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Thanks for writing this. It's tangential to my point (which is specifically about the large corporates which constitute "tech" in the colloquial sense), but I f

Thanks for writing this. It's tangential to my point (which is specifically about the large corporates which constitute "tech" in the colloquial sense), but I find it very interesting, and am keen to reduce my own ignorance. > There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.' Why do there need to be physical assets? I know the classic Marx-ish "seize the means of production" stuff is written in this way, but it doesn't make much sense to me outside of the factory labor of the industrial revolution. I use 'capital' to mean investable money, or assets that can be traded or exploited; e.g. accumulated wealth, as opposed to income. And I generally use 'capitalist' to mean someone who invests 'capital' seeking a return on investment, without producing much productive labor themselves. Often this means maintaining the capability to partially or fully control the product and the nature of production, in exchange for the investment. E.g. a venture capitalist. > But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over... These wouldn't really be 'capitalists' per my working definition above, just extraordinarily successful founders of bootstrapped-small-business. I think we're aligned, except on whether examples like these are in any way representative of anything that's likely to happen to anyone, or what's meant by "tech" in the article. Google raised 36MM pre-IPO, Facebook 2.3B pre-IPO. This money came from venture capitalists, who would have exchanged it for boards-seats, strong influence on executive appointments, and ultimately the direction of the company. I can't tell if you're an accountant or a Marxist (or a Marxist accountant!), but I'm keen to know more about your perspective.

lucas_membrane 9y ago
No, I am a skeptic, not a Marxist. I try to keep this question of Einstein in mind: "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" We never know how much we are missing, what points of view will come and go back and forth between unrecognized and undeniable. I've been following these fashions for some time (I can trace my skepticism to reading Parkinson's Law when it was fairly new and I was 11 years old). When I was taking my degree in economics, the theory of the firm said that the firm exists to cooperatively advance the combined interests of its suppliers of capital, its suppliers of labor, and its customers. Later, that was expanded to also recognize the reasonable expectations of other 'stakeholders.' The apotheosis of wealth has changed that so much that deciding how much we have gained or lost is much like the index-number problem in economics -- unresolvable. We cannot value what we have today by standards that we used to embrace, nor can we value what we used to have according to today's standards. We cannot not change, but changes over time confound the problem of evaluating change. I might suggest that the single biggest cause of the runaway worship of vast wealth was the arrival of the New Hampshire lottery, the first modern lottery in the 50 states, subsequently imitated by almost all the others, in 1964. Now the man in the street can identify and sympathize with the millionaire because it is only a matter of time until the right numbers come out (lottery investments in the USA are now around $1.00 per capita per day). Belief in American capitalism runs on optimism; optimism and denial sustain each other. This too shall pass.

lucas_membrane 9y ago

No, I am a skeptic, not a Marxist. I try to keep this question of Einstein in mind: "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" We never know how much we are missing, what points of view will come and go back and forth between unrecognized and undeniable. I've been following these fashions for some time (I can trace my skepticism to reading Parkinson's Law when it was fairly new and I was 11 years old). When I was taking my degree in economics, the theory of the firm said that the firm exists to cooperatively advance the combined interests of its suppliers of capital, its suppliers of labor, and its customers. Later, that was expanded to also recognize the reasonable expectations of other 'stakeholders.' The apotheosis of wealth has changed that so much that deciding how much we have gained or lost is much like the index-number problem in economics -- unresolvable. We cannot value what we have today by standards that we used to embrace, nor can we value what we used to have according to today's standards. We cannot not change, but changes over time confound the problem of evaluating change. I might suggest that the single biggest cause of the runaway worship of vast wealth was the arrival of the New Hampshire lottery, the first modern lottery in the 50 states, subsequently imitated by almost all the others, in 1964. Now the man in the street can identify and sympathize with the millionaire because it is only a matter of time until the right numbers come out (lottery investments in the USA are now around $1.00 per capita per day). Belief in American capitalism runs on optimism; optimism and denial sustain each other. This too shall pass.