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Paul Graham accidentally explained everything wrong with SV world view

165 points by makaimc 11y ago

adnam 11y ago
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. http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood
- GoodJokes 11y ago
  Proving her point nicely here I see.
leereeves 11y ago
To sum up, with less vitriol: Paul Graham: > Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it Holly Wood: > [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.
deleted 11y ago
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la6470 11y ago
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.
la6470 11y ago
yayyy. .. how can candy crush saga be valued more than an elementary school teacher? Something is very wrong and anyone sensible can see it.
brandonmenc 11y ago
The article kicks off with a trying-to-be-snarky intro: >> penned by self-described “essayist” Paul Graham Well, he writes a lot of essays that are read by a lot of people. Seems apt.
cwalv 11y ago
They might believe market success is a fairly ridiculous barometer for measuring societal value. 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.
deleted 11y ago
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dang 11y ago
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549.
- api 11y ago
  HN's mods need to be able to merge the comment sections of dupe articles.
  - vayeate 11y ago
    I am sort of surprised this website has so little functionality when it attracts some of the best programmers in the world by the thousands. I understand to some extent it's probably to prevent redditification, but mobile being entirely unreadable (and the "desktop view" on phones is broken now and does not help) is a bit much.
    - ploxiln 11y ago
      You must use Firefox on Android. I did as well. Apparently they're aware and working on a fix, but for now it works better in a webkit based browser on a phone. (Including Chrome on Android.)
    - ericd 11y ago
      I actually view that lack of functionality mostly as a feature - there's very little bloat, and the website is very fast, even on terrible connections.
    - DrScump 11y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "mobile being entirely unreadable". HN seems to have full functionality for me (on Android, using Opera or Dolphin with Desktop user agent).
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - 11y ago
FreedomToCreate 11y ago
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. 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. 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.
- maxsilver 11y ago
  Yes, exactly! No one is arguing against technology or progress. But there is a legitimate issue here; our economic system currently punishes society for progress when it should reward it. For instance, If automated driving becomes a viable technology, we have just eliminated most of the labour force in the trucking industry. This should be a good thing for society (we've freed up lots of time and labour, likely reduced error, increased efficiency, potentially even eliminated some accidents and saved lives, etc). But in practice, self-driving trucks would be devastating to the nation. There's close to 1 million people in the US who drive trucks for a living -- it's literally the most common job in nearly every state. (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...). All of these people would be unemployed. Many would likely be shunted into minimum wage, poverty-level employment for the rest of their lives (whatever poverty-level employment is left by then -- those jobs are rapidly disappearing to automation too). If we continue on our current course without changing something, it will eventually be impossible for companies to create value at all -- so many people will be so poor, that it will be impossible to sell anything to them. How highly can Candy Crush be valued in the future, when 99% of it's ad viewers have zero spending money? How much value can AirBnB capture if 99% of the population is too poor to travel? The reply that "these people should all just start highly successful businesses" is a cop-out, in much the same way that telling a poor person to "just become a movie star" or "just become a pro basketball player" is. It's simply not possible for most people to do that, regardless of how hard they try. (Startups already have a 90%+ failure rate today. Adding 1 million otherwise untrained individuals won't help that figure). And it's grossly irresponsible of us as a society to shove people into poverty for failing to meet this wildly-unrealistic expectation.
davemel37 11y ago
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. 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.
- towlejunior 11y ago
  When you can't attack the argument, attack the man.
euske 11y ago
I think I'm very late at the party, but anyway I'm hoping that someone educate me. 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. 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. 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.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  But the woodworker literally created wealth. The world now has more chairs than it used to. The same is true for nonphysical goods, like writing software. In addition to actually creating things, people can trade things. I have a thing you want, you have a thing I want. We trade and we are both better off, so the amount of utility - "wealth" - has been increased.
- deleted 11y ago
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- towlejunior 11y ago
  What if you're better at making chairs, and I'm better at making shoes? As you say, partiality of resources, but how is that trade zero-sum? You benefit, I benefit. To be zero-sum, one of us would need to lose.
  - euske 11y ago
    So you're saying wealth is actually something like happiness? Then I can see it can be created, but I thought he was talking about something materialistic.
stuaxo 11y ago
Those tweets by PG are pretty embarrassing, if I was told they were a parody of SV culture, I'd think it was going too far.
AstroChimpHam 11y ago
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. 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. No wonder she hates libertarians. She's a totalitarian. And the funniest part for the rest of us is she doesn't know it.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
