This is a duplicate of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549</a>.
I actually see both sides of this issue and don't think either essay is very good, both are preaching to the choir and neither will never convert anyone.<p>PG is arguing against a strawman using a very cold and clinical justification for his career—the wider social issues are not addressed at all.<p>Meanwhile this article barely stops to acknowledge that SV is actually building things as opposed to ripping people off with arbitrage and financial instruments. Beyond that it is just a frothy rant setting up another strawman about rich people telling poor people what to do (which is not really what PG was doing). Never does the author stop to acknowledge that they are probably fine with small mom-and-pop businesses, just not venture-funded unicorns, and that if we dislike the machinations of SV there must be some gray line papering over a pretty wide swath of the continuum between the two.<p>Personally I think PG would have been better off to just keep his mouth shut, because when you're rich it just looks like post-hoc rationalization no matter how you slice it. The social issues are real, and we are going to have to contend with what the effective replacement of labor with capital means for our society, but this is a conversation that the SV elite don't have the political capital to address.
"For him, a better future is one where a team of eight guys makes billions of dollars with an invention that replaces thousands of people currently earning livable wages with automation. If those people lose their jobs, they’re just collateral that got in the way of progress. This is a bizarre way of saying that the only thing keeping people poor is their inability to capitalize on their future obsolescence."<p>This is a completely luddite position.<p>So if she had it her way we would still have people walking around planting seeds instead of using modern farming equipment because the people planting seeds would have lost their jobs, even though history has shown us time and time again that people retrain and do different work. Not to mention that the new jobs that replaced the old ones are nearly always safer and more productive for society.
--------
edited grammar
That was an awful read.<p>“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”<p>I found PG's opinion interesting, regardless of whether I agree with him.<p>Author seems to have unleashed a hateful screed, which optimally includes a world where opinions like PG's are silenced.<p>I guess the only thing she inspired is my distaste for her creative output.
PG is having a semantic debate with himself about "income inequality" when the world is using this term to refer to the raging class struggle in America.<p>The startup world is 100% class-based, worse than anything, and yet PG actually seems to believe that it's a meritocracy. He thinks Stanford PhDs like Larry Page (whose father was a professor) had about the same chance as anyone of getting funding.<p>He completely ignores the fact that startup funding and elite credentials are <i>extremely</i> limited pies. Harvard only admits a certain number of people. YC only funds a certain number of people. Sequoia only funds as many people as they can sit on the boards of. So who do these people always choose? Other members of their class.<p>See: <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/people/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ycombinator.com/people/</a><p>He seems to have no awareness of what it's like to live outside the elite bubble he was born into. And how could he...
PG is copping a lot of flack for his essay. This is fine, people are allowed to disagree in a free society.<p>But please, if you're going to respond or comment on any of these articles, keep things civil and pointed at their arguments. Instead of this is a stupid opinion, say why you think their opinion is incorrect.<p>Also, a (perhaps) less formal article along the same lines was flagged yesterday and it sunk from the front page within minutes. It was rather harsh in its wording but the act of flagging it let no one from the community talk about the opinions expressed or why they were wrong.
PGs argument unfortunately ignores that its the majority that makes it possible for the few to create things. He doesn't seem to understand that instead of being bolstered by the success of the few, the opposite is happening and the majority is being left behind. Its sad to say, but his current social position is definitely influencing his thought process.<p>The author of this essay does the opposite. He ridicules the advancements that start ups have created by focusing on things like Candy Crush. What about Dropbox and Uber. Those have had a profound impact for the positive.<p>What we should be saying is that income inequality is occurring because there is a skew in the system. The growth we are creating isn't being equally distributed back to the growth generators. We make Candy Crush worth billions, but that billions doesn't do anything for the majority. Nurses and janitors are vital jobs, no arguing that, but we need growth generators as well. It sad that no ones sees this to be the issue and instead we all pick our extreme corner and then drive points to bolster ourselves.
Yeah this response isn't that great... While I'm not in PG or Thiel's camp (I think inequality is bad for the economy, bad for small business, and bad for quality of life), this author pretty much embodies all the stereotypes that people have about sociologists.
This critique seems to focus on startups as something specific to the tech scene as opposed to the wider picture of small business startups across the U.S. I suppose though that Graham also is focusing specifically on that category as well.<p>There's approximately half a million businesses being created each year in the U.S. (that number used to be higher) [1], the vast majority of which are not tech focused. They are getting credit to do this from a variety of different ways, but not normally from investors. It's mostly the credit card companies profiting off of these ventures as many small businesses self-fund through personal credit cards.<p>We (Kiva) have a fair amount of data on this as our focus is on interest free loans for startups for poverty alleviation, though we are increasingly also funding social impact small businesses in the U.S. I do wonder if our model of charitable crowd-funding small businesses [2] will have a dent on the overall way startups are funded in the U.S., there's a lot of other folks doing it now asides us but probably too early to tell. I guess point is that both parties here seem to be discussing a broader set (all startups) when really actually just focusing on the minority of tech startups in the bay area and it'd be worthwhile to consider the broader U.S. picture and/or the global numbers.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf</a>
[2] <a href="https://zip.kiva.org" rel="nofollow">https://zip.kiva.org</a>
The article kicks off with a trying-to-be-snarky intro:<p>>> penned by self-described “essayist” Paul Graham<p>Well, he writes a lot of essays that are read by a lot of people. Seems apt.
Holly Wood - her real name, it seems - is just a talentless troll trying to get a PhD in gender studies and realising she's hurtling into her mid-20s with no nogotiable skills and a bitter hatred of the world.<p><a href="http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood" rel="nofollow">http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood</a>
I posted a criticism here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663</a><p>It's indeed a lazy article.
