6 ms·
New Study Indicates Silicon Valley’s Elite Are Not as Liberal as They Think
- nitwit005 8y ago> Research found that the tech elites responded with the same anti-regulatory zeal when questioned about other industries as well, as in a question about whether florists should be able to raise prices on flowers during holiday seasons. Is that actually a law somewhere?
- scarejunba 8y agoOdd that one would hold a price control law as particularly 'liberal'. Anti-regulatory zeal is perfectly in line with Liberalism. Perhaps it is the names in the US that have diverged from the original meaning. The so-called socially liberal, fiscally conservative is just Liberalism as conceived of by Locke and gang.
- ojbyrne 8y agoI don’t think anybody questions the fact that the “elite” (i.e the wealthy) are conservative. The 1% generally are. But the rest of the population of Silicon Valley generally aren’t.
- scythe 8y ago>College-age tech students poised to enter the Silicon Valley ranks overwhelmingly responded like their millionaire idols: liberal on social issues, staunchly conservative on regulation.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoStanford students are generally wealthy to begin with. Do it for all CS majors and I’ll be more interested.
- deburo 8y agoOkay but thats probably the most popular stance anyway
- zorga 8y ago> liberal on social issues, staunchly conservative on regulation. That's what liberal actually means. To be liberal in both areas it to be a progressive.
- dnautics 8y agoThat use of the word liberal is quite obsolete. You might as well call a libertarian a classical socialist (in the style of Benjamin Tucker).
- zorga 8y ago> That use of the word liberal is quite obsolete. No it isn't, and in the era of social justice warriors, it's relevance is on the rise.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoThe word libertarian has been wrongfully stolen by capitalist, yes. Same with a term like anarcho-capitalism, which has nothing to do with anarchism, an ideology which is always staunchly anti-capitalist.
- lake99 8y agoYou have it backwards. Liberal economics means fewer regulations, less federal planning, etc. In their more "socialist" phases, China and India had the government in control of a lot of manufacturing, trade, etc. After their economies were liberalized, private companies had a greater say in their own affairs (they got "liberated"). In India, the government started selling off its factories to private owners under a liberal economic regime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism
- verbify 8y agoWhile I agree with you in the main, many economic liberals would still support government intervention to stop oligopolies, monopolies or monopsonies. They support free markets and individual choice, not just privatisation or corporatisation for the sake of it.
- isoskeles 8y agoBelieve it or not, many people who work in SV didn’t go to Stanford.
- jcims 8y agoSo basically closet libertarians? Too bad the party is so weird and dysfunctional (and subject to a first-past-the-post voting system in the US), it could have a lot of support.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoAnd I see no problem with that. Why would being liberal mean to support extreme leftist regulatory policy here? Why would we consider, letting those government officials, who may not have the expertise understanding the subject at hand, in this case technology, dictate how business should run and put harness on it, as part of the package of being liberal?
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoCorporations have proven these past hundreds of years that they are completely unwilling to act in a way that is remotely moral or beneficial for the greater good. And yet people continue to go “no we should let them poison the earth for their profit! We should allow them to underpay people and let society pick up the difference! We should allow them to pay politicians to make rules that benefit them! Because rules are bad!”. It’s baffling.
- sheepmullet 8y ago> completely unwilling to act in a way that is remotely moral or beneficial for the greater good. So have many governments. Even well intentioned regulations have unintended side effects.
- oh-kumudo 8y ago> remotely moral or beneficial for the greater good You really couldn't find a worse time to defend the government caring about morality or greater good under current administration.
- fzeroracer 8y agoWhile I haven't worked in SV yet, my experience across the tech sector has been somewhat similar. Developers tend to be socially liberal in a few areas but strongly conservative when it comes to issues of regulation, taxation and so forth. A lot of that is I believe because they tend to come from upper-middle class families or relatively more stable upbringings. It can make discussing some of the various social issues difficult because they've been in a well-insulated bubble most of their life and they're not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am.
- isoskeles 8y agoI don’t know how to write this without being too defensive, but the place where you think other peoples’ opinions come from seems incorrect and is borderline insulting, mainly bringing them down to prop yourself up. Maybe it’s not your intent.
- jhowell 8y agoWhat's insulting about saying someone from a middle class background (presumably in the United States) is "not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am." To me, this sounds like a shared opinion based on personal experience.
- isoskeles 8y agoIt was said in a different direction. People who hold political opinion X must be from this background because they don’t understand the issue like I do. I’m from a working class background and arrived at a different conclusion in my own experience. But I get lumped in with people raised upper middle class just because I couldn’t possibly have such opinions. Granted, this is why I try not to be defensive about it: who I am doesn’t really matter (nor should it for anyone else) when we’re discussing ideas.