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. 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 release is happening in this generation on vast scales, mediated by technology, software and startups. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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?
ikeboy 11y ago
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" wants, because they're altruistic. 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.
- kamaal 11y ago
  Which brings us to the question, are they truly altruistic? I haven't seen Gandhi, Mandela or Teresa complain that they didn't make millions out of their work. Which finally brings us to the answer, these people aren't altruistic, they seem to latch on to whatever job they get, get stuck there, and then try to paint the altruism color to make them feel good. Deep down knowing very well that its the money they desire.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Someone can want multiple things. But all else being equal, the one who only wants money has an advantage over the one who wants money and feel-goodies, an honorable job, etc. (Incidentally, it's not always the people complaining, it's activists on their behalf. Also, even if you would continue to work for a low amount because of altruistic reasons, there's still rational value in complaining insofar as you expect the complaining to result in a higher salary. But the rational sell-interest in asking for more money doesn't have any bearing on the ethical question of "should they get more money", and for that, we should remember that they chose the lower money position because of fringe benefits that higher paid positions didn't have. Note further that this only applies to the reference class of "teachers, nurses, academia, science, childcare etc" that can plausibly be said to forgo greater value jobs for altruistic reasons. For someone that can't land a well-paying job because they aren't skilled enough, we need a separate analysis. But the argument OP tries to make that what they produce is still valuable to society wouldn't go through as easily; you could still say "everyone is valuable" or some such thing, but it has less power.)
    - 11y ago
dinkumthinkum 11y ago
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.
GoodJokes 11y ago
Oh look. The people beholden to the people the author is ragging on dismiss the article without engaging the points by and large.
GoodJokes 11y ago
In which a bunch of men can't deal with a woman dissing their style.
dcgudeman 11y ago
"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." This is a completely luddite position. 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
- asuffield 11y ago
  Agreed. Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work. The net result is that more useful work is done, which equates to wealth created. If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. We do not need those people to continue doing busywork in order to provide for them. The more that we can do this, the more surplus wealth we create. This is clearly working by reference to history: this is the best time ever to be poor, compared to all points in history before it. This isn't quite so obviously true, but it's likely also the case that an unemployed person today has significantly better life outcomes than a menial worker 100 years ago (which means mines or factories). That's what improved automation buys us.
  - shmageggy 11y ago
    > If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. The problem is that roughly half the population is fighting against this kind of social welfare system and they would only be encouraged by PG's blog post.
  - geoelectric 11y ago
aelaguiz 11y ago
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. (I'm referring to the qz article, not pg's essay)
tmaly 11y ago
the author must not have heard of the broken window fallacy. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt explains it. Available free online
droopybuns 11y ago
That was an awful read. “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.” I found PG's opinion interesting, regardless of whether I agree with him. Author seems to have unleashed a hateful screed, which optimally includes a world where opinions like PG's are silenced. I guess the only thing she inspired is my distaste for her creative output.
- GoodJokes 11y ago
  Nice comment. Really engaging the points made in the essay.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood It is ironic how often this gets quoted, patronizingly, at people whose faces are literally marred by dust and sweat, by people who work in air-conditioned offices.
  - droopybuns 11y ago
    Empathy for people you have never met will help you find success & happiness in life. Bigotry, arrogance and prejudice will not.
    - meanduck 11y ago
      (Personal observation) One has finite amount of empathy. Use it wisely.
aunty_helen 11y ago
PG is copping a lot of flack for his essay. This is fine, people are allowed to disagree in a free society. 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. 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.
dasil003 11y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  I think PG's essay was far better than this one. PG had actual thought-through points, whether or not you agreed with them (and whether or not it was wise for him to express them). This article is just someone looking for a pretext to yell, and flinging as much mud as possible in the hope that some will stick in the reader's mind.
- pcmaffey 11y ago
  > Personally I think PG would have been better off to just keep his mouth shut The intensity of the response to PG's articles stems precisely from the rarity of someone in his position speaking up to defend the capitalists' monopoly. It's rare because it almost always puts an obvious target on that person. He might have well have said, "Let them eat cake." Regardless of the relative merit of his essays, they've started a wider conversation that's raising the consciousness about the single-most important issue of our society. An issue that only 1 of a half-dozen presidential candidates is willing to talk about...
Mikeb85 11y ago
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.
- ericd 11y ago
