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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."
This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.
Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.
There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.
What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.
What do they actually want?
Marxism, or the leveling they expect it to provide.
It's just the labour theory of value conveniently cut off at such a point that it doesn't apply to anyone they know (or could conceivably be) or their favorite allied rich people (culture-producing left-wing celebrities and athletes ), though even some of those will breach the generous cap.
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Your terms are acceptable. I would consider a world without gigantic monopolies with huge sway over public influence to be a better one.
The amount of power these mega corporations have is, I think, incompatible with liberal democracy. Having public discourse be decided by algorithms on a handful of global powerhouses is actually an insane state of affairs with huge potential for abuse.
So yeah, let Zuck and his ilk retire early. Have Facebook fade to obscurity. Let Google fall before internet search is optimized. The entities that buy the companies should also cash out, or break up into smaller parts. Give me a bunch of multi-millionaire medium to large entities instead of the titans we see today. Spread out the money and power, and I genuinely believe the world would be in a much better state than it is today.
Zuck cashing out in 2007 doesn’t mean the end of Facebook, it means another entity, even bigger than Facebook, gets to control Facebook.
Facebook, in not selling out, wrested control from the established media players who were looking to acquire it.
That’s an outcome in your preferred direction, no? Time Warner, Fox, et al are less powerful as a result.
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You're basically asking for a magic wand to give you the upsides of what you want without the downsides. It does not exist.
That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
While wealth taxes and antitrust legislation come with their own downsides, and taxing people because they are wealthy is in some sense unfair, it seems to me that the current situation is so undesirable that it would be worth it. Fundamentally, money and power go hand in hand, so having ultra wealthy individuals in practice means that power becomes centralized within an increasingly smaller circle. Worse, the longer this goes on, the harder breaking up the circle becomes, as power is transferred through wealth from the people to the rich.
The current richest people created many of the good things in society. On the Internet, you kill Google and anything else that could become big, and at best you end up with a world with a lot of Altavistas and Yahoos. Kill Amazon and anything else big, and you have a whole lot of relatively crappy e-commerce sites (which still exist, mostly for things that aren't sold on Amazon; they're usually not great). Electric cars remain impractical curiosities; space is confined to NASA and Arianespace. You also kill a lot of other things; some you wouldn't like, and some you likely would. Useful speech recognition and high-quality synthesis. Cloud computing. AI.
Currently the richest people in America are tech people. But go back a few decades or a century and you wipe out more. Retail giants. Railroads. Oil refining and retailing. Electric generation and distribution. The banking system financing all this -- like 'em or not, they're necessary. The richest people living now are why we're living with a 21st century standard of living instead of a 20th; some the richest people at any given time were responsible for similar advancements. Cut off the potential rewards, you also cut off the advancements.
The people never had the power in the first place. Power in the US is obtained by those who have political ability; the wealthy can purchase some of this but the agents they purchase are by nature often treacherous. Eliminating the wealthy leaves the ambitions of the politically savvy unrestrained by anything.
I'd say the argument isn't that Elon Musk didn't do an impressive thing by creating SpaceX. Musk + a bunch of people that worked with Musk did all that. No, not everyone should get an equal slice of the pie, but when multiple people created it and one person ends up with a slice that's 1,000 times bigger then maybe the "meritocracy" model isn't producing the output it should.
If Gwynne Shotwell wants to be paid more I expect she's got the leverage to at least make an attempt. I don't see a lor of SpaceX engineers complaining about Musk's worth (which of course comes not just from SpaceX but his other ventures) either. Elizabeth Warren and reddit antiworkers have zero call on any of that. And in fact, when they go after the "rich", they often include people like Shotwell (herself a billionaire) and even some of the multi-millionaire engineers.
I'm aware that Musk has multiple ventures. I'm also sure people are aware that higher taxes would affect people like Shotwell.
My point is that people act like more wealth maps out to more contribution to society. Rather than:
I would say usually they organized the labor and provided the material to the people who created many of the good things in society. That organizing the labor has value, but so does actually performing the labor. There's an entire chain of work to building a rocket, from organizing the labor to designing the rocket to producing the parts to sweeping the floors. Each of them deserves some of the cut of success, but who decides the amount? The answer is the people with resources.
The trick to this is that the contribution of the guy sweeping the floors is anchored by society's expectations. When setting the salary of janitor positions they look at the going rate. Meaning that even if they generate $50,000 in profit from having a janitor vs not having one, they can get away with only paying $25,000 by not competing. And the guy with nothing to his name has far less leverage to hold out for more.
