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Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

holografix 7y ago
Why is scarcity of resources not discussed in this article? There’s a curved frontier where the return on yet another human to a geographical region or virtual grouping is negative. Too little people and you can’t do much, too many people and everyone is eating each other. The data on elites preferring not to work harder for a promotion is irrelevant. They’re not working to be richer, they’re working not to be poor. The terror of being poor after growing up in comfort is aggravated by a lack of social services safety net in the US. Lose your job, have a medical emergency and you’ll die without private health care. It’s a brutal system.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Author probably has tenure and good benefits.
malandrew 7y ago
> How can that be done? For one thing, education—whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding enrollment. I wonder if people who propose such lofty ideals reason through the possible consequences (direct and 2nd and 3rd order effects) of such ideas and how it might backfire? Right off the bat, I can see two possible consequences: - the schools reject the proposal, lose tax exempt status and just charge more because many of their students' parents can afford the added cost. The second order effect of this is that a school that was once financially accessible to the top 5% maybe only becomes accessible to the top 1% because of the additional tuition required to make up the lost tax exempt status. - the schools admit 50% from the bottom two thirds and the quality of education suffers because the bar has been lowered and the school can no longer be as demanding. This is a reasonable expected outcome because the article cites strong correlations such a "children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000.". Assuming they keep the school as demanding even with 50% from the bottom, a second order effect of this change would be extreme anxiety for the students that aren't as capable being thrust into a system that hasn't attenuated expectations to accommodate their abilities.
malandrew 7y ago
> In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia). If societal collapse is inevitable, maybe we're better off accepting that inequality because it's better to have inequality and a functioning society than to have societal collapse that leaves everyone more equal but leaving almost all qualitatively and quantitatively worse off than they were prior to the societal collapse. The more I study history, the more inevitable it looks that any system eventually ends up with an ossified oligarchy running it. Even every attempt at socialist/communist states whose goal was equality end up with an ossified oligarchy. No system humanity has created has ever avoided this fate. With that in mind, maybe the best course of action is to figure out which system, once it ends up with an ossified oligarchy, does the best job at achieving a steady rate of improvement in the quality of life for all constituents of that system.
- cmurf 7y ago
  Once it ends up as such an extreme oligarchy, the entire system is proven illegitimate. No system succeeds by explicitly acknowledged ideology: some people are simply better than others, and those better people are wealthy, it's just an undeniable fact. And that's because the human primate is competitive and biologically inclined to violent jealousy when seeing fellow primates have a lot more shit than they do for no good reason. Not all of them. But enough of them.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Meritocracy? Talk about an ivory tower. Sorry for the cynicism, but we are not meritocratic. Maybe once similarly advantaged people are organized you get a temporary meritocratic competition, but that ignores all the presorting and all the nepotism that follows. Exhibit A: our president.
- cmurf 7y ago
  A very old argument about meritocracy is that it inevitably corrupts itself as the people who define what and who has merit lower ladders to friends and family. The discipline required is essentially authoritarian, so you might see it appear in that context, e.g. the military.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  The article makes this exact point at considerable length...
dannykwells 7y ago
While nice in thought, this is all a bit rich, coming from a tenured Yale law professor. I also think he misses a major counter example to his argument, which is (some) tech companies, which have generous work life balance and reasonable expectations. Amazon is (famously) the exception, not the rule, in terms of how miserable everyone is there.
lanstin 7y ago
Darn, I was hoping to read the commentary on this. Seems like YC doesn't cotton to the idea of "mid-skilled" being enough. All these people straining so hard with the side projects and so on, to achieve a little more, it wears me out even as I force myself to go home to take my kid to the dentist - It'll take me longer to master spark shuffling algorithms, but whatever. I got to hear (and later mock) the dentist scolding my son for having mold in his braces. He laughed. And my kids are probably going to be more average than I am - I do hope our society can use their skills and pleasant qualities effectively. Only providing work for uptight but high-skilled people is not so great.

