Excellent post. As a young programmer I often got the impression that "gate-keeping" is a rather bad thing (and it *can* be bad in many circumstances). But experience taught me over the years: If you care about something, be very selective about whom you give influence over it. Once I learned that I also decided that there is not point in trying to "grow" my software company (which I tried at first), but to stay small, efficient and close to the craft.
As a side question: What or how are people generally invited (for attendance) to the conference? Is it possible for somebody to attend without having personal connections to other attendees?
While personal connections sure would help, remember what was said about these people being strangers to each other. To get invited you must create something that earns you it.
"But for someone who is primarily concerned with craft, or the creation of beauty, and would rather financial gain and influence come as second order effects of that, this lust for power is detrimental to their whole purpose. [...] This is why careful selection of people is critical, and this is why it works."
I think this is an excellent summary of what we (as craftsmen) should be striving for.
It always comes back to virtue ethics in the end doesn't it :-)
This made me reflect on the various ways I have pursued "power" in my own life. I realize that I can't execute my own vision for Better Software without some amount of power. I need financial independence to carve out a meaningful block in my schedule and make software my way. I've always argued in favor of more entrepreneurship from people in Handmade Network because, practically speaking, money buys you that freedom.
It sucks to be in a position where you know you need to change your career, but you lack the power to do so and are more or less "stuck" working as a web developer until you hit retirement age. That situation will burn out people who have higher ideals for what software should be.
But perhaps where I differ with some is the means by which one acquires this relatively small amount of power, financial independence. I don't think you get there by growing a community and charging an entrance fee. Like you said, it dilutes the community and wrecks the original stated goal.
Products and businesses are a much better path, but I could also see a creeping interest in expanding the market for a product and potentially wrecking the stated vision that way too.
I think the reason we all have such admiration for Jonathan Blow is the fact that he somehow managed to do what most of us cannot. His team does work they believe in, on their own terms, and they make more than enough money to cover the expenses. It might not be a flashy existence, but you're well fed and don't have any identity friction eating at you.
We want something like that, something like being the studio that made Factorio. You let few people into your core working group, but you're okay with the consumer end product having more of a mass appeal. The product isn't entrance into the club. It's something useful to civilization, something well-built where you control the variables.
I don't think the stated aim of Handmade or BSC should be to change the software industry at large. It should be to create financial independence for the handful of people who really need to make Better Software to live with themselves.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Those redditors complaining about how "samey" everyone allegedly is are precisely the kinds of people you _don't_ want in your organization, team, or company. They inevitably will eat away at the core mission statement and goals of the organization, attempt to lodge themselves in key positions, and ideologically capture it. We've seen this happen at 37Signals and DHH wisely cleaned house, just as one example.
As a native Hawaiian myself I find it infantilizing and disingenuous that these people virtue-signal so much to care about "minorities". If anything, watching the BSC talks really expanded my awareness of what I had assumed or thought to have known and allowed me to update my paradigm (or throw it away and start from first principles!). This is the sort of excellence-seeking that should encourage and inspire others to git gud and grind out the work to literally build better software.
But if you were to just tell people like me that "no babe you're doing fine, you're not invited to their evil creepy white-man club because they subconsciously hate you for who you are, not based on your behavior or quality of work" you're lying for one thing, but also you're stunting their growth and preventing them from excelling at all! "I'm fine, everyone else is the problem".
And no amount of logic will work on these people. If they weren't logic'd into it, they won't be logic'd out of it. They're just avatars of an ideology, which if anything makes them more pitiable than the faux-pity they claim to have on other groups of people.
May you guys keep up the excellent work! I still gotta get through a lot of the talks, and they've all been quite illuminating! Cheers!
Curated conferences with homogeneous perspectives can be powerful and certainly comfortable, but it also leaves you vulnerable to blindspots. And I think the strength of Handmade Network is that it challenged the dominating consensus. So be careful to not just create a new consensus, because the best cure to blindspots is diversity and inclusion of perspectives, the very thing you credit as an issue.
The "people are not fungible" point is something I finally put into words in 2016. The company I was working for was purchased by a venture cap and was getting parted out. They were closing my site and moving all operations to the primary site, with the intent of hiring new grads to staff any positions needed.
I do not disagree with what you wrote, but the publication of the conference was... incomplete to put it kindly. I signed up on the newsletter, but did not receive any email, the bsc x (twitter) account didn't post anything till may 31, and the invite-only thing was quietly patched into the website months later since the original site version.
Thank you for your interesting talks, but the organizers certainly did not help make a good image for the conference.
As time goes on I've noticed myself also adopting a similar principle of exclusivity. I.e. there is some "spirit" of a goal I wish to accomplish, and my priority at that point is surrounding myself with like minded individuals to share that charter with.
If you've got more content along these lines, like learning how to identify individuals most likely to contribute greatly to the craft, or organizing meetups/events in a way that doesn't inhibit individuals participating, etc, that'd be great to hear.