That's how we got robber barons and sweatshops. The people then fought to give themselves a bit of influence on their own pay, by organizing unions and getting wage laws enacted.
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I suppose the question is then: Are most of the richest uniquely capable to the extent that those good things wouldn't exist at all without their work, or are they just the ones who were marginally faster than the next best competitor and/or cutthroat enough to use often questionable means to eliminate their competitors. If primarily the latter you could argue they are in fact a net negative on society. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which the value they produce over replacement is minimal or even negative, but winner-take-all dynamics in things like e-commerce or social media networks make this impossible to measure.
Maybe taking away the carrot entirely for the wealthy would cut off their motivation to develop advancements like electric cars and Amazon, but there's obviously a sliding scale that can be applied here. Is the potential for 100 billion in wealth that much less of a motivator than 200 billion? I can't imagine that possibly being the case. If anything, the striving by the ultra wealthy is almost entirely positional rather than anything absolute.
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This isn't clear to me, though. At the very least, it's not clear to me that policies that would accomplish this would make society better rather than immensely worse. It's not clear to me it would make it immensely worse, either, but I certainly know which way I would bet if it were possible to adjudicate this and pay out.
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Is China going to reciprocate?
I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.
I assume China is scary to you because its interests do not necessarily line up with those of America, and if the Chinese government deems it necessary, it might take actions that are detrimental to American citizens if it becomes too powerful.
I would argue that the same is true for the mega corporations though. They did not get rich by being nice, and will tend to look out for their own interests first and foremost. Those interests may not always align with those of the local population, so if they become too powerful, they may take actions that are detrimental to American citizens. The main advantage of the mega corps being local then, are the jobs, taxes, and the fact that you can regulate them.
Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate. So for large enough entities the advantages of taxes and regulation are bound to lessen over time.
So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.
So I suppose I don't see much of a difference between having the mega corps in America or in China. They don't seem to care about how their activities effect the world regardless.
Chinese social media sites already tried this to stop the sale of TikTok. That's my real problem here: this doesn't prevent this happening, it just prevents you from having your own companies (which do respond to US government pressure, e.g. with the pressure over "misinformation" or the Hunter Biden story).
The countries that don't have megacorps are basically buying their services from the US. The EU doesn't have its own social media sites and the solution is to just take US ones and regulate them. Of course, this only works if the US doesn't respond badly (which it is now). All of this seems strictly inferior to just building your own.
There's also the fact that these more regulations focused states are simply not doing as well as the US and arguably leech in some fields like pharma where the US spends more. I don't think wanting to control social media companies caused this, but maybe the mindset may apply elsewhere and be damaging.
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Assuming JK Rowling didn't have problematic views on trans stuff, is she allowed to be a billionaire? Surely nobody can argue writing books and licensing the stories for movies is an unethical way of becoming a billionaire?
A lot of people are fairly hard against copyright. Not that it's my personal belief, but if I put my 'angry twitter warrior hat' on I could see argument that the story shouldn't entitle to her than more than a 'reasonable living'. Also you could argue that a large part of that billionaire status is built off merchandising her story as opposed to direct entertainment consumption, which may also be objectionable?
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As I understand it, Rowling donated so much money to charity that she actually lost her billionaire status. Before the trans stuff, she was seen as the exception that proves the rule.
However, one could probably make an argument that where the money comes from matters a lot. Rowling's hands are clean, but can the same be said for the companies that paid her? How exactly could Warner Bros manage to get so big without underpaying or overworking their employees? Is such a thing even possible in a world of cutthroat competition in which every company is trying to be cheaper and faster than the others?
By that reasoning, almost every job is problematic, not just billionaire jobs, except for the jobs that are so close to the bottom that your loss from being underpaid and overworked exceeds your gain from the fact that the company is rich enough to offer you a job in the first place.
Thus why leftists critique the capitalist system and claim that there are no ethical ways to get rich.
Your analysis applies to political power far more than it does to wealth.
It's rather silly when applied to Rowling, who basically got rich by selling 7 books to every kid in the free world, then even richer through the movies. Not much less "problematic" than that.
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A top marginal tax rate of 101% and for rich dudes to shut the fuck up and go back to the business mines, instead of pretending they are gods gift to this earth.
"I stole or copied an idea from someone who had less seed capital and lied to partners and investors and broke various laws until I hit escape velocity and everyone decided we can't punish this guy just for doing all that shit, he's a rich founder promethean demigod now!" Shut the fuck up and put the tech stock in the bag.
