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

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101–110 of 148 posts

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

#101
"The whole premise of stakeholder capitalism offers a powerful and distinct message, because it gets at both our desire to be competitive in the global marketplace, but also to be more fair and equitable in the way we share our wealth. True libertarians would be repulsed at the thought..."

This sounds to me like a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of a startup vs big company.

In a startup, every employee has an important bearing on the success or failure of the company. Getting the right people on the team is priority number one for a budding startup, and to get the best people you have to promise them a piece of the spoils.

In a typical big company, only a handful of people have enough authority to steer the ship. For everyone else, their roles usually aren't mission-critical, or they're relatively easy to replace. You therefore don't need to pay them as well.

This isn't about "being fair and equitable" or "sharing our wealth" for its own sake, this is still just about economics. More people are getting stock at tech companies because those people's skills and contributions are more directly linked to the success of those companies. It just doesn't make sense to be giving stock to pilots, pharmacists, and factory workers - if they're amazing at their jobs, it has at most a marginal affect on the company as a whole, and if they quit, the show will go on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely in support of giving junior people meaningful equity, for a number of reasons. But it still needs to make sense. There are good reasons why we don't see it in other industries.

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

#102
* 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. *

While me may already be better than the rest of the country in this regard, we can definitely do a lot better than we do today. I'd be preaching to the choir so I'll refrain from elaborating on the equity compensation of single digit employees, but there must be a way to share the success more equally than we do today.

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

#103
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on it is that SV is 'liberaltarian', in that they prefer small, efficient, decentralized organizational structures, but that they also recognize the need for social welfare as a stabilizing force. That's how I see it as well. The fact is, that there is a strong demand for social insurance/welfare services (e.g. health insurance, unemployment stipends, retirement pensions, etc), and the supply of those service…

> "Liberaltarians," I think, believe that we're better off letting the government provide the social insurance services to everyone, so that citizens' access to them is no longer dependent on employment, which will increase liquidity in the labor market and take some of the risk out of entrepreneurship. Also, employer-funded health insurance is a drag on US companies that must compete with foreign companies that can…

And it depresses salaries. Companies could afford to pay more in salaries if they didn't have to pay for health insurance. This could potentially make up for the higher taxes we might have to pay for a national single-payer health plan.

Of course, we might not have to pay higher taxes at all if we didn't have all these private health insurance companies skimming the pot.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just enumerated a significant portion of the de facto Republican agenda. Also, as 2004 demonstrated, voters normally vote for what they like instead of against what they dislike.

Um. One data point does not a "normal" make.

ok fair enough. Here are a few other data points. The same holds true for 1980, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012.

1984: http://books.google.com/books?id=phQo8JYcjw8C&pg=PA62&#3...

1988: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,147885,00.h...

2000: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/10/18/flash...

2004: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation...

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

#105

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,…

Reasonable, honest, thoughtful people vote Republican for good reason. For example, they are more likely to support good governance. Blue states and massive public debts go hand in hand[1].

In my experience, the number one most common quality that distinguishes the rare Bay Area young Republican is a love for sustainable budgets and a belief in the immorality of a government knowingly running an unsustainable deficit. Those monsters.

The idea that the Republican party is a collection of "circus freaks" is a myth largely sustained by the liberal echosphere.

[1] http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/blue-s...

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

#106
post #32

A much simpler point the author missed is that wealth doesn't exactly cause the housing shortage so much as not building houses. San Francisco has rent control, and most of the peninsula has severe zoning controls. It would be extraordinarily profitable to build commercial buildings with dense lofted apartments in many areas of the peninsula, however they are simply prohibited by local governments. That's neither lib…

Note that those projects would be profitable only if they were permitted in limited areas only. A broad lifting of regulation would result in sprawl, not density. Look at Houston. Everyone would avoid expensive, dense areas by building out further and further into the land, and in the Bay, there's a ton of undeveloped wooden land that developers would have no problem replacing with tract homes if they were able to do so.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's correct. Anecdotally, my personal network in tech seems to side with Democrats for reason like environmental protection, global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and olive branch foreign policy; not because of economic reasons like union support, wealth redistribution, or strengthened regulators.

I agree to a large extent, but a lot of Democrats do support the healthcare reform which is one of the greatest wealth redistributions of our time. They may not explicitly call it a wealth redistribution, but the idea of making healthcare access available to people that can't currently afford it is a big redistribution.

Like most existing government programs, it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old. The program pays for the old and sick on the back of the comparatively more healthy and less wealthy younger workers.

More supporting evidence that democracies tend to work in favor of the largest voting blocs rather than some abstract "public interest".

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

#108
post #106
post #32

A much simpler point the author missed is that wealth doesn't exactly cause the housing shortage so much as not building houses. San Francisco has rent control, and most of the peninsula has severe zoning controls. It would be extraordinarily profitable to build commercial buildings with dense lofted apartments in many areas of the peninsula, however they are simply prohibited by local governments. That's neither lib…

Note that those projects would be profitable only if they were permitted in limited areas only. A broad lifting of regulation would result in sprawl, not density. Look at Houston. Everyone would avoid expensive, dense areas by building out further and further into the land, and in the Bay, there's a ton of undeveloped wooden land that developers would have no problem replacing with tract homes if they were able to do…

Of course, there is room for urban planning. But it's quite telling that none of these projects are starting even in the "downtown" areas adjacent to caltrain stops, which is exactly where you want growth to happen. If a peninsula city actually wanted to prevent sprawl, they'd build up the urban core rather than force people to commute from more permissive cities in the east bay.

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

#109
post #82
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…

The Democratic Party is trying to gobble up more of the economy to spend through the federal government, the Republican Party is trying to make it eat less. How are they not left and right?

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

#110
post #32

A much simpler point the author missed is that wealth doesn't exactly cause the housing shortage so much as not building houses. San Francisco has rent control, and most of the peninsula has severe zoning controls. It would be extraordinarily profitable to build commercial buildings with dense lofted apartments in many areas of the peninsula, however they are simply prohibited by local governments. That's neither lib…

One of the biggest lies of progressivism is that regulation is in place to protect the poor. Rather, it usually serves vested interests.
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