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Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their

Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand the rules of the game they're playing) and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation. Free trade _does not_ benefit large companies. Large companies want, and generally get, favorable regulations and tariffs that make it hard for outsiders or for small guys.

malandrew 9y ago
Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foisted upon them, they make sure to take the time to influence what regulation they are subject to so that it benefits them and becomes a barrier to entry for new entrants.
- jnbiche 9y ago
  > Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.
- hibikir 9y ago
  The regulation doesn't have to be foisted upon them at all: Regulation that just harms new companies, or competitors of a very different shape, is introduced at the behalf of industry groups all the time. What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation. Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations. We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Licensing is a typical regulation pushed by established businesses in order to limit the entry of new companies.
mattnewton 9y ago
I'm not arguing that they don't have other thoughts. I'm arguing that those other thoughts shouldn't be correlated with being a "tech boss" unless it has some advantage to being a tech boss, because people are largely different! Like, in a completely random sample, we would expect beliefs representative of the population, but by biasing it to only leaders of tech companies, people who dedicate their lives to giant multinational corporations, we should expect to see their beliefs to correlate with what is good for those corporations. And everything else should match the general population, in aggregate.
jnbiche 9y ago
I strongly agree with your argument regarding economic-class determinism or whatever it's called. After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson). However, if you're suggesting that Silicon Valley CEOs are in favor of libertarian free trade, I think I agree more with the article and disagree with you. Silicon Valley CEOs loyalty is not to free trade, it's to their globalist lifestyle and outlook on life. Indeed, most of these people seem to be hardcore monopolists, and with no shame for it either.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson). You mean regressive policies that hurt the poor, right? The War on Poverty marked the end of the decline in the American poverty rate. The social welfare state gradually sapped American industrial vitality and the labour productivity growth that had been fueling wage gains across all income classes for decades.
  - Applejinx 9y ago
    But labor productivity growth doesn't cause any wage gains anymore, hasn't for decades upon decades. Probably worth asking if you assert that American corporate taxes are the highest in the world: sometimes there are just major, major reality-based differences in the discourse and it's useless talking any further. I know I can't believe some of your axioms here, unfortunately.
    - ericd 9y ago
      I'm curious what you mean by that, because I've never heard anyone seriously argue against that assertion. Our top marginal corporate tax rate is one of the highest, according to Wikipedia [1], though companies are generally pretty good at not being too profitable and therefore not paying a very high tax rate, if that's what you mean. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St... Excerpt: In 2014 the United States had the third highest general top marginal corporate income tax rate in the world at 39.1 percent (consisting of the 35% federal rate plus a combined state rate), exceeded only by Chad and the United Arab Emirates However, the average corporate tax rate in 2011 dipped to 12.1%, its lowest level since before World War I, largely due to the great recession and a bonus depreciation tax break.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand the rules of the game they're playing) and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation. The amount of libertarian bullshit in that statement ought be enough to fertilize the soil in the whole great state of Idaho for a decade at least.
coldtea 9y ago
>Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but usually they are. We're more caricatures than snowflakes. That's why there's mainstream music and movies, and most go through the same limited number of stages in life with utmost predictability. When money is involved that's doubly so. And if Marx's not your thing (although the notion that class/position/economic factors greatly shape the man is much older than Marxism -- heck, the aristocracy believed the exact same thing), here's Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In other words, they can have all the other thoughts they like -- as long they fit in with their role and don't come at odds with it (In other words: "any color you like as long as it is black"). This leaves them with a more limited set of corporate compatible set of thoughts. If they're gonna be buddhists, for example, they'd be the kind of "buddhists" for which driving expensive sports cars, managing people, and selling commercial trite products is a-ok for.
- andrewjl 9y ago
  How to explain the behavior of people like Nick Hanauer, who advocates higher taxes on the wealthy?[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    How does one exception change anything?
  - coldtea 9y ago
    There will always be some outliers when speaking of human affairs. I mentioned mainstream movies above and it's similar: the majority loves them and flocks to them. But still some would legitimately rather watch a Tarkovsky or some really obscure creators. To quote myself above: "Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but _usually_ they are" (emphasis mine). In other words, you can find one Hanauer. Heck, you could find 10 Hanauers. But I doubt you can find 10,000 or even 100. Most of the SV bosses beliefs are determined by their wealth/role/position. Heck, even old Marx (to whom they idea that people's class/position etc determines their values/beliefs was attributed above [1]) very well knew that. His friend Engels was a wealthy industrialist heir, but very much a communist. And Kropotkin was a prince from a wealthy family -- but ended an anarchist. The overwhelming majority of industrialists and princes however never made those jumps to the other side. [1] And he indeed wrote it and popularized it, but it was not uniquely his.
classwarsteve 9y ago
You have no understanding of the marxist conception of base - superstructure relations. If marxists thought class determinism was as simple as it is then they would be baffled why revolution hadn't taken place long ago.