Who am I talking about? There's just so many fucking options, so many titans of industry who's main job is to do rails of coke, fuck adolescents on little saint james, and perform slightly to vastly worse than a replacement level MBA after hitting the big time.
But they've done so much for the world! They're so fucking important we could never replace them with a random number generator, the deserve to control the production of a significant amount of the worlds total work and labor. Imagine if Von Neumann and Bohr did the smart thing and developed and ap that spies on you in exchange for making you depressed instead of revolutionizing their fields, changing the world for all time. They could have gotten rich, the fucking retards.
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For nobody to have anything more or better than they do. Like I've said before, it's envy — not just wanting what other people have (that's "covetousness"), but resenting them for having it. Much more toxic, because it's most easily satisfied by tearing others down.
There's a wrinkle you leave out. There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot. Instead, the idea is that the right kind of person, once certified (invariably including whatever their own certifications are), should have access to the highest luxuries and social status modern society has on offer, with all the drudgery to maintain that world being performed by the lessers.
It's not a revolt against the idea of hierarchy in general, but instead a rejection of the particular hierarchy we have, because it does not adequately reward them. I can sympathize a fair bit with the radical leveler point of view (logistics and feasibility aside), but there's no one even really pretending to argue for it.
Indeed, if you actually want to do this you can do it right now. There a variety of communities that work that way. They’re weird, but they exist.
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Good thing that's not what what I said. A few may still try to sell their preferred outcome as providing this, but like you point out, they barely even try that anymore.
Again, envy is about hating those who have more than you. That's perfectly compatible with having other people who have less than you. Like you say, it's not hating hierarchy, its about hating everyone above you in that hierarchy.
I'm again reminded of my dad's old employer — who passed a few weeks ago. Liked to give all the usual lefty bits about "helping the poor"… while paying employees, contractors, and so on as little as he could get away with (along with plenty of other slightly scummy business practices); and would regularly endorse "taxing the rich more"… as a millionaire whose approach to his own taxes bordered on outright evasion (near the end, he actually got dinged by the IRS for a rather substantial amount of unpaid back taxes).
Because, you see, he wasn't rich. No, he was your ordinary middle class millionaire landlord. And "the rich" who need taxed more? Anyone who had more money than him, those greedy bastards.
There's a sequence of tweets showing how Bernie Sanders's rhetoric changed... he started complaining about "millionaires and billionaries", then when he became a millionaire he dropped that part. Elizabeth Warren, too, sets her proposals above her own substantial (~10M) net worth.
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The anti-billionare crowd would rather have an opaque network of institutional investors appoint a ceo puppet than have a founder keep his company. What what they would prefer even more of course is a government committee.
I'd actually like worker co-ops, myself.
You will still end up with a co-op President or maybe some circle of powerful union leaders sitting in cozy office deciding what to do with capital worth billions of dollars, while the rest of the schmucks would still need to punch their card and make steel, or whatever the anointed kings and counts of the factory decided to do.
I really do not understand why are people so enamored with politics as deciding mechanism for economic power. People are raging against the 1,000 billionaires in USA, but they think 1,000 top elected government bureaucrats are better deciding what to do with $4,9 trillion of tax revenue every year - we are talking potential net worth of $100 trillion plus? And that is the best case scenario - worst case you get some petty dictator who actually decides everything personally, effectively becoming as far from your cookie cutter billionaire as they are from homeless addicts on the street. There is not one billionaire now that could even lick a boot of people like Joseph Stalin, who could just say a word and the whole country of 100 million people and its whole capital stock would make his wish happen. But he was just an appointed leader of co-op labor councils - or soviets in Russian. What a bunch of nonsense.
And even dictators can be a step up in some ways from democratic rule. One of the valid downsides of democratic rule (and public corporations) over monarchies (and privately owned businesses) is that the monarch has his incentives aligned with making the best long term decision, whereas politicians have short time horizons.
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I mean there's nothing keeping you from making one. WinCo is the biggest one in the US that I'm aware of, and Mondragon in Spain is pretty sizeable too.
However my favorite example of commies deciding they don't like having to share the means of production is when the creators of the game Dead Cells started out as a co-op, but after they hit it big they created a wholly owned (non-co-op) subsidiary to hire all the new developers and other talent they needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Twin
...
