I've been curious about EP's take on start up culture for a while, he's both a finance professional and a pretty avid programmer, so I sent him a single line email, "Start-up culture bullshit or complete and utter bullshit?" He answered my question and responded to my previous meandering post about the role history has in understanding today's status quo:
I do think there is a cool element of how computers have affected our lives. We went from people that actually made stuff, to mostly office workers and consumers before personal computing was widely adopted. Now at least there is a possibility that software can turn more people back into makers of (digital) things. That said, there is a lot of "start-up culture" that is simply ridiculous. Given the lopsided pay scale for even ideas of questionable value, a lot of it is just scheming up bullshit that offers no marginal benefit to society, but might scale fast enough to get you a lotto ticket. We have this romantic idea of these guys as cowboy risk-taking entrepreneurs, but what is risky about getting into one of the best schools on the planet, getting VC funding to make slightly less but have way more control, and likely having a backup option at a highly desirable tech firm? The goal is not to deny that these guys are smart, or that they work hard, but moreso to question whether or not we are truly allocating capital efficiently.
To get back to your point, if we really cared purely about structuring society around the greatest possible human benefit, we would do things entirely differently. Most people's lives are structured in ways that are unfulfilling and we also massively incentive behavior that has questionable benefits in the long-run. A lot of people think that they only reason we get a company like Google is because of types of rewards, but I don't think that's true. As long as businesses are easy to set up and there is good, or even great (but not ostentatious), we will get companies like that. We will get companies like that because the true motivation for people who build truly valuable things is not entirely money. The motivation for people who build some of the more pointless shit is more skewed towards money. I don't blame them as those are the rules of the game.
To get back to your point, if we really cared purely about structuring society around the greatest possible human benefit, we would do things entirely differently. Most people's lives are structured in ways that are unfulfilling and we also massively incentive behavior that has questionable benefits in the long-run. A lot of people think that they only reason we get a company like Google is because of types of rewards, but I don't think that's true. As long as businesses are easy to set up and there is good, or even great (but not ostentatious), we will get companies like that. We will get companies like that because the true motivation for people who build truly valuable things is not entirely money. The motivation for people who build some of the more pointless shit is more skewed towards money. I don't blame them as those are the rules of the game.
Honestly, if society was structured for the greatest benefit we would just allocate massive public spending to education and medical research. The one thing that makes everyone's utility go to zero is dying. The real issue is that, barring a reasonable likelihood of life extending treatments becoming available in the current lifetime, there is no incentive whatsoever for policymakers to run things this way.
I wouldn't be shocked if everyone became a lot more socialist if all of the sudden we were realistically 20-30 years away from discovering the fountain of youth given necessary resources and talent allocated to the problem.
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