tpeo 9y ago
This doesn't have anything to do with Marxism. The notion that people might have ulterior motives is as old as the hills. The actual Karl Marx, on the other hand, didn't think that people's beliefs were determined by their social class. Rather that their behavior was ultimately determined by their social class regardless of any personal beliefs. It's true that free trade in principle doesn't benefit large companies. But in principle, it doesn't hurt them either. Free trade and largeness can be largely orthogonal issues. And so can largeness and market power.
- armenarmen 9y ago
  >it doesn't hurt them either. Sorta true, but if you are in an industry with a low entry cost (hypothetical example) dairy farming, and you have a large herd and facilities. Another smaller dairy farmer comes into the market. You see that they are taking some of your business. So you call your friend Mr. Mayor and voice your concerns about how $expensive_compliance_regualtiob is necessary to "protect consumers" and a law gets passed. Your competitors cannot to afford the afore mentioned new process and are as such drive. Out of business. So, are big companies hurt by free trade? No, it's how most get started. But once in power, they will lobby to make sure they maintain it
jmcmichael 9y ago
People who understand capitalism tend to be entrepreneurs, as they understand the rules of the game. But capitalism does not equal economics. I would even venture to say that people who consider themselves capitalists have a woefully limited view of the field of economics, and a general misunderstanding of the origins of money, markets, and debt. Although they certainly can do a good job of making profits within the mess of an economic/political system that we currently have to endure.
- sbge 9y ago
  mess is the word
WalterBright 9y ago
To generalize, businessmen feel that free trade is great for every other business, but their business is special and should be enshrined as a government enforced monopoly :-)
EGreg 9y ago
Free trade benefits consumers at the local producers' expense.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  There are no consumers anymore. Everybody's a micro-producer, and there's no market for any of it.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Proves my point as well :)
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. People's values and beliefs usually model the reinforcement signals they've actually received, not the distribution of all such signals that a human being in our world can receive. So yes, their values and beliefs will tend to support their interests. That is, after all, what values and beliefs are for.
- dmix 9y ago
  This is a bit reductionist. One popular example I see on HN/Reddit is when someone is supportive of market capitalism you often see this dismissive comment in response: > "Every American think's they are a future millionaire and from this delusion they blindly defend the rights of millionaires to their own detriment." This sounds clever but it's based on the (fallacious) assumption that everyone's political position should be reflective of their current economic status - or that the government's economic policy should be defensive of one's current economic status - and not doing so is acting against your self-interest. But it's entirely possible to support a political position that is advantageous to people outside of your own short-term direct self-interest, because you see it as the most beneficial to the most amount of people in the country - and ultimately to yourself, family, friends, and country in the longrun. Self-interest is often falsely perceived to be merely only about benefiting one's current direct/personal circumstances. Given that: a) we're social beings b) we all must live and survive within communities over an extended period of time a natural side-effect of any one's self-interest within a economic/political system must itself factor other people's interests and external realities. The exception of course is when an economic/social system attempts to reduce everyone to one imaginary class of people, and a singular self-interest - which is where the Marxism analogy comes in (which opens up another can of worms).
notacoward 9y ago
> People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs ... and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation. People who want to be tycoons some day tend to have those views. That's not the same as understanding economics, and is arguably detrimental to it.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Plus if you're an entrepreneur who's NOT a tycoon you might feel very differently. I've kept a business alive these past ten years in spite of anything the market threw at me, and I had to notice the sharp correlation between my own well-being, and the Fed metric for the labor share. Globalization hurt my business just as much as it helped. Yes, overseas sales, but my domestic sales just kept getting eroded as people live on less and less money, and it got to a point where I just got onto a Patreon model because my competitors in my industry were becoming too evil: I had to get disruptive in a big way because my industry sector was in a downward spiral of dishonesty, broken promises, DRM, and increasingly ruthless business behavior. I expect major turmoil in that market within a few years, but I jumped off the train before it went into the ravine ;) I think these days people who understand economics lean socialist, and I see unironic embracing of even more radical doctrines. Capitalism is following an easily observable trajectory as human worker productivity gains escalate year over year, and that trajectory is not 'upward'.
ue_ 9y ago
>that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. Have you actually read Marx? Nowhere does he make this claim, nor inspire this thought. I don't know where you're getting this from. Marx does not deny the indidual's individuality. Here's a little quote, which is a criticism from Marx of the very view you are accusing him of: >The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (From Theses on Feuerbach) Please don't accuse us Marxists of the fallacies you can't back up. Besides, even if Marx was accused of economic determinism, it doesn't mean that the critics are right. In fact, here's yet another statement from one of the founders of Marxism (Marx's close friend Friedrich Engels): "Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible."
CalChris 9y ago
> You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. Actually the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and yes, people in aggregate are pretty simple. If post-millennium Silicon Valley can be reduced to single idea, it is that predicting that simplicity is a business model.

