A lot of good food for thought here, but then it goes off the rails:
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I am no great cheerleader of capitalism, I could go on and on about the way people worship at the alter of "free markets" as if a market is inherently virtuous, but this is utter hogwash. Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser. Making everyone happy and prosperous beyond ones immediate tribe is just not an instinctive goal in large-scale humanity.
The historical terms for "unemployment" would have been beggars and paupers. They certainly existed prior to the term and economic philosophy of Capitalism (big-C) being defined.
If everyone's basic needs are covered, and they are free to pursue artistic or otherwise unnecessary pursuits to fulfill themselves, they will fast begin to compete with each other about who is the most artistic, or free-spirited, or creative. Then it will become a game to be gamed, and the sheen will wear off for a lot of people.
I don't know if this was intended as a criticism or agreement with the person you replied to. Either way, competing on levels that are far removed from the bottom hierarchy of needs is something we should consider a good thing, whether or not the sheen wears off for some people. The problems with our hypercompetition for many of the basics are that it produces cheating because there's such intense pressure to stay/get ahead ("The Cheating Culture"), and that failure can leave you with absolute, rather than just relative, levels of privation.
As far as the sheen wearing off, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In extant communities that have no rewards outside of their status hierarchy, people continue to participate, often with great gusto: gaming, stamp collecting, meme creation, drawing, etc. People do them for both intrinsic rewards, and for status rewards only within that hierarchy or in "nearby" hierarchies.
Even Trotsky thought "the powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form" "individual competition will have the widest scope." In the cases where the sheen does wear off, people can always switch, as they do now, to other areas (get bored of WoW, start playing Dark Souls, or go to a completely different hierarchy [games -> painting].)
Whether it is minuscule or meaningless is isomorphically equivalent to the question of whether reproduction itself is meaningless. I'd say the meaning in this case is in the eye of the beholder.
Cool interpretation! I like that concept. But grandparent was definitely trying to deconstruct the word "meaningless", getting a little existential in the process.
The parts of capitalism that are worth keeping are the least zero sum of any other system. Unfortunately, "capitalism" has come to cover concepts that really don't belong to it.
Culturally, mimetic envy of one's neighbor was explicitly proscribed against in Western systems of though - "thou shalt not covet" - until fairly recently. So what changed? Probably TV advertising.
Or "thou salt not covet" was always bullshit no one really followed and used selectively to shame people who went against the church and to shame the people into tithing, shame the rich to giving up their estates to the church, protect markets/vendors that the church has a stake in, etc.
As a student of history I find it amusing when people pick some golden period when things were better or when we look at written records uncritically. From what I can tell, human nature doesn't really change and follows the types of algorithms evolution has inserted into other animals like following game theory-like tactics.
I plead observer bias - I've noticed the difference in my lifetime. It wasn't some halcyon golden era, but I was raised by people who grew up in the Depression, and they had a certain Puritan streak about material possessions.
And TV advertising is just a hobby horse. The first practitioners were "retired" OSS officers, principally propagandists. This certainly fits my desire to avoid it for aesthetic reasons. I'd just note that Prosperity Gospel really is a thing, caused (and carried) by Cable TV.
I agree. The article describes pretty interesting cultural problems, makes some interesting points, and then out of nowhere suggests radical political change as the solution.
Still worth the read, especially in the context of tech industry, where personally I see it at a crossroads of cubicle-farm vs artistic-expression. Maybe just ignore the last paragraph.
Its fairly ironic that the biggest criticism I've seen of continuing education is that academics get really out of touch with the status quo and academia becomes its own weird echo chamber of near nonsense, especially outside the hard sciences. The fact that this guy ended his little essay with a "tear down capitalism and replace it with $failed_communist_lite_ideas" fulfills that prediction.
Everyone I know who went to grad school had a "meh, I dont have anything else to do and being a student beats working" attitude as opposed to some cutthroat "fuck you losers" attitude the writer is suggesting. This is a bizarre essay unless you're to the far left and casually blaming everything on capitalism is the only card in your intellectual deck (which is often the case on the internet I'm afraid).
"Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser."
I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.
Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.
Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.
Capitalism, at it's core, is the freedom to offer people a deal and at the same time the freedom to reject deals. If you create something of value, you are free to ask something of value in return. Anybody is free to pay your price, to try to negotiate or to say no. Capitalism is a system where created value is distributed with the least amount of compromise to freedom.