Why is scarcity of resources not discussed in this article? There’s a curved frontier where the return on yet another human to a geographical region or virtual grouping is negative. Too little people and you can’t do much, too many people and everyone is eating each other. The data on elites preferring not to work harder for a promotion is irrelevant. They’re not working to be richer, they’re working not to be poor. The terror of being poor after growing up in comfort is aggravated by a lack of social services safety net in the US. Lose your job, have a medical emergency and you’ll die without private health care. It’s a brutal system.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Author probably has tenure and good benefits.

malandrew 7y ago

> How can that be done? For one thing, education—whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding enrollment. I wonder if people who propose such lofty ideals reason through the possible consequences (direct and 2nd and 3rd order effects) of such ideas and how it might backfire? Right off the bat, I can see two possible consequences: - the schools reject the proposal, lose tax exempt status and just charge more because many of their students' parents can afford the added cost. The second order effect of this is that a school that was once financially accessible to the top 5% maybe only becomes accessible to the top 1% because of the additional tuition required to make up the lost tax exempt status. - the schools admit 50% from the bottom two thirds and the quality of education suffers because the bar has been lowered and the school can no longer be as demanding. This is a reasonable expected outcome because the article cites strong correlations such a "children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000.". Assuming they keep the school as demanding even with 50% from the bottom, a second order effect of this change would be extreme anxiety for the students that aren't as capable being thrust into a system that hasn't attenuated expectations to accommodate their abilities.

malandrew 7y ago

> In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia). If societal collapse is inevitable, maybe we're better off accepting that inequality because it's better to have inequality and a functioning society than to have societal collapse that leaves everyone more equal but leaving almost all qualitatively and quantitatively worse off than they were prior to the societal collapse. The more I study history, the more inevitable it looks that any system eventually ends up with an ossified oligarchy running it. Even every attempt at socialist/communist states whose goal was equality end up with an ossified oligarchy. No system humanity has created has ever avoided this fate. With that in mind, maybe the best course of action is to figure out which system, once it ends up with an ossified oligarchy, does the best job at achieving a steady rate of improvement in the quality of life for all constituents of that system.

cmurf 7y ago
Once it ends up as such an extreme oligarchy, the entire system is proven illegitimate. No system succeeds by explicitly acknowledged ideology: some people are simply better than others, and those better people are wealthy, it's just an undeniable fact. And that's because the human primate is competitive and biologically inclined to violent jealousy when seeing fellow primates have a lot more shit than they do for no good reason. Not all of them. But enough of them.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Meritocracy? Talk about an ivory tower. Sorry for the cynicism, but we are not meritocratic. Maybe once similarly advantaged people are organized you get a temporary meritocratic competition, but that ignores all the presorting and all the nepotism that follows. Exhibit A: our president.

cmurf 7y ago
A very old argument about meritocracy is that it inevitably corrupts itself as the people who define what and who has merit lower ladders to friends and family. The discipline required is essentially authoritarian, so you might see it appear in that context, e.g. the military.
brianpgordon 7y ago
The article makes this exact point at considerable length...

dannykwells 7y ago

While nice in thought, this is all a bit rich, coming from a tenured Yale law professor. I also think he misses a major counter example to his argument, which is (some) tech companies, which have generous work life balance and reasonable expectations. Amazon is (famously) the exception, not the rule, in terms of how miserable everyone is there.

lanstin 7y ago

Darn, I was hoping to read the commentary on this. Seems like YC doesn't cotton to the idea of "mid-skilled" being enough. All these people straining so hard with the side projects and so on, to achieve a little more, it wears me out even as I force myself to go home to take my kid to the dentist - It'll take me longer to master spark shuffling algorithms, but whatever. I got to hear (and later mock) the dentist scolding my son for having mold in his braces. He laughed. And my kids are probably going to be more average than I am - I do hope our society can use their skills and pleasant qualities effectively. Only providing work for uptight but high-skilled people is not so great.