malandrew 9y ago

Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foisted upon them, they make sure to take the time to influence what regulation they are subject to so that it benefits them and becomes a barrier to entry for new entrants.

jnbiche 9y ago
> Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.
hibikir 9y ago
The regulation doesn't have to be foisted upon them at all: Regulation that just harms new companies, or competitors of a very different shape, is introduced at the behalf of industry groups all the time. What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation. Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations. We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Licensing is a typical regulation pushed by established businesses in order to limit the entry of new companies.

mattnewton 9y ago

I'm not arguing that they don't have other thoughts. I'm arguing that those other thoughts shouldn't be correlated with being a "tech boss" unless it has some advantage to being a tech boss, because people are largely different! Like, in a completely random sample, we would expect beliefs representative of the population, but by biasing it to only leaders of tech companies, people who dedicate their lives to giant multinational corporations, we should expect to see their beliefs to correlate with what is good for those corporations. And everything else should match the general population, in aggregate.

jnbiche 9y ago

I strongly agree with your argument regarding economic-class determinism or whatever it's called. After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson). However, if you're suggesting that Silicon Valley CEOs are in favor of libertarian free trade, I think I agree more with the article and disagree with you. Silicon Valley CEOs loyalty is not to free trade, it's to their globalist lifestyle and outlook on life. Indeed, most of these people seem to be hardcore monopolists, and with no shame for it either.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>After all, some of the most progressive policies for the poor in this country were passed by the wealthiest presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson). You mean regressive policies that hurt the poor, right? The War on Poverty marked the end of the decline in the American poverty rate. The social welfare state gradually sapped American industrial vitality and the labour productivity growth that had been fueling wage gains across all income classes for decades.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  But labor productivity growth doesn't cause any wage gains anymore, hasn't for decades upon decades. Probably worth asking if you assert that American corporate taxes are the highest in the world: sometimes there are just major, major reality-based differences in the discourse and it's useless talking any further. I know I can't believe some of your axioms here, unfortunately.
  - ericd 9y ago
    I'm curious what you mean by that, because I've never heard anyone seriously argue against that assertion. Our top marginal corporate tax rate is one of the highest, according to Wikipedia [1], though companies are generally pretty good at not being too profitable and therefore not paying a very high tax rate, if that's what you mean. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St... Excerpt: In 2014 the United States had the third highest general top marginal corporate income tax rate in the world at 39.1 percent (consisting of the 35% federal rate plus a combined state rate), exceeded only by Chad and the United Arab Emirates However, the average corporate tax rate in 2011 dipped to 12.1%, its lowest level since before World War I, largely due to the great recession and a bonus depreciation tax break.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

> People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand the rules of the game they're playing) and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation. The amount of libertarian bullshit in that statement ought be enough to fertilize the soil in the whole great state of Idaho for a decade at least.

coldtea 9y ago

>Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but usually they are. We're more caricatures than snowflakes. That's why there's mainstream music and movies, and most go through the same limited number of stages in life with utmost predictability. When money is involved that's doubly so. And if Marx's not your thing (although the notion that class/position/economic factors greatly shape the man is much older than Marxism -- heck, the aristocracy believed the exact same thing), here's Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In other words, they can have all the other thoughts they like -- as long they fit in with their role and don't come at odds with it (In other words: "any color you like as long as it is black"). This leaves them with a more limited set of corporate compatible set of thoughts. If they're gonna be buddhists, for example, they'd be the kind of "buddhists" for which driving expensive sports cars, managing people, and selling commercial trite products is a-ok for.

andrewjl 9y ago
How to explain the behavior of people like Nick Hanauer, who advocates higher taxes on the wealthy?[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  How does one exception change anything?
- coldtea 9y ago
  There will always be some outliers when speaking of human affairs. I mentioned mainstream movies above and it's similar: the majority loves them and flocks to them. But still some would legitimately rather watch a Tarkovsky or some really obscure creators. To quote myself above: "Humans want to believe that they are not so simple, but _usually_ they are" (emphasis mine). In other words, you can find one Hanauer. Heck, you could find 10 Hanauers. But I doubt you can find 10,000 or even 100. Most of the SV bosses beliefs are determined by their wealth/role/position. Heck, even old Marx (to whom they idea that people's class/position etc determines their values/beliefs was attributed above [1]) very well knew that. His friend Engels was a wealthy industrialist heir, but very much a communist. And Kropotkin was a prince from a wealthy family -- but ended an anarchist. The overwhelming majority of industrialists and princes however never made those jumps to the other side. [1] And he indeed wrote it and popularized it, but it was not uniquely his.

classwarsteve 9y ago

You have no understanding of the marxist conception of base - superstructure relations. If marxists thought class determinism was as simple as it is then they would be baffled why revolution hadn't taken place long ago.

