7 ms·

How to Get Rich (1999)

118 points by oldgun 8y ago

swingline-747 8y ago
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a really good book. Two hospital MD's independently stopped me at gym to say "that's one of the best books I've ever read." And the department chair where I worked exclaimed similarly. Another hypothesis I would posit about the evolution of world powers is that WWII Axis members later reached population maximums and declines before Allied powers, and that that somehow shaped their political and situational values to align them together. It's not obvious until you see population graphs of Japan, Italy and other Axis countries are nearly all in population decline unless other unqiue factors like immigration bolster their numbers.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  Can't find it back, but I've seen it heavily criticized here on HN for, iirc, sloppy statistics and jumping to conclusions. EDIT: found it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536958#17539380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536958#17539380
  - Jwarder 8y ago
    A lot of those criticisms seem like a not seeing the forest for the trees argument. Yes, not every Spanish mission was successful, but those that lasted are important. Yes, not all diseases come from domestic animals, but those that do can be an important difference with diseases between the natives and colonizers. Diamond is making some _very_ broad claims to describe the general trend of human history. With a topic so broad there are always going to be exceptions. I'm always disappointed that the criticisms focus on the details exceptions rather than dealing with the broader ideas.
    - artimaeis 8y ago
      > Diamond is making some _very_ broad claims to describe the general trend of human history. This is precisely why so many have a problem with it. Diamond waxes on about these grand history ideas and they're not backed by facts. He's generalizing highly complex topics and losing all accuracy in doing so. Diamond's GG&S effectively minimizes the agency of entire groups of people by providing a false interpretation of history.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  > Guns, Germs, and Steel is a really good book. It really isn't. It's more mass market fiction than anything to sell books and take your money than a serious book on history. Nobody in academia takes it seriously. > Another hypothesis I would posit about the evolution of world powers is that WWII Axis members later reached population maximums and declines before Allied powers, and that that somehow shaped their political and situational values to align them together. No. What aligned axis powers together was the existence of dominant empires like the US and Britain. Had nothing to do with population. When most of the world is controlled by the US and Britain and you are a small power wanting to create an empire of your own, it makes sense to join forces against much larger and stronger powers. > It's not obvious until you see population graphs of Japan, Italy and other Axis countries are nearly all in population decline unless other unqiue factors like immigration bolster their numbers. The same applies to the US, Britain, China, Soviet Union ( they were ultimately allies ), etc. The only thing keeping the US population growing is immigration and high immigrant birth rates. The native-born US birth rate has been below replacement since the 1970s.
  - jackallis 8y ago
    what books you recommed we read in place of the book in question?
    - artimaeis 8y ago
      It depends heavily on what you're interested in. I'd probably categorize GG&S as general history, so here's an excellent curated list: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general I strongly recommend both _How Humans Evolved_ and _Why the West Rules, for Now_.
  - picsao 8y ago
    >Nobody in academia takes it seriously. Well ever since the soft sciences in academia became thoroughly involved ideology that statement has the value of a trillion Weimar talers. If they have real valid critique you would have cited a dozen papers rebuffing central claims of diamond. And Europe centric it for a phase of history where that continent disrupted half the planet seems fitting. It's like complaining about Roman centriciy doing classic medditeranean history. Get over the facts beeing that in any competition produces a atleast temporary winner.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Never mention that to an anthropologist, they hate that book because it’s largely incorrect.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    I've read the book and every criticism of it that I came across, much of it here on HN. Because I could not care less who is right, I have no emotional beef on either side, I'm just a mildly interested bystander (nothing in my life is affected by any of it). However, every criticism I read felt... thin. It felt like many reddit comment replies - you post something that you happen to actually know a lot about, but any human communication requires the other side to work with you. Human information exchange is not like computer data exchange, not even close. Lots of ambiguity, lots and lots of unmentioned context, lots of other stuff I could not even name. Those reddit replies I mentioned, it's things like - always hard to come up with a concrete example - I think I'll just point to Dilbert: - http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 (quite a bit of the criticism was like that, I could not match them to the book that I had read at all) - http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 Also, as another commenter pointed out, the criticism focuses on the tree and misses the forest. I have yet to see something that lets me conclude anything even close to your statement. Also, many - MANY - or, actually, all models are wrong. That's not just