  If I recall correctly, PG says that it isn't inequality that's bad, but poverty, and that it's poverty we should be focused on eliminating. Do you disagree with that viewpoint? If so, why?
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    Yes, because the mechanisms which create inequality are the same which allow for poverty. Targeting poverty alone ignores the root causes, and thus never solves the problem. You can see this in Africa and third world countries everywhere. Poverty has been reduced by access to capital and markets, investment, education, etc... Not by charity.
    - ericd 11y ago
      You don't believe that one can eliminate poverty without eliminating upside for people to reach for? I'm not talking about handouts, necessarily, as a solution to poverty. Education/training, things to provide opportunities to help with economic mobility, and other programs would be applicable.
      - Mikeb85 11y ago
        The economic system needs to change to provide economic mobility. As long as capital and the ability to make capital is out of reach of the poorer classes, then economic mobility really isn't possible. Expanding education and training will bring us to a higher technological level, and provide prosperity for society, however that won't ensure the working classes will have a 'fair' share. If everyone's income is increased, but the distribution of resources stays the same, the poor will still be poor because costs will simply climb as their income does. Furthermore, every job can be commoditized. When 7/11 jobs are automated, then the next lowest class could be programmers. If there are too many programmers, wages will be run down to the level of today's 7/11 workers. Society as a whole may be more advanced, but that won't prevent people from becoming indentured workers. Just as today we are more advanced than 1960, but it's harder for the lower classes to get by. The distribution is the problem, poverty is a symptom.
ccarter84 11y ago
Agreed with this part at least: "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." 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.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  No. You're still stuck in a 1950s Samuelson-Hicks framework that's wide open for naive market failure theory. This is before the Coasian and public choice revolutions. Negative externalities are factored as considerations in the legal institutions of property, tort and contract law that lead to resolving, among other things, environmental disputes. You're also using "public good" incorrectly. You mean "social utility", I think. But social utility is not quantifiable for the simple reason that it's not possible to perform interpersonal comparison of utility. For the record, you can simultaneously be laissez-faire and an environmentalist. See the Property and Environment Research Center: http://www.perc.org/ http://www.perc.org/
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    > social utility is not quantifiable That's generally true, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a value. Social utility shouldn't be ignored simply because it cannot be assigned a convenient numeric value.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      I'm making a more subtle point than that. It's that the social utility is determined by people revealing their preferences and participating in an institutional framework of voluntary and mutual exchange (whether you want to call this a "market" or not - markets don't have to be capitalistic contrary to popular belief, see Proudhon and other thinkers). One cannot speculate what these preferences will be ex ante. Else you would be imposing an unjustified upper bound on the heterogeneity of them. The trick is creating an arrangement such that people can settle grievances endogenously. An exogenous body can't determine social utility since its actions change the expectations of its constituents, perhaps creating perverse incentives. It has also no way of determining what constitutes a welfare gain or welfare loss. Actually the rather special role of the state in being the arbiter of law makes it rather biased towards generating welfare losses via cronyism.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I posted a criticism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663 It's indeed a lazy article.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  I recommend that people follow vezzy-fnord's link. It's worth reading.
staunch 11y ago
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. 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. He completely ignores the fact that startup funding and elite credentials are extremely 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. See: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ 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...
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Yes. The clothes and demeanor of the bourgeois class are a prerequisite for utilizing their resources. This ensures that power networks remain tight, and closed to the chance of social mobility most of the time.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Um, you do realize that PG (through YC) is trying very hard to fund people from other backgrounds? More: You seem to think that VCs decide who to fund based on class. What VCs actually look for is companies that they think will make money.
  - staunch 11y ago
    1. YC doesn't publish numbers on economic diversity and I'm not aware of any special attempts at funding people from poor backgrounds. 2. VCs make money and raise funds by getting higher valuations. VCs in later rounds will value companies with elite founders at higher numbers, and are more likely to fund them in the first place. VCs also can't be as easily blamed when elite founders fail, so they're a safer bet, etc.
    - 11y ago
nowarninglabel 11y ago
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. 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. 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. [1] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf [2] https://zip.kiva.org https://zip.kiva.org
cryoshon 11y ago
So uh... the author claims he got paid $500 for this extended ad hominem attack. How do I get someone to pay me that much for better quality content?
known 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility are mutually exclusive in real world;