Learning to deal with people properly feels like the final frontier for most engineers like myself.
It's really common for people to complain about gate keeping--except when they're the customer. Taylor swift gate keeps her stages from the kareoke bar singers and her concerts are better off for it. Likewise, the cockpit of the planes I fly on are rigorously gatekept. It's a good thing that the death cult of inclusiveness is finally falling out of fashion. I'm glad to have benefitted from the BSC, and really appreciate it being put out for free!
Holy dooly. What an awesome post. "People are not fungible" - I'm going to start using that one.
"This phenomenon is driven by an organization’s age, and it seems to necessarily flow in one direction—towards the preference of growth, at the cost of exclusivity and cultural preservation. It’s unsurprising that companies, specifically, exhibit this effect—and ultimately regress towards the mean—because it reduces risk, and doesn’t immediately compromise profit. The longer a company is alive, the more incentive there will be to stop betting on the initial “magic” which made the company function to begin with (since it’ll inevitably die out regardless)."
Wow, I know of a major old organisation going through this right now.
Thanks for the wonderful post Ryan. We should treasure and protect the spirit and the culture of craftsmanship and we can’t ignore the fact that it requires conscious effort and selectivity. Without it, the quality just degrades and I have witnessed it many times in various places.
Great post. Surprised that there was so much backlash against the exclusivity of it given that the results were high quality talks. You can be sad you didn’t get to go while also enjoying and appreciating the content.
It’s sad to see that the immediate response to exclusivity was bashing it for not being open. E.g. when I saw it was going to be invite only, I was struck with FOMO, because it sounds cool to attend. But I asked myself the fairly obvious “well what would you present on or contribute outside of a talk?” - the answer is “probably nothing…”. The fairly obvious action to take is work on something high-quality / innovative and share it!
This is a great post, enough to make me subscribe.
It reminds me of a quote from the book "Darkness at Noon" where the writer describes how organisations have chosen self-preservation at the expense of their ideals and what they believe in.
"Gletkin justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved. But what did it look like inside? No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete. The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world."
Indeed, growth is desirable until you reach the point where growth becomes cancer and maturity[1] is what's needed. It should be no revelation as it is true in our own lives as well. Addiction to growth is common, particularly with powerful people.
I wish you'd be right that the source of the problem is culture, but unfortunately I think it looks much more like a growing power distribution problem. The growth addicted 'noobs' are taking over, and I don't think it solves the root problem that a new wave of disciplined elites fight for quality at maturity in pockets of our industry. But it is a great and welcomed endeavor nevertheless.
Also, while I agree that careful curation is powerful and has benefits in worker settings, such as the ones shared here, let's not forget that exclusivity has legitimate trade-offs just like inclusion does. For one, demagogues, autocrats, and other false prophets reign in an exclusivity-dominated world - and that leads far away from well-being for broad humanity.
Inclusion is not predominately about watering down power, it is about a fundamental social need that we all have, and it's also about minimizing injustices from cognitive biases[2], logical fallacies[3] and losing touch with important stakeholders. However, the power distribution today is already very extreme and growing[4][5], so if I were you I'd be very careful dismissing the need for redistribution. Not between elite workers and underprivileged 'noob' workers, but between workers (who need to work for a living) and plutocrats (who don't need to for many generations).
This elite community understands orders of magnitude better than most, so don't forget that knowledge when examining power distribution.
Inclusion can also just mean putting effort into finding quality people who are commonly ruled out on prejudice of the times. And publicly sharing the conference is also a form of inclusion.
Last but not least, inclusion combats homophily blindspots, i.e. mistakes made from only being subject to people with a similar background and perspective as your own. Like the famous incident of the US army falsely determining to armor all the places surviving planes had been shot during WW2, and not the places that were actually needed[6]
Thus, inclusion is not the enemy of quality, just like curation and merit isn't its direct opposition.
Redistributing goods from "plutocrats who don't need to work for many generations" to the working class is, simply put, a misunderstanding of economics and human behavior.
If put into practice, it would be government sanctioned theft. If wealthy people can't trust their own government to protect their wealth, you will see widespread capital flight out of that country. Rich people will leave the USA and go to places like Singapore where they feel the government is more on their side and will respect their private property rights.
The result? Many employers leave the USA and the jobs the workers held disappear. Now you have neither workers nor plutocrats, just a massive drop in everyone's standard of living. You also have a corrupt government that steals from its own population on a whim.
Anyone who respects their own freedom and property rights will have left the country the moment this happened, so you will also have a brain drain.
It doesn't work. Never will. You won't be taken seriously the moment you bring it up.
At risk of being off topic, I’ll add that centralized redistribution isn’t the only way to balance power between worker and so-called plutocrats. A better way, in my opinion, is workers freely associating / organizing, democratically deciding what their demands are of their bosses, and then collectively bargaining for those demands to be met. A central government need only protect the rights of the worker to organize.
