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One foundation of the entire argument seems to be that support for the Democratic party makes SV progressive. However, in a global context only the minority lef

One foundation of the entire argument seems to be that support for the Democratic party makes SV progressive. However, in a global context only the minority left wing of the Democratic party could be called progressive. Also, a simpler explanation for the large support for the Democrats would be that SV consists of intelligent, highly educated and well-informed people that wouldn't dream of supporting the extremist, anti-intellectual and downright insane collection of circus freaks the Republican party has become. Just based on the purely anecdotal evidence of online and personal encounters with SV-dwellers, I would consider most of them to be "open minded conservatives". The other foundation is the way companies in SV are organized and equity dived compared to traditional companies. This could simply be explained as "pragmatic", which is how most companies view it themselves. It seems to me the author is trying to project his own ideas on SV.

nostromo 13y ago
I think that's correct. Anecdotally, my personal network in tech seems to side with Democrats for reason like environmental protection, global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and olive branch foreign policy; not because of economic reasons like union support, wealth redistribution, or strengthened regulators.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Makes you wonder if the Republican party isn't intentionally taking the wedge-issue craziness to 11 only so that they can rebrand next election cycle and yank the mat out from under the Democrats. Given the effectiveness of Romney's rush-to-the-center in the 1st debate against Obama, the thought has to have crossed their minds. The timing (tossing last election to win the next one) makes sense because next election they won't be running against a relatively popular incumbent. They don't have anything to gain by doubling-down on the losing side of every social issue on the list -- their core demographic will vote R regardless -- but a pull-the-mat strategy could net them tons of wealthy individuals from the "socially liberal economically conservative" camp.
  - refurb 13y ago
    I think the bigger issue is that each party caters to their fringe groups and then shifts to the middle when they are in office. GWB backed one of the biggest expansions of entitlement programs since LBJ (Medicare Part-D). Obama seems to have no problem ignoring the international community when it comes to using US force globally. The only thing that separates the two parties (when in office) are the issues that can keep them in office (e.g. the issue of abortion and guns is pretty evenly split in the US)
- krschultz 13y ago
  I agree to a large extent, but a lot of Democrats do support the healthcare reform which is one of the greatest wealth redistributions of our time. They may not explicitly call it a wealth redistribution, but the idea of making healthcare access available to people that can't currently afford it is a big redistribution.
  - jacoblyles 13y ago
    Like most existing government programs, it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old. The program pays for the old and sick on the back of the comparatively more healthy and less wealthy younger workers. More supporting evidence that democracies tend to work in favor of the largest voting blocs rather than some abstract "public interest".
    - wwweston 13y ago
      > Like most existing government programs, it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old. It seems accurate to say that Medicare is as you describe -- we've more or less been socializing the costs of insuring the elderly, privatizing the risks/benefits of insuring the employable, and letting everybody else fend for themselves for a few decades. But it seems pretty tenuous specifically in the context of the recent PP/ACA legislation. The only arguable point is that by requiring people to join a risk pool, we're forcing them to subsidize the elderly... which we were already doing via a tax-supported medicare program. > The program pays for the old and sick on the back of the comparatively more healthy and less wealthy younger workers. Sure, in the same sense that any insurance program is. That is, there is no insurance program of any kind that isn't a "wealth transfer" to those who suffer from the insured-against event from those who don't. Though when talking about "young" and "old" in the context of a stable policy, this may not be a particularly important point. Most people are going to get a chance to be part of both.
dmmalam 13y ago
Yea, in real terms the Democratic party are more right wing than the UK Conservative party.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  On a policy level that may be true, however I would guess that many members of the conservative party are ideologically more right wing than the average democrat and would prefer to see the party move to the right. They have to maintain a more centrist position to be electable.
CleanedStar 13y ago
Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted. More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce. This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum. If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case. If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on. The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.
- svdad 13y ago
  All the older people are, in fact, at Google. The average age of software engineers there is much higher than you might think.
- arcosdev 13y ago
  Wow, the comment with the most insight and clarity in this discussion. I couldn't agree more. We are building a future that we can't properly retire from, making "software" of questionable value (socially, economically, sustainably) while our countries crumble around us and the middle class evaporates.
jacoblyles 13y ago
Reasonable, honest, thoughtful people vote Republican for good reason. For example, they are more likely to support good governance. Blue states and massive public debts go hand in hand[1]. In my experience, the number one most common quality that distinguishes the rare Bay Area young Republican is a love for sustainable budgets and a belief in the immorality of a government knowingly running an unsustainable deficit. Those monsters. The idea that the Republican party is a collection of "circus freaks" is a myth largely sustained by the liberal echosphere. [1] http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/blue-states-creamed-in-pensions-crisis/ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/blue-s...
- thecage411 13y ago
  From the link: "When looking at the list, it’s hard to miss how the costs seem to break down according to the red-blue political divide." I love arguments that invite you to interpret statistics based on your biases. No analysis given to the fact that one of the most conservative states (Wyoming) has one of the highest pension liabilities per capita or that one controlled by Democrats (West Virginia) has one of the lowest.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  It's very worth noting that most of those "unsustainable deficits" in blue states are caused by making net contributions to the Federal budget, while most of those "good governance" surpluses in red states are caused by receiving net transfers from the Federal budget. It's hypocritical but easy for a child to complain about the financial irresponsibility of the very parents who subsidize him.