some stupid meme. Every single model is "wrong". When you go through learning chemistry, for example, at every new step you learn "oh and by the way what we taught you two years ago is completely wrong". Question is, is it useful? What is the alternative believe that you work with if that book was never written? Note the target audience - just like a Ph.D. chemist will find the models learned in high school useless so will actual anthropologists probably find a book targeted at the masses useless. The question is, what ideas in the heads of the people did the book replace, and what is the alternative? If it's so easy, someone just write a better book and we'll gladly read it and forget about Guns, Germs and Steel. I have and ever had any doubts that it's all a lot more complicated and different than described in one popular book. It's the same everywhere: the closer you look, the more insane the theories of/for those who don't look closely seem to be.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
cimmanom 8y ago
This article discusses German beer production and Japanese milk production as being less efficient than their equivalent industries in the US as a result of legal and cultural factors (Germans liking local beer, Japanese emphasizing freshness). It seems to suggest that more efficient industries would be more desirable; but I’d argue that freshness and variety are more important than efficiency in many regards. (I also say this as someone whose dominant regional milk distributor often distributes milk that’s already sour when opened minutes after purchase a week before the sell-by date, probably because it’s more “efficient” to produce milk a full day’s drive from a factory that’s a full day’s drive from the city; and more “efficient” not to clean their equipment thoroughly. Since few stores here carry any other brands of “normal” milk, I’ve had to start buying a more expensive “organic” brand just to get reliably drinkable milk; but plenty of people can’t afford that.)
- addicted 8y ago
  I want to point out that the author/speaker points out that efficiency and productivity aren’t the only metrics to consider and in certain scenarios you would want to consider other metrics as well. I personally feel that the examples effect was reduced because the values that led to a loss of productivity in the food processing industry in Japan or the beer making industry in Germany may actually be worth it. But in general they still do illustrate the point he is making about efficiency and productivity arising out of competition. That being said, the IBM/Microsoft example didn’t really work for me. Because it completely ignores Apple. Apple operates very much like the IBM thst MS vanquished but for the past decade or so it has been crushing Microsoft by any measure of efficiency or productivity. I’d argue that MS still has significantly more innovation than Apple, but is unable to convert that into productivity or efficiency. And that’s where I think there is a slight hitch in the argument. Competition appears to help with innovation. And innovation often leads to productivity and efficiency. But not always. So if you take the beer example, I would suggest that German beers are likely more innovative than American ones (by which term both the author and I are excluding the fast growing craft beer industry in the US, which is clearly less efficient than the Budweisers the author is discussing) because of the high degree of competition, but in this case, that hasn’t translated into efficiency. I find the author’s claim that this is because of strong localism hard to swallow considering that the effects of competition in other parts of the article are described as strong enough to lead to the demise and conquering of entire continents, but apparently cannot overcome local tastes. Also, the laws argument doesn’t explain why the thousands of breweries within Germany are unable to compete with each other. It seems to me that in this case American companies are more efficient because they focus on efficiency whereas the German companies prioritize having a distinct taste which disallows productivity gains from mass production and stuff like reducing brewing times by using certain chemicals etc. Further, the tremendous rise of the American craft beer industry seems to indicate that even Americans, having been exposed to better beers, are valuing less efficient methods of beer production. So it seems to me the author is making another correlation that does not necessarily stand. Which is a correlation between efficiency and becoming rich. I think the author describes the conditions under which innovation happens, but incorrectly draws a straight line to efficiency, and continues that line to making money.
mpax 8y ago
On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining. They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.
quadcore 8y ago
Oh actually, it's giving me an idea. Someone should try to setup two teams, each supposed to develop the same software on its own. The two teams can speak to each other, they can see the other team code, but they can't merge into one team. I bet the resulting software (the best of the two software) could be significantly better than with one team. (at some point one the team could be instructed to copy the other team's software and work from there for another competition cycle)
- anotheryou 8y ago
  Isn't that kinda what happens with many open source projects :) ? - Libre/Open Office - Pentadactyl/Vimperator - Nextcloud/Owncloud
  - quadcore 8y ago
    I was actually thinking about it as a methodology. Twice the cost, but I bet the gain could be big.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  This occurred with the JWARS strategic simulation software, with 3 teams in 3 languages. The result of that, was that the dynamic language team (Smalltalk) soundly trashed the C++ and the other project.

