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Notes -
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
What is the case against meritocracy?
One has to separate ‘primordial’ meritocracy from the structured, deliberate, extreme meritocracy that exists in the modern west.
It has always been true, under every socioeconomic system man has ever devised, that smart young people have worked their way up the ladder. Historic royal courts (say those of the Tudors in England) often had a surprising number of people of low birth (at least in the second generation) who had worked their way to some kind of power. It was possible and even common for fortunes to radically shift for a family in a single generation. In a few decades families of no historical presence (who had maybe been peasants, then small time landholders, then gotten involved in regional politics) made it to court, to the king or queen’s ear. The current American system of deliberate meritocracy, open job applications, slander against ‘legacy’ applicants, criticism of “nepo babies”, the surging of second generation immigrants into the establishment at rates unseen even in the early 20th century is what is comparatively new. The worship of meritocracy, in other words.
Modern American meritocracy is bad because I see no reason why the child of two Brahmins deserves vastly more wealth and power than the child of two average Mayflower descendants just because the former is “more intelligent”. Though I have a reputation as something of a Jewish chauvinist on this board, I actually sympathize with the Ivy League admissions committees of the 1920s that capped us at 10% or 20% of a student population. Simple IQ is not enough to justify your rule. Tell a Hausa or Fulani or Yoruba that the Igbo deserve to rule Nigeria because they’re smarter and richer and they have every right to laugh you out of the room. Mere intelligence does not by default grant you the right to power over other men.
Meritocracy breeds the most extreme, most perverse form of entitlement. The entitlement that having a big boy IQ means you are owed a significantly greater money-making capacity (and thus comfort, power and prestige) by society than someone of more modest intelligence. I reject this notion. Perhaps it is particularly intelligent people who themselves owe a duty to society. I recall a comment by a regular user on a previous account (possibly @Esperanza) about how, growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, almost the entire graduating class (in engineering at the country’s most prestigious university) left for the United States, for fortune. What could Ireland have become had they decided to stay, to force change, to build things at home even if it was hard, to serve instead of to seek to merely enrich themselves, again and again?
I am relatively intelligent. But I despise the vanity of IQ meritocracy, the narcissism of it, the dweeb superman, the programmer ubermensch who believes not only that the arbitrariness of fate entitles him to rule (this is true, obviously, of any system), but that he owes nobody for it. Silicon Valley, America’s IQ meritocracy headquarters, is so devoid of duty, of nobility, that it has allowed San Francisco to collapse into shithole status. All the tech men can do is either defend it, whine without doing anything or flee to Texas, which is arguably even more pathetic. Bill Gates’ only noblesse oblige is funding third world mosquito nets and attempting to design a better toilet for India, his philanthropic service to his own people is limited or nonexistent.
I have found in my life that ‘strivers’ of humble birth often have pathological character flaws that make them extremely dangerous. These include mild sociopathy, lack of gratitude, poor etiquette and manners, rudeness, a belief that their success is entirely their own doing, deep-seated jealousy of those they perceive as doing better, and immense, insatiable greed. Often, they do not even particularly enjoy life, they just try to min-max it, like a video game theory-crafter. They seek power and so ought, quite rationally, to be denied it or at least to be handed it very, very slowly.
Obviously baseline intelligence in positions of power is necessary for the successful functioning of society. But how much? Must they be the most intelligent people from all the land, or can they merely be quite intelligent people who also have other things about them that should be valued in a ruling class?
Ok so where the case against meritocracy?
Those kids of brahmins dont deserve more wealth.. they earned more wealth!
Smart people duty... Do you seriously think all the ways in which your life is better than your grand parents was brought to you by.. dumb people? If anything its not that they do too little, but that they did and continue to do so much that we so greatly benefit from such as not dying of polio or being able to talk over the internet that we should be thankful a system that made those things exist exists at all and we get to live in it.
