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Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

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Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#91

Post by saraid216 »

cmdkeen wrote: post #82
paul wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not an engineer. (not really, but to me it makes as much sense as your statement) How does being a part of the evil "one percent" make you any less qualified to have or hold a variety of political views? If anything, I've found that having more money makes me more aware of issues like unemployment, health care, et…

Well feel better - there is no right/left divide in America. By the standards of anywhere else there is only very right / slightly less right. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled off was convincing Americans that anyone to the left of Attila the Hun was a Communist... What I find odd is that the article equates libertarianism with Rand and the Koch brothers, as if no other type exists. There's also a hint of con…

Libertarianism is basically a fundamentalist version of liberalism. It's essentially "liberalism has gotten too complicated and the complexity is producing errors; here are the most important bits and they're what Really Matter", which is what fundamentalism is.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#92

Post by HIbachikabuki »

bubbleRefuge wrote: post #89
jseliger wrote: post #37

I find it somewhat funny that the original New Yorker article about the tech industry's insularity is itself hidden behind a paywall; I actually wanted to submit the Packer article itself this morning but didn't bother. Nonetheless, I do think Johnson does a decent job of giving the other side. But I did send this as a letter to the editor, since it concerns a pet peeve that I constantly see in the media: George Pack…

You are right. Why can't more high-rise condo projects get going on the peninsula? Is it b/c of earthquakes? Why not build lots or hi-rise condos along the bart/cal-train corridor?

It's not the earthquake issue. It's that the Peninsula is already fully built out & most existing residents/voters don't want any high density development, they want to keep the existing single-family-home environments.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#93

Post by khuey »

bubbleRefuge wrote: post #89
jseliger wrote: post #37

I find it somewhat funny that the original New Yorker article about the tech industry's insularity is itself hidden behind a paywall; I actually wanted to submit the Packer article itself this morning but didn't bother. Nonetheless, I do think Johnson does a decent job of giving the other side. But I did send this as a letter to the editor, since it concerns a pet peeve that I constantly see in the media: George Pack…

You are right. Why can't more high-rise condo projects get going on the peninsula? Is it b/c of earthquakes? Why not build lots or hi-rise condos along the bart/cal-train corridor?

It's because of zoning.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#94

Post by michaelochurch »

rayiner wrote: post #33
dmmalam wrote: post #10

"I would be surprised if there were any new industry in the history of capitalism that distributed its economic rewards to its employees as widely as Silicon Valley has." Wall street has been distributing most of it's profits to employees in the form of bonuses for decades. Though unlike SV, it get criticised heavily (a lot unfairly IMHO) for it. Having worked in both, I feel they are full of the same 'type' of peopl…

Yeah, this quote is totally off base. Finance, consulting, law, and accounting all distribute company earnings very widely (often, entirely) to the people who do the actual work. These companies also tend to have much flatter structures than Silicon Valley tech companies. The greenest associate at a big NYC law or consulting firm probably has just a few levels above him to the managing partner or CEO. The structure i…

Thank you for this.

Lawyers and bankers actually have a sharkish will to negotiate for themselves. They're good at what they do, they're powerful allies and formidable enemies, and they know it. People don't often try to take advantage of them, even when one is senior and the other's a greenhorn. They know better. In 7 years, that junior you tweaked is going to be partner-level somewhere and might end up surprising you how well he does.

Most programmers work for old-style Theory-X companies where you have to be a manager to get a fair shake-- because we, as a group, suck at advocating for ourselves and get taken advantage of in a way that just wouldn't happen to most lawyers or bankers.

The same is true of most of these Silicon Valley "startups". You gotta differentiate between companies that are small because they're elite niche operations (which are some of the best places to work) and companies that are small because they're shitty. Many of these "startups" are the latter.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#95

Post by CleanedStar »

onemorepassword wrote: post #54

One foundation of the entire argument seems to be that support for the Democratic party makes SV progressive. However, in a global context only the minority left wing of the Democratic party could be called progressive. Also, a simpler explanation for the large support for the Democrats would be that SV consists of intelligent, highly educated and well-informed people that wouldn't dream of supporting the extremist,…

Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted.

More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce.

This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum.

If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case.

If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on.

The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#96

Post by michaelochurch »

The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice among tech companies of distributing meaningful equity (usually in the form of stock options) to ordinary employees.

That's disingenuous. 0.02% of something that a CEO thinks (based on nothing but his own ego) is worth $10 billion is not meaningful equity.