It's like someone from a future in which they can perfectly model the human brain and predict it's reactions wrote an article designed to perfectly stimulate all of the anger centers of my brain.<p>(I'm referring to the qz article, not pg's essay)
I think I'm very late at the party, but anyway I'm hoping that someone educate me.<p>I still can't agree with PG in that wealth is something that can be created. When a woodworker makes a chair to get money, he's merely trading his skill and time with money. The net wealth of the world hasn't increased. The perceived "win-win" situation only exists because there's a partiality in different types of resources: some people only have time, some people only have food, and some others only have iron, etc. If the world gets truly homogeneous, there's no way to create value. In reality, people are not homogeneous, so they keep trading, but still the total wealth isn't increasing. i.e. the economy is almost always a zero-sum game.<p>It's not a zero-sum game only in two cases: 1. When we take resources from the outside world. This typically happens when we mine a natural resource. Or 2. When we do unfair trading with people who somehow we don't deem as proper "human". This is pretty much a form of slavery or extortion.
i.e. the economy is not a zero-sum game when exploitation happens.<p>I don't think PG is advocating the second type of the economy, so I don't understand how he can think we're still creating wealth.
Agreed with this part at least:<p>"But what the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society, or even what we want."<p>Negative externalities that harm the public good aren't factored into markets until a price is put on the value of public goods. When no enforcement mechanism is present, or at least decent incentives properly aligned, then the public good keeps getting screwed and we end up with climate change.
Aargh! the top comment here is miles better at (re)presenting the arguments of both articles than this rubbish - which seems at best to be an inarticulate rage against the idea that wealth creation should lead to rich people.<p>PG's original argument seems to be - We like wealth creation. We pay the price of rich people, in order to get that. Wealth creation, as well as wealth <i>release</i> is happening in this generation on vast scales, mediated by technology, software and startups.<p>Pg concludes there is not much we can do to fix the wealth inequality gap from being created in the first place. And he fails to point out there are second order fixes that can alleviate inequality if that is our goal. In other words politics has created the SV milieu over forty years, and will be instrumental in handling the Pikkety fallout.<p>This article seems to claim that because Candy Crush makers made hundreds of millions of dollars, that is exemplary and desirable, and the intention of pg and his Silicon Valley cabal. none of which is bourne out by the original article.<p>Billionaires are a symptom of the failing of a market. No one should be able to capture that much value themselves. More Startups should create more wealth, yes, but they should also prevent monopolies from other startups.<p>We need more "startups" in all walks of life, started by people from all walks of life (not just MIT). Because, and this is an important point briskly touched on, the ideal size of the firm is shrinking, and the traditional jobs will not be there.<p>PS
Has anyone else noticed that PG's essays are more and more like listening in to one half of a Socratic phone call, where the pupils questions are inferred from the half you can hear?
She's a great writer, but wow is she wrong about everything. In her head, the market decides Candy Crush is $7b because a few VCs decided so. That's not how this works. The market is willing to pay $7b for Candy Crush because millions upon millions of people download it, enjoy it, and look at ads on it, which generate revenue. At the same time, those users' enjoyment is the value it created.<p>Holly doesn't think that's real value. She thinks she's a better judge of what value is and isn't. And that's where this becomes hilarious. Because Paul Graham respects "the poors" to spend their money and time on what they think is worthwhile. But not Holly Wood. She thinks that millions of people downloading and using and enjoying Candy Crush isn't valuable because she personally thinks Candy Crush is a stupid waste of time. She knows what's really good for people. Those people themselves, they have no idea.<p>No wonder she hates libertarians. She's a totalitarian. And the funniest part for the rest of us is she doesn't know it.
If someone is motivated by altruistic reasons, then they'll be willing to do the same work for less than someone doing it for profit reasons. That creates inequality, but it's inequality that the "loser" <i>wants</i>, because they're altruistic.<p>It seems weird to choose a job for altruistic reasons, then turn around and complain you aren't making as much as people who don't have a strong desire to do something even without compensation.
I don't agree with the author at all, there are some interesting points buried under an over abundance of ranting and vitriol waged at one person. It also, I think, attacks Paul Graham for points he is not even making in the original article. However, those tweets she brought up are very dismaying and show a very odd attitude, that I don't think was found in the original essay.
To sum up, with less vitriol:<p>Paul Graham:<p>> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it<p>Holly Wood:<p>> [Paul Graham] assumes people who are not rich are not driven, and so he ignores...the probability that the poors are poor because they are busy being driven at enterprises that people like Paul Graham think are valueless. Like childcare. Or science. Or academia. Or education.
<p><pre><code> They might believe market success is a fairly
ridiculous barometer for measuring societal value.
</code></pre>
I'm not sure what a better measure would be. People will pay for things that add value, and getting a bunch of people to pay you is the definition of "market success". Conversely, if people won't pay, it's because you're not adding value.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility</a> are mutually exclusive in real world;
I will never understand why Authors let their bias and vitriol ruin their essays when they are trying to make a legitimate point.
I simply cannot take an essay at face value when it is riddled with anger and emotion.<p>Not to say emotion isn't a valid point, and doesn't make for a good read, but it completely undermines the objectivity of the author and defeats the point.
So uh... the author claims he got paid $500 for this extended ad hominem attack.<p>How do I get someone to pay me that much for better quality content?
yayyyyy really great counter arguments..how can something like candy crush saga be more valuable than a teacher? SV economy will head down in a couple of years.