Honestly, you should pick up an econonics textbook. I really dont understand why you become a total leftist when it comes to this topic. Its not like wealth just exists and is redistributed.. it needs to be generated.
Like have you ever not met a truly competent person, someone who is really good at what they do?
Assuming you don't mean room temperature IQ nonfunctional people - dumb people (and a good amount of smart people who couldn't find a cushy job) flip my burgers, serve my coffee, clean my environment, make my clothes, grow my food, deliver my food, drive me to work... the list can go on. They do all that shit I wouldn't want to do, especially not for the money they get for it. None of the "vast economic benefits" of smart people would be worth a spit if there wasn't someone doing the work.
Conversely, those doing the work would be cannon fodder or slaves if someone smart didn't create the conditions for them to be able to "do work" and not be made to do work, vastly different things.
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Elaborate.
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You are making the same error that leftists do when they complain that not enough minorities are doctors or CEOs, qualifications be damned. It's not a question of "deserving power." It's a question of, "who is best for the job?" because whether important jobs are done well matters. As Scott once wrote:
Now, obviously, IQ is not the only factor that determines if someone is going to be good at such a job. And I would greatly like to separate/reduce power over other people from as many positions as possible, even if what they do is important, because the existence of the "ruling class" is the problem, not the details of who is in it. This is relatively easy for surgeons; less so for the chairman of the Fed. But the only way for the Fed not to have power is not to have a centralized monetary system, and similarly the only way for a politician not to have power is to have as small and weak a government as possible. And favoring "Mayflower descendants" over 1st generation immigrants accomplishes, in my view, pretty much nothing on either front. What if we flip your example; do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
This isn't what 2rafa is proposing in her post at all, she is proposing that the Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power because they have more sense of duty and respect for the people around them and the institutions that their ancestors built than the descendants of people who flew over 30 years ago do.
Neither that argument nor any supporting evidence for it are in their post. It's mostly just complaining about the outgroup.
You're right, I was conflating the comment you replied to with this comment she made below.
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To me the central problem of IQ meritocracy is that intelligence is one value among many. If you were in charge of staffing a business or a school or a government ministry, it's understandable why you would want to prioritize intelligence; but if you prioritize intelligence alone you might start to run into problems. There are plenty of intelligent people who are conniving schemers, who are sociopathic, who are selfish and vain, who hate themselves or their country, who value their own advancement much greater than others, or who even simply prefer others failing to themselves succeeding. In these cases selecting individuals solely for their intelligence makes their destructive flaws worse. An inveterate gambler is a bad person to hire in accounting. An inveterate gambler who is also intelligent is a million times worse, because not only will they do much more damage they also are much more likely to be able to conceal their faults (and subsequently, the wake of destruction).
Western academia seems to be filled with plenty of smart people who hate themselves and their country. I don't think it would be an unpopular observation here to point out that them being intelligent makes it worse and not better. Maybe if we weren't so hellbent on selecting for IQ we would not have found ourselves in this position for IQ to be so roundly dismissed.
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Having been a school leaver (no college) in Ireland in the 80s, I can tell you what would have happened: nothing. You honestly, unless you lived through it, have no idea how terrible things were; people weren't leaving to enrich themselves, they were leaving to get an actual job, any kind of a job.
There has long been a cynical saying "We breed our children like our cattle: for export". The reason that engineering class left for England and Canada and the USA and Australia was because there was nothing in Ireland. You have no idea how bad the 80s economy was; we're always about ten years behind the rest of the world, and while the 80s started being the era of opportunity in England (for some, at least), in Ireland we had a crash and a long recession.
