3 ms·
It's a systemic problem. We can be fairly certain of it because the system used to work differently. Past decades saw major national projects that were successf
by zeteo 13y ago
It's a systemic problem. We can be fairly certain of it because the system used to work differently. Past decades saw major national projects that were successfully undertaken e.g. the Tennessee Valley Authority in the '30s, the WW2 effort, the interstate system in the '50s, Apollo in the '60s.
This all came to a halt in the '70s (just as the baby boomers were starting to be in charge - coincidence?). In the '80s, "greed is good" was practically a campaign slogan. The ideal of public service (make the world a better place, even at great personal cost) is still as strong as ever with many young men and women. But its proper outlets are sorely missing. You can e.g. join the Peace Corps and work to improve another country with hardly any resources allocated to you. Or, if you want to follow greed instead, you can join Wall Street and have discretion over millions of other people's money.
It's certainly not become impossible to improve the world in significant ways, but you just have to become very wealthy first; see Elon Musk, Bill Gates. So every young entrepreneur has to squeeze out some money at a low investment cost first. The route to great public service has thus become: 1. spend the most energetic and productive years of your life to build Angry Birds 2. make lots of money in subsequent financial and legal operations 3. balance family and retirement with building and running a foundation to cure cancer.
- acjohnson55 13y agoI like where you're coming from, but I'm not sure our foundation system is as altruistic or effective as we're led to believe. Peter Buffett wrote a great op-ed the other day on this topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-ind...
- jessaustin 13y agoI'd managed to miss that the first time around; I wish I could thank you for prompting me to read it. Buffett offers some vague criticisms, intended I assume to mean something to his rivals in the trust-fund-gradual-diminution game. They mean little to someone outside that community. They seem especially unfair in response to a mention of Bill Gates. Gates is ending diseases. How is that kicking the can? How is that turning the world into "one vast market"?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kingraoul3 13y agoHere is a link worth reading if you're considering the social, political and economic changes of the last 40 years (it is written by Leon Trotsky): http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm Essentially, increasing competition drives down profit margins in existing market sectors. Companies respond by increasing automation so that they can generate arbitrage profits against the "average" price dictated by the cost of the generation of a unit of the good by their competitors. The other companies catch up, however, and this process itself is deleterious since profit is generated by accumulating the surplus value of the labor embodied in a unit of the commodity. As this process reaches it's nadir, the economic character of society is marked by speculation, increasing international tension, and market crashes. Once the fictitious capital that has outstripped the value in the real economy is destroyed, growth can begin anew. Based on Nikolai Kondratiev research, these growth and contraction cycles operate on approximately 30 to 40 year cycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave What's particularly fascinating (detailed in Trotsky's article) is how the growth / contraction cycles operate on human culture and thought. Thus 60 years ago, the United States could be a signatory to a Declaration on Universal Human Rights and today find itself denying that it's own citizens have a right to due process. Anyways, I could go on, but I'd be rambling :)