165 points by makaimc 11y ago

adnam 11y ago

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. http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/holly-wood

GoodJokes 11y ago
Proving her point nicely here I see.

leereeves 11y ago

To sum up, with less vitriol: Paul Graham: > Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it Holly Wood: > [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.

deleted 11y ago

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la6470 11y ago

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.

la6470 11y ago

yayyy. .. how can candy crush saga be valued more than an elementary school teacher? Something is very wrong and anyone sensible can see it.

brandonmenc 11y ago

The article kicks off with a trying-to-be-snarky intro: >> penned by self-described “essayist” Paul Graham Well, he writes a lot of essays that are read by a lot of people. Seems apt.

cwalv 11y ago

They might believe market success is a fairly ridiculous barometer for measuring societal value. 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.

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dang 11y ago

This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833549.

api 11y ago
HN's mods need to be able to merge the comment sections of dupe articles.
- vayeate 11y ago
  I am sort of surprised this website has so little functionality when it attracts some of the best programmers in the world by the thousands. I understand to some extent it's probably to prevent redditification, but mobile being entirely unreadable (and the "desktop view" on phones is broken now and does not help) is a bit much.
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    You must use Firefox on Android. I did as well. Apparently they're aware and working on a fix, but for now it works better in a webkit based browser on a phone. (Including Chrome on Android.)
  - ericd 11y ago
    I actually view that lack of functionality mostly as a feature - there's very little bloat, and the website is very fast, even on terrible connections.
  - DrScump 11y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "mobile being entirely unreadable". HN seems to have full functionality for me (on Android, using Opera or Dolphin with Desktop user agent).
- deleted 11y ago
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- 11y ago

FreedomToCreate 11y ago

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. 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. 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.

maxsilver 11y ago
Yes, exactly! No one is arguing against technology or progress. But there is a legitimate issue here; our economic system currently punishes society for progress when it should reward it. For instance, If automated driving becomes a viable technology, we have just eliminated most of the labour force in the trucking industry. This should be a good thing for society (we've freed up lots of time and labour, likely reduced error, increased efficiency, potentially even eliminated some accidents and saved lives, etc). But in practice, self-driving trucks would be devastating to the nation. There's close to 1 million people in the US who drive trucks for a living -- it's literally the most common job in nearly every state. (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...). All of these people would be unemployed. Many would likely be shunted into minimum wage, poverty-level employment for the rest of their lives (whatever poverty-level employment is left by then -- those jobs are rapidly disappearing to automation too). If we continue on our current course without changing something, it will eventually be impossible for companies to create value at all -- so many people will be so poor, that it will be impossible to sell anything to them. How highly can Candy Crush be valued in the future, when 99% of it's ad viewers have zero spending money? How much value can AirBnB capture if 99% of the population is too poor to travel? The reply that "these people should all just start highly successful businesses" is a cop-out, in much the same way that telling a poor person to "just become a movie star" or "just become a pro basketball player" is. It's simply not possible for most people to do that, regardless of how hard they try. (Startups already have a 90%+ failure rate today. Adding 1 million otherwise untrained individuals won't help that figure). And it's grossly irresponsible of us as a society to shove people into poverty for failing to meet this wildly-unrealistic expectation.

davemel37 11y ago

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. 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.

towlejunior 11y ago
When you can't attack the argument, attack the man.

euske 11y ago

I think I'm very late at the party, but anyway I'm hoping that someone educate me. 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. 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. 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.

Houshalter 11y ago
But the woodworker literally created wealth. The world now has more chairs than it used to. The same is true for nonphysical goods, like writing software. In addition to actually creating things, people can trade things. I have a thing you want, you have a thing I want. We trade and we are both better off, so the amount of utility - "wealth" - has been increased.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
towlejunior 11y ago
What if you're better at making chairs, and I'm better at making shoes? As you say, partiality of resources, but how is that trade zero-sum? You benefit, I benefit. To be zero-sum, one of us would need to lose.
- euske 11y ago
  So you're saying wealth is actually something like happiness? Then I can see it can be created, but I thought he was talking about something materialistic.

stuaxo 11y ago

Those tweets by PG are pretty embarrassing, if I was told they were a parody of SV culture, I'd think it was going too far.