Even in my last year of school, we were being warned about it. When I was looking for work, and being put on various government training schemes (for jobs that just were not there), we were also being heavily encouraged about "have you any relatives in England/USA? would you not think of going over to them?" Our Tanáiste (second behind the premier in the goverment) Brian Lenihan said in an interview with "Newsweek" in 1987 about the emigrating generation that "We can't all live on a small island" (for the record, the population of the Republic back then was 3.5 million; today it is 5 million). Places that would advertise vacancies would have hundreds of applicants applying for even low wage and menial work, even people with degrees and qualifications. Employers were able to turn applicants away on the grounds of being over qualified (this happened me when I applied to the local pharma plant; 'you have a qualification, as soon as you find a better job you'll leave' was the blunt refusal the HR guy gave me, and never mind that there was no 'better job' out there). You can bet your life no employer wanted those engineering graduates because 'they'll leave if they get a better offer'. Hence why the USA or England or Australia or Canada was the only option.
**That ** is what was so remarkable about the Celtic Tiger era, and why the politicians in general did not want to rock the boat. For the first time, in a long time, or ever as far as some could remember, there was work. There were jobs, and good paying jobs at that. People were not going abroad unless they wanted to, instead of being forced to leave. People were coming back home! We had our own immigrants now, the Poles!
The good times were always going to roll and this time it was different, the new economy would never end. Yeah, right.
We are still way too dependent on foreign investment by multinationals. If Apple, Google et al. decide to up and leave for cheaper pastures elsewhere, we are screwed in six different ways.
To be clear, I don’t think I’m necessarily in a position to judge. People do what they feel is in their own interest.
But I struggle to imagine that the loss of Ireland’s top engineering classes of 1980-1995 isn’t a great loss to the country. And I struggle to imagine that - had emigration not been a possibility - this group of people would just have accepted their minimum wage jobs and not worked to improve things in the country. They would have set things up, built things, started businesses, even as capital was very scarce. It’s laughable in the same way that arguing half of Nigeria’s doctors leaving for the West isn’t a tragedy for that country is laughable. It’s especially sad in Ireland’s case because independence was arguably hard-won. Becoming a generic American isn’t really honoring the generational struggle to liberate one’s ancestral homeland, although I suppose you have the Brits to thank for exterminating or assimilating your native aristocracy. In Israel, emigration (certainly permanent emigration) is looked down upon at least somewhat.
Prosperity is only rarely the result of a bounty in natural resources (which guarantees nothing), it’s most often the result of people. I think people of great ability do have a duty to work to the benefit of their society. Silicon Valley abstracts this, turns it into a generic mission to ‘save the world’, vastly grander and more epic than ‘improve Ireland for my children and their children’ and yet also - somehow - less meaningful.
Its a tragedy for Nigeria in the short term. In the long term they will crash and burn. Which is a good thing, because ultimately something that can retain its people will take its place. Let the unfit die.
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Oh, it was a great loss. And the irony of it was that the IDA at the time was selling our young, educated (and cheaper to pay than the equivalent in your company, American multinationals) workforce as the reason to invest in Ireland - the Young Europeans campaign.
The irony, I say, is because people have stories of "As I was leaving for the airport to get on the plane to emigrate, I saw the Young Europeans billboards and I was one of the people in that photo":
Since the Famine (and before, but not as badly), we've been bleeding our young and our talented. The eldest son got the farm, the eldest daughter got the dowry, the rest of you look for work and that usually means emigration. Goes double if there is no farm or money to be inherited. My parents were the youngest of their respective families and the ones to stay at home; most of my father's siblings emigrated (three stayed behind besides him) and the same for my mother. My mother actually planned to go to America but her parents were elderly and she was left to look after them.
We can argue history, the Church, the economic climate, all the rest of it as to why this is so - but the brute force reality of Irish life was that you were likely to have to leave if you wanted work, any kind of work. And if you wanted to make anything of yourself, the opportunities are abroad. People are still contemplating that - the cost of living is too high, the salaries too low, no chance of buying a house. In the USA, that mostly means "move across the country". In Ireland, that means "emigrate".
"Starting a business" was another programme pushed by the government, with limited success. Capital was non-existent, as opposed to very scarce, unless you had some kind of influence or assets or pull to get loans. Ireland is not the US. There was (is) a cerrtain amount of political corruption which favoured certain people in their business dealings and enabled them to profit.