nostromo 13y ago

I think that's correct. Anecdotally, my personal network in tech seems to side with Democrats for reason like environmental protection, global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and olive branch foreign policy; not because of economic reasons like union support, wealth redistribution, or strengthened regulators.

jjoonathan 13y ago
Makes you wonder if the Republican party isn't intentionally taking the wedge-issue craziness to 11 only so that they can rebrand next election cycle and yank the mat out from under the Democrats. Given the effectiveness of Romney's rush-to-the-center in the 1st debate against Obama, the thought has to have crossed their minds. The timing (tossing last election to win the next one) makes sense because next election they won't be running against a relatively popular incumbent. They don't have anything to gain by doubling-down on the losing side of every social issue on the list -- their core demographic will vote R regardless -- but a pull-the-mat strategy could net them tons of wealthy individuals from the "socially liberal economically conservative" camp.
- refurb 13y ago
  I think the bigger issue is that each party caters to their fringe groups and then shifts to the middle when they are in office. GWB backed one of the biggest expansions of entitlement programs since LBJ (Medicare Part-D). Obama seems to have no problem ignoring the international community when it comes to using US force globally. The only thing that separates the two parties (when in office) are the issues that can keep them in office (e.g. the issue of abortion and guns is pretty evenly split in the US)
krschultz 13y ago
I agree to a large extent, but a lot of Democrats do support the healthcare reform which is one of the greatest wealth redistributions of our time. They may not explicitly call it a wealth redistribution, but the idea of making healthcare access available to people that can't currently afford it is a big redistribution.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Like most existing government programs, it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old. The program pays for the old and sick on the back of the comparatively more healthy and less wealthy younger workers. More supporting evidence that democracies tend to work in favor of the largest voting blocs rather than some abstract "public interest".
  - wwweston 13y ago
    > Like most existing government programs, it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old. It seems accurate to say that Medicare is as you describe -- we've more or less been socializing the costs of insuring the elderly, privatizing the risks/benefits of insuring the employable, and letting everybody else fend for themselves for a few decades. But it seems pretty tenuous specifically in the context of the recent PP/ACA legislation. The only arguable point is that by requiring people to join a risk pool, we're forcing them to subsidize the elderly... which we were already doing via a tax-supported medicare program. > The program pays for the old and sick on the back of the comparatively more healthy and less wealthy younger workers. Sure, in the same sense that any insurance program is. That is, there is no insurance program of any kind that isn't a "wealth transfer" to those who suffer from the insured-against event from those who don't. Though when talking about "young" and "old" in the context of a stable policy, this may not be a particularly important point. Most people are going to get a chance to be part of both.

dmmalam 13y ago

Yea, in real terms the Democratic party are more right wing than the UK Conservative party.

jiggy2011 13y ago
On a policy level that may be true, however I would guess that many members of the conservative party are ideologically more right wing than the average democrat and would prefer to see the party move to the right. They have to maintain a more centrist position to be electable.

CleanedStar 13y ago

Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted. More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce. This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum. If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case. If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on. The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.

svdad 13y ago
All the older people are, in fact, at Google. The average age of software engineers there is much higher than you might think.
arcosdev 13y ago
Wow, the comment with the most insight and clarity in this discussion. I couldn't agree more. We are building a future that we can't properly retire from, making "software" of questionable value (socially, economically, sustainably) while our countries crumble around us and the middle class evaporates.

jacoblyles 13y ago

Reasonable, honest, thoughtful people vote Republican for good reason. For example, they are more likely to support good governance. Blue states and massive public debts go hand in hand[1]. In my experience, the number one most common quality that distinguishes the rare Bay Area young Republican is a love for sustainable budgets and a belief in the immorality of a government knowingly running an unsustainable deficit. Those monsters. The idea that the Republican party is a collection of "circus freaks" is a myth largely sustained by the liberal echosphere. [1] http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/blue-states-creamed-in-pensions-crisis/ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/blue-s...

thecage411 13y ago
From the link: "When looking at the list, it’s hard to miss how the costs seem to break down according to the red-blue political divide." I love arguments that invite you to interpret statistics based on your biases. No analysis given to the fact that one of the most conservative states (Wyoming) has one of the highest pension liabilities per capita or that one controlled by Democrats (West Virginia) has one of the lowest.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
It's very worth noting that most of those "unsustainable deficits" in blue states are caused by making net contributions to the Federal budget, while most of those "good governance" surpluses in red states are caused by receiving net transfers from the Federal budget. It's hypocritical but easy for a child to complain about the financial irresponsibility of the very parents who subsidize him.