Anything else I feel is sick capitalism, Banks repackaging unsustainable mortgages, hiding their inherent risks is not capitalism, it is lying, obfuscating and misleading. It is crime.
Capitalism is someone creating value and others willingly giving up their time and money (their create value) to get that value. Capitalism a beautiful system but it is ill and wrongly labeled in the current world.
The fundamental issue with that line of thinking is that deal-making only works when one of the parties is not under duress. If your life is on the line, you will take terrible deals, because you have no choice.
Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.
Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.
Anyone can start a company under capitalism. You are empowered to create wealth yourself and enrich yourself from that creation. That's a beautiful thing and should not be taken for granted.
MIT provides a great book on learning deep learning. Amazon web services and many other big name virtualization services provide free trial periods for their services. A raspberry pi and a cheap tv and keyboard/mouse will get you the ability to write programs and you can get free phone service and internet with absurdly cheap smartphones available at most retail stores. All of the courses you need to work up to a masters in theoretical physics are available through MIT OCW and the perimeter institute or other programs(Stanford, UCI), and there are many programs that will help you with starting up a company. There's no excuse nowadays. A couple of years ago, yes, but now, there's no excuse.
Get a job as a security guard? Security guards have a surprising amount of down time when it comes to work, and one of my good friends wrapped up his degree while working as a security guard on campus. That's not what you want to hear though. What you likely want to hear is 'Free Monayz!' Well either you're taking that money from someone else who earned it productively or you're taking that money from someone who saved it in the form of inflation if you print it.
So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?
I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.
What capital? We're not building widgets here. You take advantage of the resources that are given to you and make something of yourself. That's how it works.
So how much capital do you reckon you need to start a company, and why isn't that amount "a lot"?
A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.
I agree with this. It is why I feel healthcare (where your option may become: Pay or Die) is not a system that should be left to the free market but is better at it's place under a government. Of course this should be a government that operates with the consent of the governed, is kept highly accountable for it's actions and is insensitive to lobbying. I think that especially the latter is undoing many of the benefits of democracy.
Also, usually when people criticize capitalism, they're referring to "the current modern day manic deregulated post-neoliberal form of capitalism" as shorthand. People are probably okay with capitalism as practiced in the postwar era, when there were stronger social safety nets in the West.
Honestly, usually not. There's an argument to be made that capitalism causes industries to tend towards monopolies (or at least oligopolies) in many areas, monopolies centralise money, money equals power, power then gets used to remove safety nets in the name of making more money - so the current state of things is nearly inevitable. Even if the vast, vast majority of cases don't lead to monopolies, it only takes a couple of large industries.
I went to grad school and published several peer-reviewed articles. Even after I die, people will be able to search my name and retrieve work that I did. To me, that is priceless.
I feel almost exactly the opposite about the work I published- I don't want anyone to look it up and ask me about it, ever, because I'll be forced to admit that I was writing about things I had no knowledge of by a guy who wanted to be able to list as many publications as possible on his academic website. The work I did had basically no relation to the industry it was for, which is the industry I now work in.
I got the job I'm in because of the work I did, but mostly because the people I work for now are even less technical than my academic adviser was, and were impressed by the people he knew and how long his list of publications was.
Apply this 10x for the patents my name is on.
For clarification, I quit two years into a PhD program and have been working in the industry for the last four years.
...which is exactly his point. People will do things that are objectively not in their best interest (become scientists, poets, or French poetry critics) because we've been strongly inculcated in that whole "do what you love" "everything is worth it as long as [you touch someone with your art] [your science is remembered after you die] [insert reason here]" philosophy.
Which means those fields get a free pass to treat their members horribly, and people will still gravitate towards them in huge numbers, because "do what you love" is so strongly ingrained in us.
A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!
That's only about a third of the point, it's also criticizing not being aware of the flip side "But that too is our culture: everyone else’s dream is a delusion. Mine is a tale of noble perseverance. Everybody else should be practical." And then the author goes on to mention how extending the same generosity we give ourself with regards to pursuing higher purposes would probably be helpful in the long run.
I agree it's an unfortunate word choice, but I couldn't think of a better way to word it without making the post significantly longer and I assumed most people would understand what I meant. If you have a better way to phrase it, I'd love to hear it- I don't say that sarcastically.
Honest request: Could you elaborate this idea a bit ? I find it very intriguing; investing so much time of your limited time on earth so that random people will be able to find your name and read your work.
I have restricted the impact I want to leave to my very close circle (especially my kids), and not in tangible things, but in how they behave, think and act.
