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Wow, I wish I could upvote this comment even more. It's a much more well-thought out version of what I wanted to say on this topic. Thank you. I'll just add t

by gphil 12y ago

Wow, I wish I could upvote this comment even more. It's a much more well-thought out version of what I wanted to say on this topic. Thank you. I'll just add that it seems to me (in the US at least) that one's compensation is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions and the size of those transactions, rather than it is to your overall value creation for society (contrary to what most libertarians, especially those in Silicon Valley, like to argue.) This is why financiers and executives make by far the most money while teachers and scientists make peanuts despite producing great value for society.

api 12y ago
> is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on proximity to the transaction and the relationship seems exponential. That's why salespeople quite often make more than inventors, engineers, etc. and why the final commercializers of tech make orders of magnitude more than those that develop it (e.g. Zuckerberg vs. Tim Berners-Lee). The other factor is equity ownership and other forms of leverage. There's an old atheist joke: that we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists. A similar effect caused me to lose my faith in at least naive and right-leaning forms of libertarianism. I worked for a while in business consulting. The only thing that kept me from becoming a full-on socialist was then working for a while as a government contractor. Both business and government are sausage factories. You just don't want to know. In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. If there were quick easy sound-bite answers to these things, we would not be struggling with these same problems over and over again. They would be solved and we'd be walking around in some kind of sci-fi white toga world.
- saschajustin 12y ago
  >In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. Yes! The only cure to social issues is applied intelligence. We should treat governing, policy, economy, and social norms with experimental elbow grease. No fundamentalism can work. The only way is to try things, observe, and try again. Government is always a work in progress. Instead we have these polarized fights between communists and capitalists. What we need is a balanced and experimental, flexible, modifiable socialism.

by gphil 12y ago

api 12y ago

> is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on proximity to the transaction and the relationship seems exponential. That's why salespeople quite often make more than inventors, engineers, etc. and why the final commercializers of tech make orders of magnitude more than those that develop it (e.g. Zuckerberg vs. Tim Berners-Lee). The other factor is equity ownership and other forms of leverage. There's an old atheist joke: that we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists. A similar effect caused me to lose my faith in at least naive and right-leaning forms of libertarianism. I worked for a while in business consulting. The only thing that kept me from becoming a full-on socialist was then working for a while as a government contractor. Both business and government are sausage factories. You just don't want to know. In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. If there were quick easy sound-bite answers to these things, we would not be struggling with these same problems over and over again. They would be solved and we'd be walking around in some kind of sci-fi white toga world.

saschajustin 12y ago
>In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. Yes! The only cure to social issues is applied intelligence. We should treat governing, policy, economy, and social norms with experimental elbow grease. No fundamentalism can work. The only way is to try things, observe, and try again. Government is always a work in progress. Instead we have these polarized fights between communists and capitalists. What we need is a balanced and experimental, flexible, modifiable socialism.