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What you are telling is completely true, yet this feels so unpleasant — how it sounds and what natural conclusions we can make from it. Because the same thing c
by krick 12y ago
What you are telling is completely true, yet this feels so unpleasant — how it sounds and what natural conclusions we can make from it. Because the same thing can be described in other words: it somehow happens that most of skilled professionals (mentioned doctors and lawyers in the first place) are mostly treating the world as zero-sum game and thus strive for personal success only, trying to be monopolists, restricting their domain of competence to any others, trying to scare off newcomers and make getting to the "inner circle" as hard as they can; while software engineers are treating the world as non-zero-sum game and thus somewhat naively strive to make world better in the first place, believing that they personally would also benefit from that. (Of course there are exceptions on the both sides, the description is purposely rough.)
I don't know why it happens to be like that and if such people tend to become programmers or programming makes people to believe such things (although I have some guesses and the former seems more plausible, but that's another topic). But because of that striving to "make the world a better place" it would be much better if it would be natural for us (us people, not us programmers) to describe current behavior of doctors and lawyers as "evil" rather than describing behavior of software engineers as "foolish", even though both are completely valid. After all, the technical progress over last few centuries clearly shows that the world isn't zero-sum game, not yet.
- pacala 12y agoThe world is not a zero sum game. But adjusted to a 3% annual growth rate, it _is_ a zero sum game. In other words, the growth rate is not arbitrarily large. On top of that, the finance industry is dedicated to capturing the 3% growth, and it's very successful at it. Thanks for making the world a better place, but chances are you won't see much personal gain from it.
- krick 12y agoIt would be zero sum game when there's no more place for new people to be born and no resources to feed them. The current state of being is that there are plenty resources just wasted because of very technical reasons and finance industry is very successful at making ones rich virtually for nothing, while others starve (that is money isn't used to unify measuring of value, as it was initially intended, but more like making money is orthogonal to producing value). Yeah, I know, it sounds like advocating communism. But what can I do if it so much naturally better in it's essence! And we would be pretty close to making it almost possible already, if not for that "pragmatic" ideology some people are spreading.
- tomp 12y agoThat's true only if you reduce "progress" to "GDP growth". As much as economists see prices of goods (e.g. houses, transportation, iPhones) falling as a bad thing, it's actually the true indicator of progress.
- timClicks 12y agoAggregate deflation is not a positive for an economy. It's nice that some sectors are more accessile than previous centuries, esp. food and clothing, but that doesn't mean that deflation in every sector indicates forward momentum. IIRC, deflation would be caused by a very fearful and therefore finacially conservative population.