118 points by oldgun 8y ago

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a really good book. Two hospital MD's independently stopped me at gym to say "that's one of the best books I've ever read." And the department chair where I worked exclaimed similarly. Another hypothesis I would posit about the evolution of world powers is that WWII Axis members later reached population maximums and declines before Allied powers, and that that somehow shaped their political and situational values to align them together. It's not obvious until you see population graphs of Japan, Italy and other Axis countries are nearly all in population decline unless other unqiue factors like immigration bolster their numbers.

skrebbel 8y ago
Can't find it back, but I've seen it heavily criticized here on HN for, iirc, sloppy statistics and jumping to conclusions. EDIT: found it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536958#17539380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536958#17539380
- Jwarder 8y ago
  A lot of those criticisms seem like a not seeing the forest for the trees argument. Yes, not every Spanish mission was successful, but those that lasted are important. Yes, not all diseases come from domestic animals, but those that do can be an important difference with diseases between the natives and colonizers. Diamond is making some _very_ broad claims to describe the general trend of human history. With a topic so broad there are always going to be exceptions. I'm always disappointed that the criticisms focus on the details exceptions rather than dealing with the broader ideas.
  - artimaeis 8y ago
    > Diamond is making some _very_ broad claims to describe the general trend of human history. This is precisely why so many have a problem with it. Diamond waxes on about these grand history ideas and they're not backed by facts. He's generalizing highly complex topics and losing all accuracy in doing so. Diamond's GG&S effectively minimizes the agency of entire groups of people by providing a false interpretation of history.
liftbigweights 8y ago
> Guns, Germs, and Steel is a really good book. It really isn't. It's more mass market fiction than anything to sell books and take your money than a serious book on history. Nobody in academia takes it seriously. > Another hypothesis I would posit about the evolution of world powers is that WWII Axis members later reached population maximums and declines before Allied powers, and that that somehow shaped their political and situational values to align them together. No. What aligned axis powers together was the existence of dominant empires like the US and Britain. Had nothing to do with population. When most of the world is controlled by the US and Britain and you are a small power wanting to create an empire of your own, it makes sense to join forces against much larger and stronger powers. > It's not obvious until you see population graphs of Japan, Italy and other Axis countries are nearly all in population decline unless other unqiue factors like immigration bolster their numbers. The same applies to the US, Britain, China, Soviet Union ( they were ultimately allies ), etc. The only thing keeping the US population growing is immigration and high immigrant birth rates. The native-born US birth rate has been below replacement since the 1970s.
- jackallis 8y ago
  what books you recommed we read in place of the book in question?
  - artimaeis 8y ago
    It depends heavily on what you're interested in. I'd probably categorize GG&S as general history, so here's an excellent curated list: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general I strongly recommend both _How Humans Evolved_ and _Why the West Rules, for Now_.
- picsao 8y ago
  >Nobody in academia takes it seriously. Well ever since the soft sciences in academia became thoroughly involved ideology that statement has the value of a trillion Weimar talers. If they have real valid critique you would have cited a dozen papers rebuffing central claims of diamond. And Europe centric it for a phase of history where that continent disrupted half the planet seems fitting. It's like complaining about Roman centriciy doing classic medditeranean history. Get over the facts beeing that in any competition produces a atleast temporary winner.
village-idiot 8y ago
Never mention that to an anthropologist, they hate that book because it’s largely incorrect.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  I've read the book and every criticism of it that I came across, much of it here on HN. Because I could not care less who is right, I have no emotional beef on either side, I'm just a mildly interested bystander (nothing in my life is affected by any of it). However, every criticism I read felt... thin. It felt like many reddit comment replies - you post something that you happen to actually know a lot about, but any human communication requires the other side to work with you. Human information exchange is not like computer data exchange, not even close. Lots of ambiguity, lots and lots of unmentioned context, lots of other stuff I could not even name. Those reddit replies I mentioned, it's things like - always hard to come up with a concrete example - I think I'll just point to Dilbert: - http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 (quite a bit of the criticism was like that, I could not match them to the book that I had read at all) - http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 Also, as another commenter pointed out, the criticism focuses on the tree and misses the forest. I have yet to see something that lets me conclude anything even close to your statement. Also, many - MANY - or, actually, all models are wrong. That's not just some stupid meme. Every single model is "wrong". When you go through learning chemistry, for example, at every new step you learn "oh and by the way what we taught you two years ago is completely wrong". Question is, is it useful? What is the alternative believe that you work with if that book was never written? Note the target audience - just like a Ph.D. chemist will find the models learned in high school useless so will actual anthropologists probably find a book targeted at the masses useless. The question is, what ideas in the heads of the people did the book replace, and what is the alternative? If it's so easy, someone just write a better book and we'll gladly read it and forget about Guns, Germs and Steel. I have and ever had any doubts that it's all a lot more complicated and different than described in one popular book. It's the same everywhere: the closer you look, the more insane the theories of/for those who don't look closely seem to be.
  - village-idiot 8y ago