- throwaway2048 8y agoI don't think there is much dispute that developers tend to come from upper middle class families, which is exactly what the parent said. He didn't say they must come from there.
- beaner 8y agoMaybe they should. Is this actually true or just an assumption? It seems like for every Koch there is a Soros.
- diogenescynic 8y agoQuit spreading right wing propaganda and talking points here. Hacker News isn’t for political discussion and you’re just making a false equivalency and repeating Fox News lines (college students all think the same!) The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaires-are-top-political-spenders/ https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire... >According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups. >In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups. From: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23/do-many-billionaires-support-democratic-party/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23... Another relevant source: https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to-the-koch-brothers-political-empire/ https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to... You can read Dark Money by Jane Meyer if you are actually interested in this.
- gammateam 8y agolol cmon, you only need to wait 10 minutes before Tim Draper says some very right leaning things complete with party line misconceptions. Nobody cares because you want the money, the infrastructure, the university, the network, the lead investor Wow a wealthy person with no input from the rest of society nor any consequences, STOP THE PRESSES, except dont, it comes with the territory
- oh-kumudo 8y agoI see SV is generally very socially liberal, but when it comes to monetary policy, the ideology behind it is still neoliberalism, thus their attitude towards regulation isn't really hard to understand. And under the risk of downvotes, I do think neoliberalism makes SV the SV it is today, the industry exists because of it. Whether it will keep working or not it is a different matter on its own, but that people tend to cling on and won't let go what has been working isn't really that of a surprise.
- bdcravens 8y agoI wonder if those who participated would give the same responses on Twitter as they gave in private emails. In all communities (liberal or conservative), there's a strong pressure to conform.
- narag 8y agoThis is just a question of labels. Maybe having just two parties is what creates the habit of dividing all the political ideas in two camps. But that's absurdly reductionist. The social-democracy has wandered worldwide from its economical foundation to another set of causes: ecologism, feminism and identity politics. In the USA the democrats are holding, but in Europe most socialist parties are having a bad time. Now Hillary (news that have been downvoted here to death) says that maybe inmigration should be curbed to avoid the raising of populism.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoSeems like a weird juxtaposition to me that the word “liberal” is being used to imply the support of more government regulations when by definition those restrictions are restricting someone’s freedoms (sometimes for the best IMO). It reminds me of the old Norm MacDonald joke where because of abortions and the death penalty, there’s no way for him to vote for a party where nobody is killed.
- proginthebox 8y agoLiberalism is always against an axis. As such, there are two different factors in liberalism, Social and Economic. The so-called liberals in America Liberals are socially liberal but economically conservative. While American conservatives are economically liberal but socially conservative.
- goatlover 8y agoSo American libertarians are the true liberals?
- iamnothere 8y agoA number of them refer to themselves as "classical liberals" in an attempt to reclaim the continental definition of liberal, but in the US media at least it feels like the definition has permanently shifted. This makes it awfully confusing when discussing US politics internationally. (Maybe one day we'll align our language with the rest of the world, and maybe one day we'll adopt the metric system too.)
- virmundi 8y agoYes. The common use of the word Liberal means Progressive. Progressives, while sounding like they want progress, want regulation of anything they don't like. They want to regulate speech. They want to regulate the energy source that would have prevented Global Warming, nuclear. The list goes on. Welcome to the Liberals of modernity.
- 8y ago
- CPLX 8y agoIf course not. It shouldn’t be a secret that the most fundamental political division of modern times is between labor and caapital, and that Silicon Valley culture is squarely on the side of capital.
- icebraining 8y agoIs that why they "overwhelmingly favored increased taxes on the rich and further redistribution of wealth to poor communities" ?
- CPLX 8y agoThey could just be in favor of paying them fair wages and allowing them to organize.
- strken 8y agoThe framing of the conflict as being labor vs capital rests on the assumption that the economy is at Pareto optimality. The tech industry's narrative is the opposite: it assumes that there are still inefficiencies which can be removed, to the eventual mutual benefit of both capital AND labor. I think what's happening is somewhere between the two extremes: the pie is still getting larger, but labor's slice of the pie is diminishing at such a rate that it's barely growing at all.
- tkyjonathan 8y agoMaybe this site should do a survey: How many conservatives friends and co-workers do you know?
- perseusprime11 8y agoThey’re mostly libertarian masking as progressives
- RickJWagner 8y ago<Edit: Please ignore this post. Others made the same point earlier.> If they align with the Democrats on social issues, but Republicans on regulatory issues, they would seem to lean Libertarian. (Right?)