The Unexotic Underclass
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The Unexotic Underclass
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Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#2Here is the basic problem. When you build a product for savvy people, your interests are aligned. Savvy people will only pay you money when you build a good product. Thus, the only way you can make money is by actually doing good, by creating a product useful to other people. This is the happy coincidence that draws so many to entrepreneurship - we get to build things, create value, and get paid $$$.
When you build a product for less than savvy people, the easiest way to make money is by tricking them. Even if if you do not want to play dirty, you will be driven out of the market by people who do. You will be competing against people who make something look like a great deal (no down payment, zero percent APR!) but where it turns out the customer is getting screwed in the long term. You might want to sell a fair product, but since you are selling to less than savvy people, they ignore your product and buy the product that is tricking them, that looks like a better deal than it is. When less savvy people buy good products, it's usually products that are being passed on via reputation by the more savvy set. Thus if you want to build good products for the underclass, build it first for savvy upper-middle class people, and if it is good, it will eventually filter down, like email, smart phones, and a hundred other technologies have.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#3> If you're itching to start something new, why chase the nth iteration of a company already serving the young, privileged, liberal jetsetter?
Because those are the projects which angels and VCs bankroll. Because those are the people who have disposable cash.
I was just reading an article on a conservative web site, actually one run by Ben Horowitz's father ( http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/cbs-colbert-and... ). It talks about how TV doesn't care about older viewers, rural viewers, and increasingly only cares about young professionals on both coasts, and how television programming is being focused on such people. Not sure how true it is but it makes sense.
Audre Lorde once said that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and capitalism is not going to solve the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, other than by imploding, as so many economic systems before have done (feudalism, slavery, primitive communism).
Also, anyone who has done work organizing working class people knows the solution is not for a genius from MIT to swoop in with some corporation to try to fix problems wrought by corporations. You see what is possible and organize around that. The American white working class once had power, and it chose to send bombers north of the Yalu river, support a war in Vietnam, on and on up to modern day with Obama's support of the Honduran's military overthrow of Honduras's democracy etc. The AFL-CIO saw it's steepest decline under someone who never worked or ran a union, but was involved undermining foreign unions in cahoots with the CIA and American big business. And on and on. Now they go down to fundamentalist churches and watch Fox News as they age, and slowly become a minority in their own country. Empowering white, blue collar Americans gave us No Gun Ri and My Lai. Thanks, I'll pass. I'm glad to see the sun setting on the white American working class.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#4Here is the basic problem. When you build a product for savvy people, your interests are aligned. Savvy people will only pay you money when you build a good product. Thus, the only way you can make money is by actually doing good, by creating a product useful to other people. This is the happy coincidence that draws so many to entrepreneurship - we get to build things, create value, and get paid $$$. When you build a…
It's not that it's easier to make money scamming poor people. It's just easier to make money scamming people period.
Rich people and poor people tend to fall for the exact same scams. The Vast majority of VC's are really running get quick scams to separate people / institutions with money from it. And if you dig into it so is much of the banking sector.
EX: Morgage backed security's are really AAA. See savings and loan crisis part 237: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis Yes, the banking sector collapsed twice in 15 years, look out 2020. Or roll back to the stock market crash of 1973-74 where the dow lost over 45% of its value. Followed by 14% annual inflation!
Budweiser is a classic example of non scam product targeting that demographic. And there plenty of others. Just think bingo card creator not twitter.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#5fta:
But there’s only so much Washington can do to help out, what with government
penniless and gridlocked, and its elected officials occupying a caste of
selfishness, cowardice and spite, heretofore unseen in American politics.
In reality, one side recently passed an amazing transformation of health care to attempt to pull the united states -- still the world's richest large country -- up to the level of any civilized first world country. That is, we've moved towards providing healthcare to all americans as a birthright. One party was unanimously opposed, either for venal reasons, or outright stupidity (Sarah Palin's death panels, and thank's John McCain for that!), or evil (all Republican governors in the south). Somehow Europe, Canada, Japan, etc, all make health care work but we can't.
We could also discuss the ever declining (real) minimum wage, which had it kept up with real income growth in the US economy would be in the $20 dollar range or so.
One side of the government -- and no, the Dems didn't cover themselves in glory, but who exactly decided to spend over a TRILLION dollars on a war in Iraq for reasons that are still up for question, on the basis of flimsy and nonsensical evidence funneled through willing accomplices in the media, against all evidence from people with a history of correctness that both (1) there where no WMDs, and (2) invading Iraq would upset the jenga tower that is iraq and the middle east?
Any article that can describe largely political problems without once mentioning republicans or putting the blame for much of this squarely on them is worthless and frankly part of the problem.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#6Here is the basic problem. When you build a product for savvy people, your interests are aligned. Savvy people will only pay you money when you build a good product. Thus, the only way you can make money is by actually doing good, by creating a product useful to other people. This is the happy coincidence that draws so many to entrepreneurship - we get to build things, create value, and get paid $$$. When you build a…
It's not that it's easier to make money scamming poor people. It's just easier to make money scamming people period. Rich people and poor people tend to fall for the exact same scams. The Vast majority of VC's are really running get quick scams to separate people / institutions with money from it. And if you dig into it so is much of the banking sector. EX: Morgage backed security's are really AAA. See savings and lo…
> The Vast majority of VC's are really running get quick scams to separate people / institutions with money from it.
