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> Do you seriously think that if money and status weren't factors, every one of the "smart people" that went into finance or law would have exactly the same cho

• naasking 6y ago
  > Any attempts to remove or repress them invariably fail due to proxies that spring up to substitute the utility they provide. In other words, they would not have made the same choice, because the circumstances surrounding status and finances would be different. No one is talking about removing social incentives. Musk was saying that finance and law are given more status and financial incentives as professions than they deserve by their contributions to humanity, in a similar manner that some stocks in the stock market become overvalued and eventually undergo corrections. Finance in particular absolutely, unequivocally requires a social correction in how it's perceived and how much influence it has.
  • yowlingcat 6y ago
    > finance and law are given more status and financial incentives as professions than they deserve by their contributions to humanity, in a similar manner that some stocks in the stock market become overvalued and eventually undergo corrections. If this is the point, then it's even weaker. Two things are being conflated here, which is neoliberal value judgments (what professions "deserve by their contributions to humanity", as if value could ever be assigned or assessed in such a uniform way) and emergent behavior (when "some stocks in the stock market become overvalued and eventually undergo corrections"). To want the former to result in the latter is not enough; a concrete feedback mechanism must exist for that correction. For Marx, this was historical materialism, wherein the capitalist mode of production evolutionarily existed in between the feudal mode of production and the communist mode of production. Weaknesses in the feudal mode of production left it vulnerable to being outexecuted by the emerging capitalist mode of production. Likewise, a systemic weakness in the capitalist mode of production leaves it weaker compared to the operationally superior communist mode of production, which is evolutionarily poised to supplant it as it collapses. For many Marxist thinkers, the Weimar-esque features of our current period of post LBO raider baron capitalism has earned our current episteme the reluctant brand of "late capitalism", a phrase which marries this time's absurd and banal social credit flavored cruelties with its evident dysfunctions and blank spaces that almost beg to be replaced with superior communist alternatives. I can't say I'm fully convinced by them, but they've at least done the legwork of slotting their explanations and predictions into a sufficiently detailed framework of historical context. But I can't say the same for Elon here, or for your argument. What's notable for such Marxists is not that finance or law disappear. Their innovations exist and continue to be developed, but the surplus value they create is distributed and aggregated differently. This is a far cry from a belief that professions involving knowledge work (particularly those with such a wide variety of labor requirements and work product outputs) can be treated as stocks in that some are "undervalued" and some are "overvalued", because such an assertion is "not even wrong". What is more likely to me is that in every profession, just as in every other kind of socioeconomic strata or societal hierarchy in human history, there exists caste-like stratification between the most successful and wealthy practitioners and the rest. Consider the paralegal who works full workweeks for barely more than minimum wage compared to the partner that rakes in eight figures. Or consider the lowly analyst at a bulge bracket . The top practitioners of each field (or to be more direct, the most well compensated executive class of each field) have much more in common with each other than with others in their field, for they have all learned the most primal, modern human skill of expanding and aggregating political power. That is to say, they have learned the skill of empire building. Does it really matter what your formal profession is when opportunistic general managers can fluidly move from one managerial, executive or political role to another? And furthermore, hasn't it always been this way with empire-builders? If I asked you to consider that a frame that encouraged you to take profession as a proxy for identity was potentially a red herring to distract you from class identity, would you consider that a possibility?
    • naasking 6y ago
      You're overcomplicating a very basic counterfactual: more people would be better off [1] if these smart people worked in fields other than finance and law. "Deserve" and "over valued" are not conflated, they are in fact inextricably linked. Market value is aggregated value, and what someone or some profession "deserves" as recompense is also an expression of market value. Of course, our markets are heavily skewed with negative externalities and perverse incentives, which is exactly why finance and law are over valued by any impartial measure of the functions they ought to serve in a free society. Finance and law no longer serve to facilitate free enterprise, commerce and national development, but as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction. [1] Some balance of happier, healthier, and wealthier.
      • yowlingcat 6y ago
        > Of course, our markets are heavily skewed with negative externalities and perverse incentives, which is exactly why finance and law are over valued by any impartial measure of the functions they ought to serve in a free society. Okay, fantastic, now we're getting to the juicy part here. So I agree with you that our markets are heavily skewed with negative externalities and perverse incentives. I also agree with you that these negative externalities and perverse incentives are present in finance and law. I can even agree with you that in terms of the utility functions they ought to serve in an ideal society, it's plausible that they would be commodities rather than this strange realm of both commodity and luxury that they currently occupy. But, I can't agree with you here: > Finance and law no longer serve to facilitate free enterprise, commerce and national development, but as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction. Finance and law never served to do any of those things. Nor does it necessarily serve purely as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction. Finance and law, much like politics, exists to serve empire. In the golden age of expansion of an empire, you see emergent phenomena such as free enterprise, commerce and national development. You may even see people express that such emergent phenomena are the goals of the empire. But I am never convinced by this. The purpose of an empire is furthering its own existence, and once it exhausts the more palatable ways to achieve growth, it turns to less palatable ways. To reiterate it again, to argue that people would be better off if smart people worked in fields other than finance or law is, in most senses, neither factual or counterfactual, because it doesn't attempt to engage with reality. The reality is that we live in a world that in many ways is not expanding. We live in a world that is increasingly has zero-sum dynamics. When one lives in a world that increasingly has zero-sum dynamics, people start thinking about securing safety and power, which tends to stratify along the caste lines of the professional managerial class, the lines of finance and law. When you live in an unsafe world, you don't want to try and follow the rules of the game. You want to write the rules of the game. None of this superficial speculation about whether people would be better if more Xs were doing Y actually addresses this root dynamical interaction, or its increasing chaos. And so it would necessarily miss it. That's why I don't think you're wrong. I think you are missing the point.