AstroChimpHam 11y ago

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. 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. No wonder she hates libertarians. She's a totalitarian. And the funniest part for the rest of us is she doesn't know it.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

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. 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 release is happening in this generation on vast scales, mediated by technology, software and startups. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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?

ikeboy 11y ago

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" wants, because they're altruistic. 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.

kamaal 11y ago
Which brings us to the question, are they truly altruistic? I haven't seen Gandhi, Mandela or Teresa complain that they didn't make millions out of their work. Which finally brings us to the answer, these people aren't altruistic, they seem to latch on to whatever job they get, get stuck there, and then try to paint the altruism color to make them feel good. Deep down knowing very well that its the money they desire.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Someone can want multiple things. But all else being equal, the one who only wants money has an advantage over the one who wants money and feel-goodies, an honorable job, etc. (Incidentally, it's not always the people complaining, it's activists on their behalf. Also, even if you would continue to work for a low amount because of altruistic reasons, there's still rational value in complaining insofar as you expect the complaining to result in a higher salary. But the rational sell-interest in asking for more money doesn't have any bearing on the ethical question of "should they get more money", and for that, we should remember that they chose the lower money position because of fringe benefits that higher paid positions didn't have. Note further that this only applies to the reference class of "teachers, nurses, academia, science, childcare etc" that can plausibly be said to forgo greater value jobs for altruistic reasons. For someone that can't land a well-paying job because they aren't skilled enough, we need a separate analysis. But the argument OP tries to make that what they produce is still valuable to society wouldn't go through as easily; you could still say "everyone is valuable" or some such thing, but it has less power.)
  - 11y ago

dinkumthinkum 11y ago

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.

GoodJokes 11y ago

Oh look. The people beholden to the people the author is ragging on dismiss the article without engaging the points by and large.

GoodJokes 11y ago

In which a bunch of men can't deal with a woman dissing their style.

dcgudeman 11y ago

"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." This is a completely luddite position. 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

asuffield 11y ago
Agreed. Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work. The net result is that more useful work is done, which equates to wealth created. If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. We do not need those people to continue doing busywork in order to provide for them. The more that we can do this, the more surplus wealth we create. This is clearly working by reference to history: this is the best time ever to be poor, compared to all points in history before it. This isn't quite so obviously true, but it's likely also the case that an unemployed person today has significantly better life outcomes than a menial worker 100 years ago (which means mines or factories). That's what improved automation buys us.
- shmageggy 11y ago
  > If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. The problem is that roughly half the population is fighting against this kind of social welfare system and they would only be encouraged by PG's blog post.
- geoelectric 11y ago

aelaguiz 11y ago

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. (I'm referring to the qz article, not pg's essay)

tmaly 11y ago

the author must not have heard of the broken window fallacy. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt explains it. Available free online

droopybuns 11y ago

That was an awful read. “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.” I found PG's opinion interesting, regardless of whether I agree with him. Author seems to have unleashed a hateful screed, which optimally includes a world where opinions like PG's are silenced. I guess the only thing she inspired is my distaste for her creative output.

GoodJokes 11y ago
Nice comment. Really engaging the points made in the essay.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood It is ironic how often this gets quoted, patronizingly, at people whose faces are literally marred by dust and sweat, by people who work in air-conditioned offices.
- droopybuns 11y ago
  Empathy for people you have never met will help you find success & happiness in life. Bigotry, arrogance and prejudice will not.
  - meanduck 11y ago
    (Personal observation) One has finite amount of empathy. Use it wisely.

aunty_helen 11y ago

PG is copping a lot of flack for his essay. This is fine, people are allowed to disagree in a free society. 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. 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.

dasil003 11y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
I think PG's essay was far better than this one. PG had actual thought-through points, whether or not you agreed with them (and whether or not it was wise for him to express them). This article is just someone looking for a pretext to yell, and flinging as much mud as possible in the hope that some will stick in the reader's mind.
pcmaffey 11y ago
> Personally I think PG would have been better off to just keep his mouth shut The intensity of the response to PG's articles stems precisely from the rarity of someone in his position speaking up to defend the capitalists' monopoly. It's rare because it almost always puts an obvious target on that person. He might have well have said, "Let them eat cake." Regardless of the relative merit of his essays, they've started a wider conversation that's raising the consciousness about the single-most important issue of our society. An issue that only 1 of a half-dozen presidential candidates is willing to talk about...

