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A. Created trillions of dollars of wealth doing what? Because it seems like Silicon Valley is well on its way to being the new "big tobacco" with the level of s
by AlexandrB 4y ago
A. Created trillions of dollars of wealth doing what? Because it seems like Silicon Valley is well on its way to being the new "big tobacco" with the level of surveillance and advertising that has been normalized.
B. There's no way to know whether a more diverse Silicon Valley would have created $trillions + X dollars. Saying something was successful doesn't tell you anything about whether the alternative would have been more successful or not.
C. Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better. This is why breaking windows to stimulate economic activity is considered a fallacy[1]. This is somewhat related to A, but saying "wealth was created so everything must be ok" is not very convincing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- inglor_cz 4y agoThe problem with B. is that there are infinitely many alternatives. Perhaps Silicon Valley would be even better off if all the developers had pet llamas at their disposal. But there is no llama industry that would lobby for that.
- hbrn 4y ago> Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better Shitty compared to what? Wealth does correlate with better life and is fairly easy to measure. Do you a specific "actual people's lives better" metric in mind?
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoIf you go from 0 to $10T dollars in the span of 5 years, but are now 25 and soon to die of cancer due to pollution caused by generating that $10T, your wealth as well as the effort to gain it was fairly useless.
- hbrn 4y agoThis proves that wealth as a metric is imperfect (like any other metric), especially if we are ignoring all other metrics (we're not). In no way it indicates that wealth is useless. Still waiting to hear which metric is more useful. It looks like you brought up life expectancy, but it does correlate with wealth. Unlike wealth, it's is extremely hard to measure due to enormous lag.
- spoonjim 4y agoSure, Silicon Valley could have been MORE successful. But it's a bit like telling LeBron James that he might have been better at basketball if he had eaten more protein in his breakfasts. It's like, really? I'm happy with being really fucking good. I don't need to change up anything.