It might be not very true for papers that almost nobody is going to cite ever again, but the idea in general is to have "some kind of impact" that outlives you.
Having kids fulfills the same, but does not "scale" very well (for lack of a better word), since you can only have so many, parenting is hard and you might screw it up irreversibly. Creating something novel and useful (even if only marginally so) has the potential to touch countless lives, even after yours is over.
It could be art, or software, or an algorithm, or a formula...
It's the nearest thing to immortality that a human will achieve. It's the moral of one of the oldest written stories (Gilgamesh). Immortality (true immortality) is impossible to achieve. Better to achieve great things and be remembered for them, immortal in the minds of the many generations that follow.
Nothing wrong with what you said, value is subjective after all.
However, couldn't you say this about about a plethora of things?
I got kids/built a commerical building/wrote a book/made a youtube clip/participated in official sport (records lasts forever whohoo!). All of these things will keep existing to some capacity when you die.
Fair enuf - everyone has their own way towards keeping some footprint once they are gone.
I personally realized half-way through undergrad that programming would help me achieve that goal - or even contributing to open source vs writing papers and trying to get published.
The point of the (grad and above) academic treadmill is to become a scientist. KKKKkkkk is saying that the author did not mention this at all, which means the author may have been misguided or under false pretenses.
This feels a lot more like an unfocused rant against social norms, than anything coherent. It also, as others have noted already, totally ignored the huge number of STEM fields which encourage or require this.
I wouldn't call it unfocused. I think it pokes holes pretty accurately in the psychology behind the pieces (and those like it) which it was a reaction to. It shows a lot of the pot-shot-taking and one-upsmanship for what it is; namely, a psychological defense to feeling like a failure in a society where to simply be adequate is perceived as failure--you have to be better(™) than some other class of your peers. It could just as we'll be a piece about how we all gather around to defend ourselves or join in throwing stones when there is a new "Why Johnny Can't Code" or "Fizz-Buzz" article.
I work for a major university and I am in the process of applying for a master's in engineering to enhance my skills (primarily) in AI and systems engineering. This is a remarkable opportunity to get a master's for free while continuing full time work. I doubt the author had anything like this in mind.
It's also expected (all but explicitly required) to have a master's degree or higher to expect any kind of management role here. May seem weird to you, but higher education plays by its own rules.
This whole article is filled with negative stereotypes, incredibly warped views of capitalism, and seems hell-bent on pushing its own message independent of the truth of its supporting "arguments".
> This is why we’ve created all these bullshit “arty” corporate jobs in marketing and related fields, why software engineering is discussed in terms of people really making things rather than in terms of sitting at a computer, staring bleary-eyed at your code
What...? I love my job, and it does involve making things while I sit at my desk -- incredibly cool things. Not only that, but my manager is awesome and discourages anything of the "up late bleary-eyed" variety.
Sure, there's a lot of crap jobs out there, but also a lot of amazing jobs where we do make incredible things that change the world. That's the "capitalist american dream" this article loves to call totalitarian propaganda (read the article if you don't believe he said something so absurd).
The article hits it right on the nose about our culture's fetishization of education and credentials. My brother is a trader at a bank. Going to grad school would cost a ton of money between tuition and opportunity costs, while doing nothing to advance his career, yet my parents still lament that he has "only a bachelors degree."
I don't know what can be done. As jobs continue to get automated away, the emphasis on education will only become more extreme. To listen to some Presidential candidates talk everyone should have a PhD in underwater basket weaving, paid for by the government. It's insane.
Unless a few hours twice a week amount to severe opportunity costs, why not work and do grad school? My brother and I and many of my colleagues took advantage of the benefit that many employers offer to get a masters after work at their expense.
So according to this author, if other people write about the pragmatic problems with getting a PhD, those articles are worthless... but he comes to the same conclusions for different (cultural) reasons, and we should listen to him?
Everybody has different goals. If your goal is simply to maximize your income, you will have a different decision making process than someone who is pursuing their interests, which will also be different than someone who is pursuing a job to pay bills, while keeping time for other interests outside of work.
Any articles written that make presumptions about your goals are going to miss the mark.
Interesting, but sort of whiny, until he veers off into "Capitalism Bad!" Socialism Good! Wait it didn't work the last 10 times? "No true scotsman! no true scotsman!"
Your severe exaggeration weakens your critique. I read the comments here before the actual article and after reading yours I expected the article to devolve into a juvenile defense of communism at the end. The author blames the problem in part on capitalism, but there was a distinct lack of "no true Scotsman" fallacy toward socialism.