The proper way to model this is that equity compensation tends to be about 1/3 of what the person is giving up in salary, career advancement, etc. If you're paying $30,000 to work there, you'll typically get $10,000 per year in equity, or $40,000 over 4 years. That'll be 0.4% if the current valuation is $10 million.

Now, let's say a clueless schmuck puts his whole life savings (or, more accurately, what he'll be getting in lieu of savings over the next 4 years) in some extremely volatile (100-500%) penny stock, because that's actually what's happening (with that penny stock being in one's employer, i.e. controlled by someone who can fire you for "performance" Pincus-style). Some of those people are going to end up modestly wealthy (no employee gets rich) and most are going to be hosed.

To say that employee equity in typical startups (there is "meaningful" is a huge stretch. You'd have the same results asking people to pump their savings into penny stocks. A few would get very rich (from modest starting points) and most would wipe out.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#97

Post by btilly »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #40
pg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. What? Much of the article is devoted to making the opposite point: that the SV elite overwhelmingly support the Democrats.

Political affiliation seems like a red herring in a two party system. It wouldn't surprise me if people in SV vote democrat because they don't like certain things associated with the republicans (religion , anti-gay rights, guns , whatever) rather than agreeing wholesale with the democratic party manifesto.

In a straw poll at work some years ago we found that a hypothetic economically liberal, and socially liberal party would handily trounce both Democrats and Republicans. I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds fairly broadly among people in IT.

As the old joke goes, "I can't vote Democratic because I want to be able to spend my money, and I can't vote Republican because of what I want to spend my money on!"

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#98

Post by btilly »

pg wrote: post #22
smacktoward wrote: post #19

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. But this is just wrong. There are lots of one-percenters who vote Democratic. They just mostly feel more strongly about cultural-liberalism issues than they do about economic ones. But when it comes to economic issues, these folks still tend to lean rightward; they overestimate the degree of s…

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. What? Much of the article is devoted to making the opposite point: that the SV elite overwhelmingly support the Democrats.

The fundamental error of the New Yorker piece would seem to be as described.

The fundamental thing that this piece fails to discuss is that just because you support the Democrats doesn't mean that you're a stereotypical liberal Democrat.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#99

Post by smacktoward »

pg wrote: post #22
smacktoward wrote: post #19

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. But this is just wrong. There are lots of one-percenters who vote Democratic. They just mostly feel more strongly about cultural-liberalism issues than they do about economic ones. But when it comes to economic issues, these folks still tend to lean rightward; they overestimate the degree of s…

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. What? Much of the article is devoted to making the opposite point: that the SV elite overwhelmingly support the Democrats.

That was my point -- whether SV's elite support the Democrats or the Republicans is kind of irrelevant to the question. Both parties have been captured by economic elites. These elites have some issues they disagree on, but lots of issues they mostly agree on, and the ones they agree on are the ones that impact the highly wealthy. Where there is consensus, it is the consensus of the elite, for the elite.

In other words -- Jamie Dimon is a Democrat. Robert Rubin is a Democrat. Larry Summers is a Democrat. These are the voices that shape Democratic economic policy, and they are not exactly a group of fiery progressives. They are the evidence of how narrow the difference between the parties is on the issues that the 1% care most about. The issues the parties fight over are by definition issues that guys like these just don't care about. If they cared about them, they would drag the parties kicking and screaming to a consensus just like they have on economic policy.

This is no different than how it was in the first Gilded Age; most of the most notorious political figures from that era were Republicans -- James G. Blaine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Blaine) and Roscoe Conkling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling) come to mind -- but there were plenty of Democrats too, like Boss Tweed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_Tweed). And all leaders in both parties overwhelmingly hewed to an ideology that business interests were more important than any others.

Re: Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

#100

Post by smacktoward »

rndmize wrote: post #77
paul wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not an engineer. (not really, but to me it makes as much sense as your statement) How does being a part of the evil "one percent" make you any less qualified to have or hold a variety of political views? If anything, I've found that having more money makes me more aware of issues like unemployment, health care, et…

> How does being a part of the evil "one percent" make you any less qualified to have or hold a variety of political views? I don't think this is what he's saying. It's that one percenters have an inherently greater voice on political issues (if they so choose) and that as a result, the national debate has been warped to focus on the issues and perspectives they consider important.

That was my point, yes. I don't object to the 1% having a voice in politics; of course they should! I just object to having a system that defers reflexively to their needs and interests over those of everybody else.
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