And when Irish entrepreneurs get successful, they leave the country - look at the Collisons. Part of that is if you want to grow, you have to go to the US, to Silicon Valley and the venture capitalists there. But also part of that is wanting to make money and advance in your field, and Ireland is just too small:
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Why would we grant an exception and compromise the efficiency of the system at all ? I don’t recognize the supposed higher value or altruism of your class. Even if some individuals in that group had those traits, we wouldn’t reward entire bloodlines. In theory, you’re making an argument about ‘personality’ versus ‘IQ’, but what you actually propose is blood versus everything else, because hereditary classes are not subject to any assessment of their worth to society, whether personality or IQ.
I can understand why most people would want their (high) status to be unalterable, but this being a zero-sum game, their interest diverges heavily from everyone else’s. This is little more than pining for the sweet life of the aristocrat who never has to justify himself.
I don’t think you can be absolved of this sin either.
What gratitude? I thought you were here to serve the common folk. Hereditary ruling classes do not feel any obligation towards their lessers – like you, they expect adulation.
I don't agree completely with @2rafa but this absolutely isn't what she's saying. It's not even a strawman.
Sure, hereditably personality and bloodline will work into it, but the central idea of @2rafa 's scenario is the stability of the institution, which can then be (overtime) refined toward a direction.
Meritocracy, through both speed of turnover and by it's nature, offers 'seats' which are themselves insubstantial, and entirely shaped by the person in them. Whereas a system where the seat makes the person, they defects of the individual are swallowed up by the nature of the seat, and when they are hereditary, they evolve symbiotically.
I don't personally agree with even @2rafa 's focus on class and heredity, so much as I agree with the concept of strong instututions, which offer a rigid and slow moving hegemony that doesn't fold like a lawn chair to whoever has the most raw "meritocratic" capacity to obtain it.
Essentially, is the legitimacy of the throne defined by the will to power of the person in it or is the legitimacy of the person's power defined by the institution embedded in the throne? Meritocracy is the former on steroids.
Imagine two neighboring island nations Meritocita and Institunia. Both have a similar native population. One day they are both met by several boatloads of foreigners fleeing a famine who wish to rehome and integrate into these societies. Generally speaking they come under no kind of colonialist or conquering mindset. Overall however, they are of greater intelligence than the natives. They are warmly welcomed into the respective nations
In Meritocrita, very quickly, due to their high IQ, the aliens work their way into centers of power and leadership. Not only that, it is disproportionately the most power-hunger and greed-thirsty. While most of the Aliens are nice and integrate into the middle of the society, the percentage with sociopathic, greedy, selfish, etc tendencies disproportionately take over the ruling class. In a generation, the natives of Meritocrita are ruled by a class including the worst of the Aliens. Because IQ is hereditable, this also serves as a de facto class system. Only the people most able to climb into it are those from the population most disproportionately thirsty for power.
Meanwhile on Institunia, the Aliens have the integrate themselves into existing, and much more rigid centers of hegemonic power. Again, the most intelligent and power-hungry are going to find paths into the system, but there willbe much more obstacles, their total ability to amass / concentrate power will be limited to the confines of the instituions, and they generally have to integrate further toward the institutional values to get there. For a power hungry Alien to work their way into a role of religious influence, he is forced to adopt the pieties and reenforce the religious values of the system. Another sociopath becomes a community leader, but excercises his power, furthering the goals and community fo the social club he has infiltrated, because that is necessary to retaining the power.
All the while, High IQ aliens who actually expemplify the existing native values have a leg up on joing and re-enforcing these institutions.
A few generations later the Aliens have conquered Meritocrita and integrated into Institunia, even as their 'bloodlines' have similarly dispersed into the native population. In fact, Institunia over time becomes less genetically sustained than Meritocrita despite having a more heredity and legacy oriented society on the margins.