cimmanom 8y ago

This article discusses German beer production and Japanese milk production as being less efficient than their equivalent industries in the US as a result of legal and cultural factors (Germans liking local beer, Japanese emphasizing freshness). It seems to suggest that more efficient industries would be more desirable; but I’d argue that freshness and variety are more important than efficiency in many regards. (I also say this as someone whose dominant regional milk distributor often distributes milk that’s already sour when opened minutes after purchase a week before the sell-by date, probably because it’s more “efficient” to produce milk a full day’s drive from a factory that’s a full day’s drive from the city; and more “efficient” not to clean their equipment thoroughly. Since few stores here carry any other brands of “normal” milk, I’ve had to start buying a more expensive “organic” brand just to get reliably drinkable milk; but plenty of people can’t afford that.)

addicted 8y ago
I want to point out that the author/speaker points out that efficiency and productivity aren’t the only metrics to consider and in certain scenarios you would want to consider other metrics as well. I personally feel that the examples effect was reduced because the values that led to a loss of productivity in the food processing industry in Japan or the beer making industry in Germany may actually be worth it. But in general they still do illustrate the point he is making about efficiency and productivity arising out of competition. That being said, the IBM/Microsoft example didn’t really work for me. Because it completely ignores Apple. Apple operates very much like the IBM thst MS vanquished but for the past decade or so it has been crushing Microsoft by any measure of efficiency or productivity. I’d argue that MS still has significantly more innovation than Apple, but is unable to convert that into productivity or efficiency. And that’s where I think there is a slight hitch in the argument. Competition appears to help with innovation. And innovation often leads to productivity and efficiency. But not always. So if you take the beer example, I would suggest that German beers are likely more innovative than American ones (by which term both the author and I are excluding the fast growing craft beer industry in the US, which is clearly less efficient than the Budweisers the author is discussing) because of the high degree of competition, but in this case, that hasn’t translated into efficiency. I find the author’s claim that this is because of strong localism hard to swallow considering that the effects of competition in other parts of the article are described as strong enough to lead to the demise and conquering of entire continents, but apparently cannot overcome local tastes. Also, the laws argument doesn’t explain why the thousands of breweries within Germany are unable to compete with each other. It seems to me that in this case American companies are more efficient because they focus on efficiency whereas the German companies prioritize having a distinct taste which disallows productivity gains from mass production and stuff like reducing brewing times by using certain chemicals etc. Further, the tremendous rise of the American craft beer industry seems to indicate that even Americans, having been exposed to better beers, are valuing less efficient methods of beer production. So it seems to me the author is making another correlation that does not necessarily stand. Which is a correlation between efficiency and becoming rich. I think the author describes the conditions under which innovation happens, but incorrectly draws a straight line to efficiency, and continues that line to making money.

mpax 8y ago

On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining. They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.

quadcore 8y ago

Oh actually, it's giving me an idea. Someone should try to setup two teams, each supposed to develop the same software on its own. The two teams can speak to each other, they can see the other team code, but they can't merge into one team. I bet the resulting software (the best of the two software) could be significantly better than with one team. (at some point one the team could be instructed to copy the other team's software and work from there for another competition cycle)

anotheryou 8y ago
Isn't that kinda what happens with many open source projects :) ? - Libre/Open Office - Pentadactyl/Vimperator - Nextcloud/Owncloud
- quadcore 8y ago
  I was actually thinking about it as a methodology. Twice the cost, but I bet the gain could be big.
stcredzero 8y ago
This occurred with the JWARS strategic simulation software, with 3 teams in 3 languages. The result of that, was that the dynamic language team (Smalltalk) soundly trashed the C++ and the other project.