What you're saying is a calumny against VC's. VC's have helped create plenty of businesses and assets that investors value and have poured money into - like the whole Bitcoin ecosphere. Why, I have heard the top VC's, angels, and even YCombinator high mucky mucks raving about Bitcoin. If people listened to you, they might not pour their money into such valuable assets like Bitcoins.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#7Maybe I lack vision - but I don't see how any of the problems of the white collar and working poor can be solved by Silicon Valley. It would be impossible for a startup to work with the government in processing Veterns claims, for example. The regulations barriers are immense and the security and compliance problems are legion.
Similarly, how are startups supposed to improve the earning potentials of the working poor? MOOCs? Don't make me laugh. Most of these people wouldn't want to take one, they are not interested in an Education. They can barely fit in their current paycheck to paycheck lifestyle into their current schedule. And even if we could retrain them - as what? Coders?! Most people do not have the aptitude or patience nessecary.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#8>entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems
What is strange to me is that people believe entrepreneurs ever solved "Big Problems". Who in history falls into this class? Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell? Henry Ford? Guglielmo Marconi?
Nonsense, I say. These men didn't solve the "big problems" of their era -- they didn't attack issues that were popular in the public consciousness. They were really much more similar to today's SV entrepreneurs: they created markets, rather than entering them.
We never needed light-bulbs, and we never needed smartphones. We never needed the telephone, or Google. We never needed radio, and we didn't need Netscape either. We never needed cars, nor did we need Paypal, Bitcoin and Square.
The mistake is that thinking the first inventions are somehow more fundamental, just because they're older. That's nonsense.
Big Problems, to the extent that they are ever solved, are almost always solved collaboratively, by coalitions of scientists and engineers, involving both the public and private sector, and the solution rarely appears by flipping a switch. Norman Borlaug wasn't an entrepreneur and he didn't work alone. Ditto Edward Jenner, James Watt, you name 'em, we got 'em. These men were not entrepreneurs (though Watt worked with one).
>And yet, veterans who’ve returned from Afghanistan and Iraq have to wait roughly 270 days (up to 600 in New York and California) to receive the help — medical, moral, financial – which they urgently need, to which they are honorably entitled, after having fought our battles overseas.
>Technology, indeed, is solving the right problems.
Why on Earth would we expect technology to solve political problems?
>Meet the people who have the indignity of being over 50 and finding themselves suddenly jobless. These are the Untouchables of the new American workforce: 3+ decades of employment and experience have disqualified them from ever seeing a regular salary again. Once upon a time, some modicum of employer noblesse oblige would have ensured that loyal older workers be retained or at the very least retrained, MBA advice be damned. But, “A bas les vieux!” the fancy consultants cried, and out went those who were ‘no longer fresh.’ As Taylor Swift would put it, corporate America and the Boomer worker “are never ever getting back together.” Instead bring in the young, the childless, the tech-savvy here in America, and the underpaid and quasi-indentured abroad willing to work for slightly north of nothing in the kinds of conditions we abolished in the 19th century.
Economics: the only field you don't have to study to rant about on mit.edu.
>“What do we have to do with any of this? The unexotic underclass has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps! Let them learn to code and build their own startups! What we need are more ex-convicts turned entrepreneurs, single mothers turned programmers, veterans turned venture capitalists!
You don't have any numbers, you don't have any sources, you don't have any data. You think my only objection is that it's not my responsibility? My objection is that it's insane.
Khan Academy, though, looking at America's education system. Fitbit, targeting the number one cause of preventable death in the developed world. That e-cigarette guy from China, taking on number two. David Nichols and the psychedelic renaissance (not a company but it can't be), bringing MDMA to veterans. Theranos, making blood tests affordable for the 80% of Americans who make five figures or fewer. Prepolarizing MRI. Various on-demand laundry and cooking servies. It's out there. In some cases it doesn't matter: single mothers'[1] problem isn't that they aren't targeted by startups, it's that they don't have any money!
And you know what? It's fucking hard. These companies don't take off like bottle rockets the way Dropbox and Google did. Bringing products to disconnected people in disparate areas who don't like you is a lot harder than selling restaurant recommendations to the other nerds on the train.
[1]: you might be able to make an app so that single parents can find each other and trade-off childcare, but it probably exists already anyway. I'm not exactly Nostradamus, here.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#9Here is the basic problem. When you build a product for savvy people, your interests are aligned. Savvy people will only pay you money when you build a good product. Thus, the only way you can make money is by actually doing good, by creating a product useful to other people. This is the happy coincidence that draws so many to entrepreneurship - we get to build things, create value, and get paid $$$. When you build a…
Your assume that poor people are poor because they lack the savvy to be born into the upper middle class. That's a common misconception.
Poor people are actually poor because they don't have any money.
The easiest way to make money is not by tricking the poor, but by tricking the rich (they're the ones who have most of it, after all).
Unfortunately, that same money allows even the dumbest rich people to aggressively defend their interests against savvy people like you.
While no one gives fuck all about the poor.
Re: The Unexotic Underclass
#10fta: But there’s only so much Washington can do to help out, what with government penniless and gridlocked, and its elected officials occupying a caste of selfishness, cowardice and spite, heretofore unseen in American politics. This is pure both-sides-do-it bullshit. In reality, one side recently passed an amazing transformation of health care to attempt to pull the united states -- still the world's richest large c…
> the ever declining (real) minimum wage
The last 30 years of minimum wage adjusted for inflation: http://i.imgur.com/7kRykeS.png
I'm not saying it shouldn't be higher, but it's actually currently higher than it was for most of the last 25 years.