Why isn’t institutionia without aliens ruled by greedy, selfish, sociopathic, and also aggressively incompetent stupid people? Like @2rafa ’s model Nigeria.
Why would it be?
Because greedy selfish sociopaths rise to the top even quicker without meritocracy. Shouldn’t the developing world, Africa, India, South america, be counted as institutiona? You seem to think hereditary positions and nepotism protects societies against intelligent sociopaths, but I don’t see the real world reflecting that. Also the analogy ignores the gains from giving more qualified aliens important jobs, the main justification for meritocracy.
No I don't seem to think that. My post was an argument against that narrow interpretation. I think strong, and robust institutions that are somewhat protected from the whims of personalities currently occupying them limits the fallout. Hereditarianism in and of itself doesn't make this, and to any extent @2rafa thinks so, I disagree with her
By what mechanism then, are aliens prevented from taking over institutiona?
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Well in part because as @johnfabian writes above, greedy and selfish people who are also very intelligent can do much more damage. But also because a more holistic, slower, more frustrated transition of power provides time for assimilation, for acculturation and so for a greater degree of continuity and thus social stability.
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My class (at least as far as the American half of my family go) is ‘new money’, if anything. Or maybe, if I had to be granular, a yo-yo between rich and poor dating back to our arrival in the country. I’m certainly not a Mayflower descendant. But I like what they did. The Harvard Club is nice. I enjoy the architecture out on Cape Cod. The true, true WASPs I’ve known have exactly the nice-but-middling intellectual energy I like to see in political leaders, who tend to get dangerous if they get too smart, rare exceptions like LKY notwithstanding.
I don’t think there’s any magic in bloodlines. But I think there’s great value in an elite raised with a certain sense of duty and a great sense of luck - that is, with the knowledge that what they have is not the result of their own hard work. This is the critical element, the worst part of the ‘self made man’, that he attributes to ability and skill what should usually be attributed to good fortune. It’s this that Freddie is writing about, because of course ability is luck too.
Strivers who believe that the universe owes them something for their intelligence are often at the heart of culture war debates, they’re the angry journalists at Vice (most of whom aren’t of particularly high birth, contrary to some claims) upset that being a journalist pays so poorly even though they’re smart and graduated from Brown. Compare to me, then, if you want and are interested as you seem to be. I believe that nothing I have is the result of my hard work (though I am in fact in my own right somewhat professionally successful), I have a healthy respect for luck, and I believe it is the duty of people with valuable things (money and talent) to support prosocial causes. To that end I advocate more redistribution from rich to poor, higher taxes on people like me, an end to mass immigration (which pressures working class pay), more police on the streets (disproportionately benefiting the poor), the locking up of the mentally ill homeless (see previous), more discipline in schools (see previous) and the overall beautification of society (benefiting everyone).
Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
Way too antagonistic, dude. You've been warned about this before. Banned for a week.
Inexorably, the bans get longer and longer. Shouldn’t I get a reset somewhere, I’ve paid my debts to mottiety.
The gradual automatic escalation is stupid, site's getting unusable for me now. Will the garden improve after I leave, weed-puller?
You've drawn three warnings and two bans in the last nine months, uninterrupted by any AAQCs. The easiest "reset" would be for you to stop being unnecessarily antagonistic. We're warning and banning you in hopes of bringing your posts in line with the rules. If you don't want to follow the rules, then yes, your absence would be an improvement.
It is not our goal to chase people away. Quite the contrary. But this is not a clickbait site and no one is running "engagement" metrics and asking how we can get more clicks. We're fully prepared to accept the possibility that the rules suppress engagement; the rules are more important to us than keeping participation high.
If - big if - I write a AAQC, will you stop increasing the bans and go back to warnings?
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I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
Communism is a system; blood/nobility is a personal characteristic. This feels like a category error. I agree that "need" (as in, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need") manages to be worse than blood, but this is quite a low bar and they're both so bad it feels pointless to ask which is worse.