AFAIK these are just conventional workplaces, though- sûre thé workers get to vote on some upper managers, but they’re still just jobs not different particularly from other jobs of the sort.
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They work well in certain sizes, around the small to mid range of things. I’m very skeptical of ideas of “workers self-management” and the like that the anarchists and syndicalists of old loved to extol. I sometimes wonder if those people have ever actually had a job and dealt with the ensuing frustration of those who simply ‘don’t work’. If we lived out said ideals on a global scale we wouldn’t have a workers paradise.
I mean shit, when I was in high school and the teachers put us all into random groups and we couldn’t select our friends, I was always the guy doing all the work while the other kids sat around doing jack shit. That’s fine with me. But if I’m doing 90% of the work, all of you guys are getting F’s due to your lack of contribution. You’d better be shining my shoes and serving me lunch everyday and hope I put your name on the project. If we had this program on a national level, you’d have half the planet die of starvation and unable to wipe their own ass.
Actually the largest workers' self-management experiment was conducted in the form of Yugoslavia, where it was enshrined in the constitution or whatever and was the main ideological pillar of the state. The system changed quite radically over the course of the state's existence, so how it was set up in the 50s and 60s during times of economic boom probably didn't have much to do with how it looked in the 80s.
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You could imagine a world where working people are allowed to make agreements with each other to collaborate in their work. Then, if someone stops fulfilling their end, the other person is allowed to stop working with them and find a replacement. The co-ops could then develop specialized roles for handling these agreements, allowing workers in the co-op to focus on the tasks they are best at.
You'd build on top of that: some co-ops would work better than others. So, then, by the same principle the co-ops can choose which co-ops they want to do business with, to provide an incentive for co-ops to work efficiently on socially valuable goods and services.
You could even have some kind of meta co-op, which exchanges frozen labor value to nascent co-ops that want to try something new and risky, in exchange for some of the value to compensate them for the risk and reward them for the labor involved in picking out the most promising co-ops.
This is somewhat by the by, but I’m curious to know how you’d interpret the failure of the kibbutzim.
On a local level we already have what you’re suggesting in the sense that there’s nothing that prevents a small band of individuals from organizing along a cooperative pathway (obviously, since that’s what we’re talking about). The problem I see is one with scale and how it generalizes to a larger population. Local production and distribution doesn’t produce an economic surplus that the broader mass of humanity outside the cooperative can benefit from on any large scale. Now technically that’s an imperfect example because some cooperatives do produce a profit but that in turn gets distributed among the workers, there is no capitalist or investor that reaps up the overall net profit to the exclusion of the workers.
I get what it is you’re hypothesizing but it just strikes me as a way for extremely dysfunctional labor to get by without keeping up their end of the work. It doesn’t seem to me to provide a solution that ‘fixes’ the problem.
Fundamentally the only way this would ever be determined is just to get the system enacted and try it out. I could be wrong, so could do. I just have a very hard time seeing it working given my empirical views about human nature.
The kibbutzim are/were more than just a worker-owned business; they were also income-sharing communities. You can have the business end of it without the communal living part. Mondragon corporation is often pointed-to as the prime example of a large corporation running as a worker co-op.
Yeah, I’m aware of Mondragon (1, 2). Even Mondragon admits however that once a labor collective gets to a certain size they get spun off from the rest of the cooperative because it becomes unmanageable. There’s a reason vertically arranged hierarchies, whether its labor or sociopolitical are easier to manage when they become more complex than horizontal systems.
They aren’t really a “corporation” in the sense Americans think of them; like “Microsoft” is a corporation. They’re a federation of cooperatives. I’m not against them at all. In fact there are many things I like about them. But they definitely have long-term organizational constraints on them that capitalistic firms don’t have. I'm not hitting them for any of the fallacious reasons idiots like Ben Shapiro come up with (he's a moron who doesn't understand shit and has never gone out of his way to read the texts of his ideological opponents).
So long as I’m not prohibited from transferring into the subunit that’s the most difficult to work in and is the most profitable for the firm, I’d just outwork everyone else; so long as it justifies my 4:1 ratio or whatever it is against the lowest paid workers and is represented in my internal capital account of the company, I’d have no problem working for one.
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"Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it." - Joshua Muravchik, "The Mystery of the Kibbutz", as quoted in this fascinating GrokInFullness blog post
It feels like "failure" is too strong a word to use for that, though. Even if it didn't work well enough economically, it was at least a counterexample to the old "you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out" joke.
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More of what others have. Preferably all of it.
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