4 ms·

Speaking of stagnation, Andreessen's manifesto seems to be aimed at a specific group of people who are not the majority of Americans. https://www.epi.org/produ

Speaking of stagnation, Andreessen's manifesto seems to be aimed at a specific group of people who are not the majority of Americans. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

gojomo 3y ago
When Andreesen calls back to earlier eras of greater tech optimism & growth, that's aimed at people who've lost out on the reduced dynamism in recent decades.
- mcguire 3y ago
  Those eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enlarging the club.
  - gojomo 3y ago
    That's a rather simplistic reading of the history, and those eras also delivered a greater share of income, & more living-standards advances, to everyone than our current "be slow and careful and deferent to so many political veto-points" era. Consider a model instead where sure, you can turn off the spigots of progress to try to punish the wealthy – but in practice, the wealthy can defend themselves, through some combo of either their accumulated power, or the same competencies that made & kept their wealth in the first place. So whatever lesser growth still happens, your (& the EPI's) bugaboos still get their share – a bit like 'liquidation preferences' in an investment, but springing not from contractual terms but the full structural arrangement of world – prior endowments, some merited some not, and the nature of human competition. But the new lower-growth era, no matter the dreams of its advocates, mostly deprives the needier masses. They wind up with a bigger 'haircut' than the wealthy. Of course, if you're totally in thrall of class resentment & ideology, you won't be discouraged by the many-decades of failure in 'slowdown' policies so far. "We must do even more of it," a comfortable tenured neo-marxist professor might argue. "Heighten the contradictions! Speed the revolution, where the growing suffering of the masses help them finally achieve class-consciousness & hand our enlightened vanguard the plenary power they need for great justice." Like pre-scientific medicine: "The blood-letting hasn't worked yet? More blood-letting!" If you've actually paid attention the last 175y, the political forces unleashed by stagnation, resentment, and demonization of tech & capital-allocation tend to instead empower the worst regimes, that then destroy both material abundance & political freedoms.
    - mcguire 3y ago
      Are you speaking of the dot-com era, the web 2.0 era, or the era that gave us tetraethyllead?

gojomo 3y ago

When Andreesen calls back to earlier eras of greater tech optimism & growth, that's aimed at people who've lost out on the reduced dynamism in recent decades.

mcguire 3y ago
Those eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enlarging the club.
- gojomo 3y ago
  That's a rather simplistic reading of the history, and those eras also delivered a greater share of income, & more living-standards advances, to everyone than our current "be slow and careful and deferent to so many political veto-points" era. Consider a model instead where sure, you can turn off the spigots of progress to try to punish the wealthy – but in practice, the wealthy can defend themselves, through some combo of either their accumulated power, or the same competencies that made & kept their wealth in the first place. So whatever lesser growth still happens, your (& the EPI's) bugaboos still get their share – a bit like 'liquidation preferences' in an investment, but springing not from contractual terms but the full structural arrangement of world – prior endowments, some merited some not, and the nature of human competition. But the new lower-growth era, no matter the dreams of its advocates, mostly deprives the needier masses. They wind up with a bigger 'haircut' than the wealthy. Of course, if you're totally in thrall of class resentment & ideology, you won't be discouraged by the many-decades of failure in 'slowdown' policies so far. "We must do even more of it," a comfortable tenured neo-marxist professor might argue. "Heighten the contradictions! Speed the revolution, where the growing suffering of the masses help them finally achieve class-consciousness & hand our enlightened vanguard the plenary power they need for great justice." Like pre-scientific medicine: "The blood-letting hasn't worked yet? More blood-letting!" If you've actually paid attention the last 175y, the political forces unleashed by stagnation, resentment, and demonization of tech & capital-allocation tend to instead empower the worst regimes, that then destroy both material abundance & political freedoms.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    Are you speaking of the dot-com era, the web 2.0 era, or the era that gave us tetraethyllead?