Mikeb85 11y ago

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.

ericd 11y ago
If I recall correctly, PG says that it isn't inequality that's bad, but poverty, and that it's poverty we should be focused on eliminating. Do you disagree with that viewpoint? If so, why?
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Yes, because the mechanisms which create inequality are the same which allow for poverty. Targeting poverty alone ignores the root causes, and thus never solves the problem. You can see this in Africa and third world countries everywhere. Poverty has been reduced by access to capital and markets, investment, education, etc... Not by charity.
  - ericd 11y ago
    You don't believe that one can eliminate poverty without eliminating upside for people to reach for? I'm not talking about handouts, necessarily, as a solution to poverty. Education/training, things to provide opportunities to help with economic mobility, and other programs would be applicable.
    - Mikeb85 11y ago
      The economic system needs to change to provide economic mobility. As long as capital and the ability to make capital is out of reach of the poorer classes, then economic mobility really isn't possible. Expanding education and training will bring us to a higher technological level, and provide prosperity for society, however that won't ensure the working classes will have a 'fair' share. If everyone's income is increased, but the distribution of resources stays the same, the poor will still be poor because costs will simply climb as their income does. Furthermore, every job can be commoditized. When 7/11 jobs are automated, then the next lowest class could be programmers. If there are too many programmers, wages will be run down to the level of today's 7/11 workers. Society as a whole may be more advanced, but that won't prevent people from becoming indentured workers. Just as today we are more advanced than 1960, but it's harder for the lower classes to get by. The distribution is the problem, poverty is a symptom.

ccarter84 11y ago

Agreed with this part at least: "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." 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.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
No. You're still stuck in a 1950s Samuelson-Hicks framework that's wide open for naive market failure theory. This is before the Coasian and public choice revolutions. Negative externalities are factored as considerations in the legal institutions of property, tort and contract law that lead to resolving, among other things, environmental disputes. You're also using "public good" incorrectly. You mean "social utility", I think. But social utility is not quantifiable for the simple reason that it's not possible to perform interpersonal comparison of utility. For the record, you can simultaneously be laissez-faire and an environmentalist. See the Property and Environment Research Center: http://www.perc.org/ http://www.perc.org/
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > social utility is not quantifiable That's generally true, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a value. Social utility shouldn't be ignored simply because it cannot be assigned a convenient numeric value.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I'm making a more subtle point than that. It's that the social utility is determined by people revealing their preferences and participating in an institutional framework of voluntary and mutual exchange (whether you want to call this a "market" or not - markets don't have to be capitalistic contrary to popular belief, see Proudhon and other thinkers). One cannot speculate what these preferences will be ex ante. Else you would be imposing an unjustified upper bound on the heterogeneity of them. The trick is creating an arrangement such that people can settle grievances endogenously. An exogenous body can't determine social utility since its actions change the expectations of its constituents, perhaps creating perverse incentives. It has also no way of determining what constitutes a welfare gain or welfare loss. Actually the rather special role of the state in being the arbiter of law makes it rather biased towards generating welfare losses via cronyism.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

I posted a criticism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833663 It's indeed a lazy article.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
I recommend that people follow vezzy-fnord's link. It's worth reading.

staunch 11y ago

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. 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. He completely ignores the fact that startup funding and elite credentials are extremely 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. See: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ 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...

cryoshon 11y ago
Yes. The clothes and demeanor of the bourgeois class are a prerequisite for utilizing their resources. This ensures that power networks remain tight, and closed to the chance of social mobility most of the time.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Um, you do realize that PG (through YC) is trying very hard to fund people from other backgrounds? More: You seem to think that VCs decide who to fund based on class. What VCs actually look for is companies that they think will make money.
- staunch 11y ago
  1. YC doesn't publish numbers on economic diversity and I'm not aware of any special attempts at funding people from poor backgrounds. 2. VCs make money and raise funds by getting higher valuations. VCs in later rounds will value companies with elite founders at higher numbers, and are more likely to fund them in the first place. VCs also can't be as easily blamed when elite founders fail, so they're a safer bet, etc.
  - 11y ago

nowarninglabel 11y ago

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. 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. 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. [1] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Startup%20Rates.pdf [2] https://zip.kiva.org https://zip.kiva.org

cryoshon 11y ago

So uh... the author claims he got paid $500 for this extended ad hominem attack. How do I get someone to pay me that much for better quality content?

known 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility are mutually exclusive in real world;