Your anti-socialism bias is far more overt and absurd than the article's vague anti-capitalism bias. You got so bent out of shape at the mere mention of socialism in a positive light that you made up an argument that the article didn't put forth just so you could accuse the author of a fallacy. I don't know what to call this. It's not even a strawman. It's intellectually dishonest.
I'm sorry that my writing isn't clear enough to differentiate between my criticism of the article whining about capitalism and then socialism good because reasons, _And_ my anticipatory response to everyone trying to defend socialism because it hasn't been done correctly yet.
This doesn't make me think more highly of your argument. You're so close-minded that your "anticipatory response" is to simply assume that no one has a defense of socialism except a "true Scotsman" appeal.
I'm also left to assume from your comments that you think socialism and communism are the same thing. The defenders of socialism rarely say that no one's done it correctly. They instead point to the myriad of socialist programs in other countries that they consider successful (e.g. Canadian healthcare, German education, even US food stamps).
The USA pays 71% of the costs of defending NATO. European socialist countries don't have to pay that, so naturally, with that subsidy, they would have no problem giving out free stuff.
The US has many socialist programs: Social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, welfare, etc. Every social program the government funds is socialist by definition.
I also feel like there's just no relevance here anyway. Greece is part of NATO and bankrupt. Norway is part of NATO and thriving. NATO membership is clearly not the major determining factor for the health of a socialist nation.
I'm having trouble deciding if I'm being trolled or if your political views are just willfully one-sided.
No, I'm just willfully educated in economics. The money has to come from somewhere. If you print it, then its going to come out of the pockets of savers.
You've succeeding in convincing me that you're not a troll. The opinions you're espousing are just too uninteresting and the non sequiturs aren't even infuriating, just pointless and confusing.
There's lots of countries that have socialist policies that are doing just fine, many of them western countries. Sometimes they are better off than the USA. Socialism just happens to be a dirty word in American culture.
The U.S. has a significantly higher GDP per capita than Canada.[1] The U.S. also has a significantly higher average wealth per citizen.[2]
But if you look closely at the second source, you'll see that the U.S. actually has a REALLY low MEDIAN wealth per adult. This indicates a large inequality.
The problem in the U.S. isn't that there isn't enough wealth to go around, it's that it's not going around.
_All_ of them benefit from NATO. Do you think its a coincidence that the United states spends as much as the next several--don't remember the count--countries, and that most of the successful socialist nato members have very little military expenditures as a percentage of GDP?http://www.defenseone.com/politics/2015/06/nato-members-defe... Remember that the US has a much larger GDP than many of those countries on the list.
Agreed. And if I can make a plea to anyone who wants to comment on this thread -- please make your comment without using the words "capitalism" or "socialism" since neither word has a proper, consensus definition. Using those words will just lead to tedious flamewars with people talking past each other and rehashing old debates. Rather, talk about the underlying structure of incentives that create this dynamic, and how incentives can be changed, if they can be at all.
please make your comment without using the words "capitalism" or "socialism" since neither word has a proper, consensus definition.
This can not be repeated enough. It is absolutely true, if you use the words 'socialism' or 'capitalism' no one will have a clue what you are talking about.
The problem with these discussions is that people usually mean "neoliberalism" when they're talking about capitalism, and "social democracy" when they're talking about "socialism". It's almost as if we never really broke out of the old Cold War terminology and paradigms.
I disagree with the premise. I went to grad school to do research. None of my cohort sees ourselves as losers.
The trick is to go to grad school in a field where you can get funding. Then, you can get paid to learn and write papers. Then it's like a day job -- no losing necessary.
I haven't seen any of the "Who goes to grad school?" thinkpieces the author mentions, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet the authors of such thinkpieces probably haven't been to grad school either...
> [R]ecognizing the sickness within capitalist “success” is necessary to inspire broad rejection of a cruel, embittering, inhumane system [...] Once you are among those lucky enough to pay for your basic material needs, the fear of being a loser keeps you motivated to work those 60 hour weeks that people are so proud of in American achievement culture.
The "sickness" the article speaks of -- fear of being a loser -- isn't a sickness at all, in my mind.
