 40% turnover and not think "Am I the problem?"?