tpeo 9y ago

This doesn't have anything to do with Marxism. The notion that people might have ulterior motives is as old as the hills. The actual Karl Marx, on the other hand, didn't think that people's beliefs were determined by their social class. Rather that their behavior was ultimately determined by their social class regardless of any personal beliefs. It's true that free trade in principle doesn't benefit large companies. But in principle, it doesn't hurt them either. Free trade and largeness can be largely orthogonal issues. And so can largeness and market power.

armenarmen 9y ago
>it doesn't hurt them either. Sorta true, but if you are in an industry with a low entry cost (hypothetical example) dairy farming, and you have a large herd and facilities. Another smaller dairy farmer comes into the market. You see that they are taking some of your business. So you call your friend Mr. Mayor and voice your concerns about how $expensive_compliance_regualtiob is necessary to "protect consumers" and a law gets passed. Your competitors cannot to afford the afore mentioned new process and are as such drive. Out of business. So, are big companies hurt by free trade? No, it's how most get started. But once in power, they will lobby to make sure they maintain it

jmcmichael 9y ago

People who understand capitalism tend to be entrepreneurs, as they understand the rules of the game. But capitalism does not equal economics. I would even venture to say that people who consider themselves capitalists have a woefully limited view of the field of economics, and a general misunderstanding of the origins of money, markets, and debt. Although they certainly can do a good job of making profits within the mess of an economic/political system that we currently have to endure.

sbge 9y ago
mess is the word

WalterBright 9y ago

To generalize, businessmen feel that free trade is great for every other business, but their business is special and should be enshrined as a government enforced monopoly :-)

EGreg 9y ago

Free trade benefits consumers at the local producers' expense.

Applejinx 9y ago
There are no consumers anymore. Everybody's a micro-producer, and there's no market for any of it.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Proves my point as well :)

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

dmix 9y ago
This is a bit reductionist. One popular example I see on HN/Reddit is when someone is supportive of market capitalism you often see this dismissive comment in response: > "Every American think's they are a future millionaire and from this delusion they blindly defend the rights of millionaires to their own detriment." This sounds clever but it's based on the (fallacious) assumption that everyone's political position should be reflective of their current economic status - or that the government's economic policy should be defensive of one's current economic status - and not doing so is acting against your self-interest. But it's entirely possible to support a political position that is advantageous to people outside of your own short-term direct self-interest, because you see it as the most beneficial to the most amount of people in the country - and ultimately to yourself, family, friends, and country in the longrun. Self-interest is often falsely perceived to be merely only about benefiting one's current direct/personal circumstances. Given that: a) we're social beings b) we all must live and survive within communities over an extended period of time a natural side-effect of any one's self-interest within a economic/political system must itself factor other people's interests and external realities. The exception of course is when an economic/social system attempts to reduce everyone to one imaginary class of people, and a singular self-interest - which is where the Marxism analogy comes in (which opens up another can of worms).

notacoward 9y ago

> People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs ... and they are in favor of free trade and less regulation. People who want to be tycoons some day tend to have those views. That's not the same as understanding economics, and is arguably detrimental to it.

Applejinx 9y ago
Plus if you're an entrepreneur who's NOT a tycoon you might feel very differently. I've kept a business alive these past ten years in spite of anything the market threw at me, and I had to notice the sharp correlation between my own well-being, and the Fed metric for the labor share. Globalization hurt my business just as much as it helped. Yes, overseas sales, but my domestic sales just kept getting eroded as people live on less and less money, and it got to a point where I just got onto a Patreon model because my competitors in my industry were becoming too evil: I had to get disruptive in a big way because my industry sector was in a downward spiral of dishonesty, broken promises, DRM, and increasingly ruthless business behavior. I expect major turmoil in that market within a few years, but I jumped off the train before it went into the ravine ;) I think these days people who understand economics lean socialist, and I see unironic embracing of even more radical doctrines. Capitalism is following an easily observable trajectory as human worker productivity gains escalate year over year, and that trajectory is not 'upward'.

ue_ 9y ago

>that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. Have you actually read Marx? Nowhere does he make this claim, nor inspire this thought. I don't know where you're getting this from. Marx does not deny the indidual's individuality. Here's a little quote, which is a criticism from Marx of the very view you are accusing him of: >The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (From Theses on Feuerbach) Please don't accuse us Marxists of the fallacies you can't back up. Besides, even if Marx was accused of economic determinism, it doesn't mean that the critics are right. In fact, here's yet another statement from one of the founders of Marxism (Marx's close friend Friedrich Engels): "Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible."

CalChris 9y ago

> You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. Actually the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and yes, people in aggregate are pretty simple. If post-millennium Silicon Valley can be reduced to single idea, it is that predicting that simplicity is a business model.