Indeed, wealth creation jumped massively right as inherited power and nobility-based political systems were starting to be replaced! I wonder if there could be a connection between these events? Maybe such a confiscatory tax regime discouraged higher production? Perhaps nobles are effectively of random competence and random (or worse) moral character? Possibly such a rigid hierarchy discouraged innovation?
I think it was quite far from "everyone" who wanted/tried to move, and some of those still planned to farm, just under someone who would pay them more. In any event, if nobles can foresee this happening, there's an obvious solution: Pay the peasants more! In this situation, their work is clearly valuable, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's not like no one except nobility is capable of understanding that food will need to be harvested 6 months out! This is exactly the kind of problem that markets are wonderful at solving and central planning is terrible at. Obviously if too many people start to move to the cities, wages drop because of supply effects, because there's limited capital, and because the productivity of the marginal migrant goes down, which discourages more migration.
Speaking of central planning, I find it rather bizarre that you pointed out how terrible communism was, then immediately suggested that some of the things the Soviets did, such as preventing peasants from moving to the city and engaging in confiscatory levels of taxation, all enforced by military strength, which demonstrably destroyed the economic productivity of huge swaths of land (most notably Ukraine) and lead to mass famine, were somehow good when implemented under feudalism?
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In a hypothetical world where this happens, they go hungry and head back to where they were born to work the land. Of course, this didn't happen, because they never got the chance: they were reduced to serfs by their nominal betters anyhow. We needn't pretend that medieval aristocrats were enlightened despots when we can very much see they were no such thing.
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I think you and Freddie are in agreement on that point: that believing you did it all yourself by hard work and native ability, without factoring in luck (being in the right place at the right time) or other elements that helped you along means that there is an attitude of "I deserve all this" and concurrently "If you don't have anything, that's your own fault for being stupid/lazy and I certainly have no duty to help you; I got all this by my own merits".
A lack of charity, if you will. It's not that those who achieve shouldn't get high rewards, it's that those who are left behind should also be considered, and a 'pure meritocracy' then puts the blame for failure on 'not being good enough'. I think Freddie is arguing, and maybe you as well, that there are people who will never be 'good enough' through no fault of their own; they didn't choose their genetics which make them 'just ordinary people' in an economy that increasingly has no place for 'just ordinary people', or their circumstances, or "a drunk driver smashed into my car and gave me traumatic brain injury". What do we do for them or about them, then?
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San Francisco is not in Silicon Valley. It has a smaller population than San Jose, and Santa Clara County has a larger population than SF and San Mateo counties combined. SF and San Jose are further apart than DC and Baltimore.
The idea that super woke SF is somehow driven by IQ meritocracy seems very odd.
Leaving aside the fact that taking Gates to task for spending on inexpensive but highly effective interventions does not seem to be very trenchant criticism, the Gates Foundation is rather famous for its efforts to reform US K-12 education, esp re small schools, and programs like the Gates Millennium Scholarships.
Moreover, why should we assume that Gates is representative of "programmer ubermenches"? The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation seems to spend most of its money in the US, and though it is hard to tell geographically where much of the Google Foundation's spending goes, much clearly goes to US recipients.
Silicon Valley is a suburb of San Francisco. The ‘Bay Area’ is the San Francisco Metropolitan Area. This is what city means everywhere, including the US, regardless of the name of the local municipality (eg. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are obviously part of Los Angeles). That San Jose
San Francisco is the oldest and most important major city on the West Coast. If you live in San Jose and are not a 10th generation native or Mexican-American, you are there because of an agglomeration of wealth that San Francisco begat. San Francisco is also the cultural center of Silicon Valley, the financial center of Silicon Valley, the tourism and visitor center of Silicon Valley etc etc etc. And of course many ‘Silicon Valley’ companies do indeed have their headquarters or significant office space downtown, or at least did until recently.
