3 ms·

Taking the assertion as a given, which of these 3 predominate: 1. Firms exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, but author and one of t

Taking the assertion as a given, which of these 3 predominate: 1. Firms exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, but author and one of those firms never found each other: search failure? 2. Firms could exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, and those firms would have a competitive advantage over firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable, but those firms have not been created: knowing-doing gap? 3. Firms in which the author would have been satisfied and productive are at a competitive disadvantage to firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable. If those firms have been created, they have failed quickly. Making author produce for capitalism would have lowered overall production: the system is working?

kragen 12y ago
I’m not convinced of your assertion in #3; maybe I didn’t understand? Let’s take as a given that Tim’s productivity per hour, making software, is strictly positive (a point on which I am not in fact convinced in fact because of the dogmatic nature of the technical viewpoints of his that I have disagreed with over the years). It seems, then, that having Tim working on making software, rather than, say, no productive activity whatsoever, would raise overall production, not lower it. You could argue that maybe having Tim work on making software instead of someone else doing it, would lower overall production; but why should we assume that’s the alternative? Maybe Tim likes problem-solving so much that he would be willing to program in exchange for just enough money to rent housing in Oakland, make pizza, and go to Thai Temple Brunch once a week, so he’s only displacing ⅑ of the wages of another programmer. Or maybe, like Joey Hess, he could go live in the country, program on a tiny netbook, and connect to the world over a low-bandwidth microwave link, thus reducing his necessary wages to something like US$6000 per year. Or maybe the software that Tim will write is software that competes with, say, cabbies or coal miners, or maybe bingo-card layout services from copy shops, not other existing software; in that case he isn’t displacing any other programmers at all. Or maybe Tim will work on Rust, and Rust will make programmers more employable, thus “displacing” a negative number of other programmers; the failure of those other programmers’ employers to subsidize Tim’s work is then merely a market failure, the kind of market failure we systematically see around public goods such as free software. It seems to me that it’s easy to believe that some productive programmer believes all sustainable capitalist firms unbearable. Indeed, the free software movement was founded by just such a programmer, an even less personable one than Tim.
- mlinksva 12y ago
  Most of your third paragraph would argue for my #1 or #2 cases: there's an opportunity for more arrangements that would allow productive programmers who are not happy in firms with the dominant culture/management practice to have sustainable programming careers, there just need to be more such arrangements or better ways of such programmers finding out about such arrangements. But my #1 or and especially #2 could mean that there's a much bigger opportunity to make typical working conditions better. From this one might see an opportunity for the industry to improve itself, or an opportunity for outside regulation to stimulate such improvement. My #3 predominating means that non-typical arrangements are irrelevant except for extreme outliers willing to make great material sacrifices and that toxic workplaces are somehow (presumably through causing people to work very long hours and work hard due to fear) more productive than bearable workplaces, and presumably there's little difference between workplaces at non- and for-profits whether producing nonfree or free software, because they're all caught up in a race to the bottom. In this case a productive programmer who finds toxic workplaces unbearable and does not want to make extreme material sacrifices would have nowhere to go other than a different full time career, and there's no opportunity to improve the industry to change this outcome from within the industry. From this one could accept that the current state of industry is optimal, or demand outside regulation, or demand the overthrow of capitalism. To the limited extent that I know about them, I admire Tim, Joey, and RMS and assume they've all made the right choices for themselves.
  - kragen 12y ago
    Well, my third paragraph wasn’t arguing that it would be profitable to employ Tim, just that him working on software in such situations would increase total production of value. If that value isn’t sufficiently capturable by the employer, it still might be unprofitable. So it doesn’t actually argue for your #1 or #2 case. I agree that if #1 or #2 is true, then there’s a big and profitable opportunity to make things better within capitalism. But if they’re not true, that doesn’t imply that regulation or the overthrow of capitalism is strictly necessary to improve the situation; it could be that non-capitalist institutions that can coexist with capitalism could solve the problem. Dominant assurance contracts on Kickstarter, for example. :)

kragen 12y ago

I’m not convinced of your assertion in #3; maybe I didn’t understand? Let’s take as a given that Tim’s productivity per hour, making software, is strictly positive (a point on which I am not in fact convinced in fact because of the dogmatic nature of the technical viewpoints of his that I have disagreed with over the years). It seems, then, that having Tim working on making software, rather than, say, no productive activity whatsoever, would raise overall production, not lower it. You could argue that maybe having Tim work on making software instead of someone else doing it, would lower overall production; but why should we assume that’s the alternative? Maybe Tim likes problem-solving so much that he would be willing to program in exchange for just enough money to rent housing in Oakland, make pizza, and go to Thai Temple Brunch once a week, so he’s only displacing ⅑ of the wages of another programmer. Or maybe, like Joey Hess, he could go live in the country, program on a tiny netbook, and connect to the world over a low-bandwidth microwave link, thus reducing his necessary wages to something like US$6000 per year. Or maybe the software that Tim will write is software that competes with, say, cabbies or coal miners, or maybe bingo-card layout services from copy shops, not other existing software; in that case he isn’t displacing any other programmers at all. Or maybe Tim will work on Rust, and Rust will make programmers more employable, thus “displacing” a negative number of other programmers; the failure of those other programmers’ employers to subsidize Tim’s work is then merely a market failure, the kind of market failure we systematically see around public goods such as free software. It seems to me that it’s easy to believe that some productive programmer believes all sustainable capitalist firms unbearable. Indeed, the free software movement was founded by just such a programmer, an even less personable one than Tim.

mlinksva 12y ago
Most of your third paragraph would argue for my #1 or #2 cases: there's an opportunity for more arrangements that would allow productive programmers who are not happy in firms with the dominant culture/management practice to have sustainable programming careers, there just need to be more such arrangements or better ways of such programmers finding out about such arrangements. But my #1 or and especially #2 could mean that there's a much bigger opportunity to make typical working conditions better. From this one might see an opportunity for the industry to improve itself, or an opportunity for outside regulation to stimulate such improvement. My #3 predominating means that non-typical arrangements are irrelevant except for extreme outliers willing to make great material sacrifices and that toxic workplaces are somehow (presumably through causing people to work very long hours and work hard due to fear) more productive than bearable workplaces, and presumably there's little difference between workplaces at non- and for-profits whether producing nonfree or free software, because they're all caught up in a race to the bottom. In this case a productive programmer who finds toxic workplaces unbearable and does not want to make extreme material sacrifices would have nowhere to go other than a different full time career, and there's no opportunity to improve the industry to change this outcome from within the industry. From this one could accept that the current state of industry is optimal, or demand outside regulation, or demand the overthrow of capitalism. To the limited extent that I know about them, I admire Tim, Joey, and RMS and assume they've all made the right choices for themselves.
- kragen 12y ago
  Well, my third paragraph wasn’t arguing that it would be profitable to employ Tim, just that him working on software in such situations would increase total production of value. If that value isn’t sufficiently capturable by the employer, it still might be unprofitable. So it doesn’t actually argue for your #1 or #2 case. I agree that if #1 or #2 is true, then there’s a big and profitable opportunity to make things better within capitalism. But if they’re not true, that doesn’t imply that regulation or the overthrow of capitalism is strictly necessary to improve the situation; it could be that non-capitalist institutions that can coexist with capitalism could solve the problem. Dominant assurance contracts on Kickstarter, for example. :)