What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins.
But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)
Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
Having a garage isn't enough. A lot of people with garages need to work everyday to pay for their garage, and food, and everything else. Bezos and Jobs both had free garages and free time paid for by their parents. I would bet the others mentioned in the post had the same sort of freebies.
Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?
It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have
People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's
not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity
Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel
Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig
And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.
But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.
I think it is from the business side, rather than the software side.
The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples.
The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly
I have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products
Business education has taught everyone that spending $100 to earn $120 that you can live confortably on, is for suckers. The real goal is to then spend $80 to earn $200 the next year, and then spend $60 to earn $1000 the following year, and then to spend $40 to earn $10,000 the following year, and then to spend $20 to earn $100,000, and so on. Growth for no other purpose than growth.
I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example.
To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home prices. These policies create housing scarcity both for homes and rental units.
That saddles later generations with unreasonably high housing costs and makes them unable to afford to start a family, so the fertility rate drops. If you want more kids, build more housing.
As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.
> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:
If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.
This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.
one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.
The US was very good for a very long time at integrating immigrants. It should continue that tradition and work even harder at it.
I believe it was some Republican president who said something to the effect of “if you move to Germany you may be a citizen but you are not a German… But if you move to America and become a citizen you are an American”.
It’s worth noting that not all advanced societies have fared as badly as Korea and Japan. Scandinavia for instance is below replacement but not nearly as catastrophically as Korea. It’s possible that a bit more policy tweaking and more productivity=>leisure time could get them back to a replacement rate.
The US was historically rather hostile towards new waves of immigrants in practice, treating them very much like second class citizens (Irish, Italians, Latinos etc), effectively pressuring them to assimilate by becoming "more American than Americans" to avoid such attitudes. One can argue that the system kinda sorta worked in the long run, but I don't think it makes it worthy of emulation.
I think you need to consider history if you think this is a new thing. People literally paid for indentured servants, even outside of the slave trade.
Importing cheap labor has been a constant throughout the countries history, look at camps of people building the railroads you’ll see lots of Chinese people etc.
But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.
How do we solve the issue of the end state, where all economies have reached our current level of advancement?
I assume we solve it, or we go extinct, and that would be an odd reason to do so after millions of years, wouldn't it?
Countries are just arbitrary here. What happens long term is there’s massive selective pressure because children of people that reproduce in wealthy economies are the only people to be around in 200+ years.
The USA as a whole has 1.7 births per woman which is really close to the ~2.1 needed. However that isn’t evenly distributed ethic Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander’s living in the US actually sit just above replacement rate. Give it 200 years and that may very well increase.
Really 3 kids needs to be seen as normal long term because some people just aren’t going to have any.
Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction?
It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:
The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing.
If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it was just assumed that people would do it on their own, but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to get people to do it.
This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the super-not-weak anthropic principle?
We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.
Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!
Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.
This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf
EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.
They might still create more value than they cost. For example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
Where are you getting this from? The value you provide sets a kind of ceiling on what you can be paid. But you are paid based on how easy it is to replace you.
Here's how you determine who brings more value to society: If they were to just stop coming to work tomorrow, would society keep going?
If every ticktocker quit tomorrow, would society still function? Yes. Things would go on like nothing ever happened.
If every surgeon quit tomorrow, would society still function? No, people would die, they would become timid and afraid of being hurt, because minor injuries would be fatal and life changing. Not only that, we would lose centuries worth of knowledge and be forced to learn it all from scratch again from books instead of trained surgeons.
The danger in your logic is it leads to thinking like this: "ticktockers provide more value than surgeons because they can scale their reach, therefore in order to maximize total value to society, we can maximize the number of ticktickers and we don't have to worry about surgeons. We can just offset the lost value by the value brought by all the ticktockers."
That's an obvious bad idea and straw man, but people really try to go down that slippery slope in non-obvious cases. The realm of education comes to mind. "MOOCs are more valuable than universities because they have more reach, therefore in the future we will close down universities and only have MOOCs" is something I've heard seriously proposed before.
You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real.
The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity.
The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars.
Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct?
A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.
if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there. Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-term.
I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They protect their children at the expense of their elders, basically. It won't be national borders either: the fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there are certain regions where people still raise children.
Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other countries though.
The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it wants to. It's so good at this that it actually has and those people pay taxes but don't get government benefits.
There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US.
Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world?
The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
Some countries like South Korea are going to face major challenges far sooner, but frankly having the most extreme examples collapse means the average stays higher.
> Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
The absolute number of humans isn't the issue. It's that people expect to retire at 65, but are now living into their 80s and 90s. Retirees have to be supported by working people, i.e. younger people. If the ratio of younger people to older people gets out of kilter, there's huge problems. Life extension makes this worse rather than better.
The ratio of younger vs older people is also a function of biological aging which might look very different in 500 years. I don’t think we can reasonably expect to retire at 65 if healthy lifespan hits 200+.
If 150 year olds are as healthy as current 50 year olds they may very well be expected to work. And personally I’d happily extend how long people are expected to work in exchange for significantly longer lifespans.
You make it sound like the US is a parasite that takes the young of other countries to endow itself, never mind what happens about other countries.
Maybe it is?
they exist, but at least employers do not seem to think they currently cover enough to accept them in lieu of a bachelor's.
in fact i would say I don't know how much additional value an associates' holds in that context, and maybe we just merge the two concepts. I haven't ever really seen a posting that is okay with just an associate's.
I saw someone saying that it is as though tech read Seeing Like a State and took the wrong lesson
I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
Seems inevitable once multi-modal reasoning 10x's everything. You don't even need robotics, just attach it to a headset Manna-style. All skilled blue collar work instantly deskilled. You see why I feel like I'm in a bind?
Way I figure, or what I worry about anyhow, is most of the well paying jobs involve an awful lot of typing, developing, writing memos or legal opinions.
And say like LLMs get good enough to displace 30% of the people that do those. That's enormous economic devastation for workers. Enough that it might dent the supply side as well by inducing a demand collapse.
If it's 90% of all jobs (that can't be done by a robot or computer) gone, then how are all those folks, myself included, going to find money to feed ourselves? Are we going to start sewing up t-shirts in a sweatshop? I think there are a lot of unknowns, and I think the answers to a lot of them are potentially very ugly
And not, mind, because AI can necessarily do as good a job. I think if the perception is that it can do a good enough job among the c-suite types, that may be enough
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