It's a boon to the world. Fear of letting down your customers, fear of letting down your employees, your cofounders, your investors -- that's a GOOD THING. That encourages people to try and make their new businesses work: to figure out what's wrong with them, to figure out how to make them better. And the point of that business is to provide customers with something valuable. And when you have lots of humans doing that across the whole world, you get a better world -- a world that turns typewriters into laptops, unused cars and houses into shared rides and shared vacations, long lost acquaintances into Facebook friends, etc etc etc.
I think it's possible that its both a sickness and a boon. I fully agree with your point that the "fear of being a loser" does drive people to work harder, do better, etc. All of that has (generally) positive effects (well, assuming that you are willing to ignore the fact that many people will use less-tan-ethical means of making more money).
However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.
Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.
I can't understand why everyone doesn't go to grad school. In grad school in a computationally focused biology lab, I'll be able to come in every day and code on whatever projects I want (well, in my case all of the projects I want to work on are in my field) to in whatever language I want to. It'll be open-source, on github, and be shared with other scientists through publications. It will contribute to advancememts in environmental and medical genomics (however small!), which are important and morally/intellectually fulfilling fields.
Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source, has to be be whatever your supervisor tells you, won't even be owned by you, and may never see the light of day for the first 4-5 years out of college? Grad school seems more fulfilling, interesting, better for portfolio development, and you just happen to get a PhD out of it than most entry level coding positions.
>Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source,
why? because I have a BS in engineering and I make 6 figures. My wife spent 5 years after college getting her phd in a hard science and she now makes less than half of what I do and has to work way harder.
I'm not even sure the work is more fulfilling. My wife is scientist and she mostly just works in isolation teaching herself things. My job is much more collaborative; I get a lot more opportunities to be mentored by peers and learn the state of the art. To me that is incredibly valuable. I'm not so arrogant as to think that I could be just as good at my job if I worked alone.
Are you really extrapolating your one example to apply to all cases? Maybe you should take a few stats classes while you're still in grad school.
Firstly, you seem to be really lucky because a lot of grad students basically spend their masters working on what their advisors want them to and being lab monkeys. Things change once you get to PhD sure but you have to grind out two years to get there.
Secondly, not all corporations are closed source. Many companies, especially tech-focused companies, have tons of open source initiatives. A lot of amazing tools come from industry. And it's not like all grad programs are havens of FOSS - there's an endless supply of papers and projects whose code is either a) non-existent or in the form of snippets or b) blocked by a paywall (to get to the article to see the snippets if they exist).
Additionally, you can choose what company you work for. If you want more autonomy or ownership, you can filter for that. I joined a company fresh out of undergrad and I was pushing product-changing code in a few weeks.
Most of all, the reason why everyone doesn't go to grad school is because not everyone can get into grad school. You are going to a top tier program at a well-regarded (and well-funded) university. That's probably why you are having such a positive experience. These positions are, by their definition, exclusive and available only to a very small percentage of coders. People rag on industry about gatekeeping (throwing resumes in the trash if they are from the wrong school) but it happens even moreso in academia. I've coded plenty of projects in my spare time, have created and implemented novel solutions, can talk intelligently about a wide range of topics and have spoken at conferences...but if my GRE / GPA scores are too low, then you're SOL for the most institutions. They'll still keep the $100 application fee of course.
I'm a grad student as well, just finished my third year. Yeah it's super fun and I have a ton of freedom, but I make roughly 1/5 of what people I graduated with. I'm sure that holds a lot of people back. That being said, I really enjoy it, especially since you continually get to learn new things.
As someone who spent five years as a "sad French poetry PhD student," I'd like to know when French poetry became the single most pathetic thing anyone could deign to study. Probably ~40% of the people in my grad program ended up in translation or international affairs/relations jobs solely or largely because of their strong language skills, so I think French literature is a safer choice than English or history.
Heck, even my software engineer colleagues who are trying to pick up French are glad there's another engineer who can help them with what they're learning or accompany them to a French conversation meetup.
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I guess, I mean, this feels like fighting fire with fire. Which is fine ... but what bugs me about competitive humble-whine-bragging is that I feel it's ineffectual. So hearing this as a pro-grad-school rant actually feels even a little worse than hearing the anti-grad-school rants he's complaining about.
The link title here is misleading - it's about an article titled 'why people go to grad school.' A better title would be 'A reaction to "why people go to grad school."'
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I am no great cheerleader of capitalism, I could go on and on about the way people worship at the alter of "free markets" as if a market is inherently virtuous, but this is utter hogwash. Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser. Making everyone happy and prosperous beyond ones immediate tribe is just not an instinctive goal in large-scale humanity.