So yes, Silicon Valley does have responsibility for San Francisco. When some game developer or software engineer or whatever attends a conference at the Moscone Center, in the center of the capital of Silicon Valley/the ‘Bay Area’, and they find it a shithole surrounded by disgusting psychotic homeless people shitting and taking drugs on the street, that is their impression of Silicon Valley. That Palo Alto suburban streets where a 3 bedroom picket fence house costs $5m are ‘fine’ isn’t really relevant.
As for the laughable assertion made by some tech people that they have no power over San Francisco because it’s under the thumb of wokes, San Francisco is and has long been one of the most corrupt cities in America. Silicon Valley tech people have (collectively) trillions upon trillions of dollars of capital, more than any other upper class anywhere else in the world. They could grease the palms needed to save the city if they wanted to, progressive city councilors are hardly incorruptible.
It is not the oldest major city on the West Coast, or even in California. San Diego is older. And it obviously is not the most important city, because Los Angeles is.
Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are both surrounded by the City of Los Angeles (well, technically West Hollywood is a separate city) and have populations vastly smaller than Los Angeles (1/100th of the size of Los Angeles in the case of BH, and 1/30 in the case of SM). In contrast, SJ is larger than SF, is 40+ miles away, and is the center of its own metro area
So, if someone believes something stupid, that makes it true?
I'm certainly aware that, in the present day, Los Angeles is larger than San Francisco (whether it is more important is debatable, according to AI twitter San Francisco is the most important city in the world).
To see the outsized importance of San Francisco to American perceptions of the West, it's important to have some historical context. The Wikipedia page on the 1880 census includes a list of the largest cities in the United States in that year. San Francisco is in 9th place with a population of 250,000, by far the largest city on the West Coast. The next largest city on the West Coast is Oakland, in 51st place, with a population of 30,000 or so. There are no other West Coast cities in the top 100 cities in the US in that year. "The last [] before San Francisco" entered the popular lexicon of the Wild West (even Red Dead Redemption pays homage to it at times). San Francisco was for many years the only substantial American settlement West of the Rockies. It played a central role in the US' relationship with Asia, and with the Pacific (and Western South America) in general. It is probably the only West Coast city to be in the top 10 in terms of their importance to American history (depending on how you feel about Hollywood).
According to the 'San Diego History Center', the population of San Diego in 1880 was...2,637 people. Major city indeed.
Again, just because someone believes something stupid, does not make it true.
No one disputes that. But it irrelevant to your absurd claim that SF is in Silicon Valley, and that it is a product of Silicon Valley. In fact, it tends to refute that fact -- SF's role in the world long predates the development of Silicon Valley. The population of SF in 1950 was 775,000; its population is now is only about 13% more, at 873,000. In that same time period, San Jose's population rose from 95,000 to 1,000,000.
Huh. As an outside I always had the impression SF had at least a couple mil running about. That's a surprisingly low number in my eyes.
In American cities the nature of local government (and the fact that wholesale reorganization from above is very rare) means that many cities are not in fact cities. Los Angeles is a famous example - important districts of the city (like Santa Monica, Long Beach, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood) are not technically part of the city of Los Angeles. The county has 88 cities and unincorporated area (another largely American invention) which together make up the city. That city, in turn, is part of the wider 'metropolitan area' that includes a large number of other towns and cities in neighboring counties. So in LA, only 4 million of the 10 million people who live in Los Angeles actually live in Los Angeles (city).
The San Francisco Bay Area has about 8 million people. Travel distances within the Bay Area are similar to those within other recognized highly sprawled cities. In many other countries, Oakland and SF would be one city, for example, as they are an unbroken (except by water) urban area. The Houston metropolitan area, for example, is larger than the entire Bay Area.
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This is geographically false. Silicon Valley is in South Bay. If Silicon Valley is a suburb of anything, it's a suburb of San Jose. Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino are all in the San Jose - Sunnyvale - Santa Clara MSA. Sand Hill Road runs right near the MSA border.
