4 ms·

You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already ex

You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already existing in the market. It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.

Ericson2314 5y ago
People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately. A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse. The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out? Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit? If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    There are plenty of wealthy people that are more focused on maintaining relative position in the hierarchy than they are on increasing their absolute amount of wealth. Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future. Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.

Ericson2314 5y ago

People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately. A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.

lr4444lr 5y ago
Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse. The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out? Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit? If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
- epistasis 5y ago
  There are plenty of wealthy people that are more focused on maintaining relative position in the hierarchy than they are on increasing their absolute amount of wealth. Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future. Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.