San Francisco gets more press because San Jose isn't an interesting city. But it's much more connected to Silicon Valley than SF.
But this is kind of the point. San Jose is in many ways a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and the wider surrounding suburbs. It has a downtown in the way that, say, Indianapolis has a downtown, a few towers surrounded by parking lots. San Francisco, even today, is (much) more important to state politics, even though San Jose was once the state capital, many of the state's most significant political figures, incuding the current governor, came through San Francisco. San Francisco is the cultural home of the tech elite who live in the Bay Area, it's home to more michelin starred restaurants, sports arenas, better hotels, international conferences, the most expensive urban real estate in the region (I don't even think San Jose has an affluent downtown neighborhood of detached houses like Pac Heights in SF), more good private schools, more in the way of galleries, theaters, orchestras, opera and cultural venues and so on. Nobody outside America has even heard of San Jose, such that people who live there would generally say they live in San Francisco or the [San Francisco] Bay Area. Minus the largely white and east asian bedroom community (much of which is in tech) who technically live within the city's boundaries, San Jose is a largely Hispanic and Vietnamese city with almost zero cultural or social significance to the wider state or even country. Wikipedia even makes clear that the 'Bay Area' is officially short for the San Francisco Bay Area, because every substantial settlement in it was built (or largely expanded) around San Francisco's role as the capital of 'The West' since the early/mid-19th century.
So I think it's relatively fair to describe Silicon Valley as part of San Francisco's wider metropolitan area, in colloquial terms.
San Francisco is not, fundamentally, important because of its Michelin stars, ballets, operas, media, literary artifacts, or galleries. It's certainly the best you'll get within 300 miles, but if those things are what you're looking for, you certainly know cities that crush it on all counts. (In state and federal politics it indeed plays a massively outsize role.) No one flies out to San Francisco to see Lohengrin.
What makes the Bay Area Important is tech and capital; without it, San Francisco would be Portland-level in terms of influence. And for tech, until very recently, the epicenter was in Silicon Valley, which is a bit amorphous but I'd call the geography spanning from roughly Stanford on down. Apple, Cupertino. Oracle, Redwood City (some would object this counts, too far north). Cisco, San Jose. Adobe, San Jose. Sun, Santa Clara. Intel, Santa Clara. HP, Palo Alto. Netscape, Mountain View. Yahoo, Sunnyvale. Later on, Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park (another relatively northern outpost). Also, pretty much every VC of note has their offices within a mile or so of each other on SHR: it wasn't as if it was San Francisco airdropping money onto nerdy engineers down south. And most of the tech elite live near where they work: Meg Whitman Atherton, Zuck Palo Alto (albeit after a stint across the street from Mission Dolores), Sundar Los Altos Hills. Pac Heights has more names like Getty or Hellman than tech CEOs. Even in terms of schools, the best private school in SF doesn't really hold a candle in prestige compared to those in the South Bay (Harker, Castilleja, even some public schools like Paly or Gunn).
This provided the initial capital and technical skills that underlie San Francisco's nascent technical ecosystem, which only really started in earnest in the late 2000s. SF has a couple of important, successful companies based there (Salesforce, Uber, Twitter, etc.), but the giants only keep relatively small outposts in the city. And, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic are based there, along with a respectable percentage of Google's ML researchers (though most are still expected to take a shuttle down south to MTV three days per week), but it remains to be seen how that will develop.
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Yes, Silicon Valley has a very odd pattern where in some sense San Jose behaves as a suburb to the towns with tech company offices. This does not make the valley a suburb of San Francisco. Nor do any of the other things you've mentioned.
No, it's the San Francisco Bay Area because it's located around the San Francisco Bay. South Bay was pretty much farms, until Stanford built his university (on his former farm). Shockley founded his company in Mountain View, Fairchild was San Jose, Intel in Santa Clara, etc. San Francisco wasn't invovled.
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