That's an option, although my concern with unions is the way they tend to create more bureaucratic structures. Once you organize, you have to hire a mob boss to act as the go-between your union and the boss you're negotiating with, and you have to pay him to do that. It usually results in lower wages for the unionized labor than if they had never organized and simply followed economic incentives out of their current line of work.
In software, more entrepreneurship is possible because the fixed costs of starting a business are lower, although not everyone has the stomach for that.
I took the financial independence into entrepreneurship route because it was the only practical thing I could do that didn't involve fighting a battle I figured I couldn't win.
Even if you unionize and "win," you're still creating an antagonistic dynamic between you and your employers, which is a pyrrhic victory. What if you want to build a business later and need venture capital? Who will you go to if you burned your bridges?
Federal taxation -> increased public goods and wages -> high marginal propensity to consume, high economic circulation, and more buyers for small business goods and services
Oligopoly/brand/financial markup[1] -> low marginal propensity to consume, increased asset prices, low economic circulation, and lower wages
Capital flight:
High income workers can work anywhere, but they are not the plutocrats in question. Plutocrats are $100M+ asset owners, who get most of their income from assets. If you own $100M worth of US assets, your income comes from rent and profits predominantly from the work of US citizens, no matter where you live in the world. Their source of income is very immobile. And plutocrats typically don't want to move[2], since being wealthy means you can afford to do whatever you want, and the wealthiest own generational estates that they have no interest in parting with.
The main reason to progressively tax assets of plutocrats is to prevent workers from losing their assets to the exponential passive incomes of plutocrats. That was also the purpose of the New Deal[3] and the Keynesian economic model, and the main reason the US economy did so well in the decades after WW2.
[1] pricing above the profit margin sufficient to motivate a trade
I fail to see how other people getting wealthy (a.k.a. the exponential passive income of plutocrats) reduces the standards of living of other people in the same economic system, which is the point you're going to have to argue here.
Let's say I own $1,000 in shares of Apple and some plutocrat owns $1 billion in shares of Apple. Tomorrow, they release a new iPhone and the stock goes up 20%. I now have $1,200 and "evil" rich dude has $1.2 billion. We both own assets. His gaining of wealth coincided with my gaining of wealth. It did not prevent it.
If you're talking about inflation, it's a similar story. Inflation is just the price of everything going up, including the price of labor, which will be reflected in working peoples' wages. We don't want too much inflation, but a small amount is necessary to keep people spending.
There are other more subtle points to made like, "have you noticed there are no starter homes?" so people can't acquire the necessary assets to get their lives going early on, but that's a different discussion. It has nothing to do with my above point.
Your thought experiment does not capture the problem. Global asset valuations depend on supply and demand. And asset demand does indeed rise when the global share of wealth is created, but asset prices rise faster than wealth creation. A symptom of this is that asset prices has consistently outgrown GDP in the last half century. And that increased share of profits by capital owners (and decreased share for workers) is the concern in question.
It results in an upward redistribution of the wealth share. Which especially affects housing and property affordability.
Moreover, your example implies everyone can benefit from owning assets in today's economy. But if you're in the bottom 50% of adults (who averaged between -2% to 2% of the total share of wealth[1] in the last two decades), even 40 years of asset investing is unlikely to make a meaningful contribution to your wealth, if any, especially with the cost of retirement (and/or cost of bad health in countries without universal healthcare).
That means that you never see any gains if your salary is stagnant (as it mostly has been in the US), if you cannot afford assets. And effectively means that work/merit is rewarded less than inheritance.
Being a high quality worker means we've been exempt from that undesirable fate for now, but the trend is growing, and plutocrats are spending their increased wealth share on arguably undesirable efforts like hyperscaling AI, SaaS, and increasing switching costs. And AI is specifically also a tech that has shown potential to delude programmers into thinking they're replaceable[2], suppressing our wages like other industries. And if we wait to take action until we can neither afford a simple life anymore, then the rest of society will likely have little sympathy for us after all the decades we ignored (or even scapegoated) them.
I think I’ve done about as much as I can here. I can at least clarify where we differ.
In simple terms, I want to make this a conversation about peoples’ standard of living, and you want to make this a conversation about wealth inequality.
I concede that wealth inequality has increased, but I differ in the respect that I don’t believe the U.S.A. has an unsustainable amount of wealth inequality. I also believe we don’t measure wealth inequality accurately because the statistics use pre-tax income as the measure, not what’s left over after taxes.
In the U.S.A., we have a progressive tax system that takes less from those who make less and more from those who make more, but our statistics don’t measure that. We also redistribute tax revenue back into the population via government programs, which again are not accounted for in the statistics.
I don’t believe wealth inequality is a problem unto itself. It’s a consequence of having a free society. I think you can agree that it’s impossible to create a society where everyone has exactly the same amount of material wealth, so some inequality is inevitable.
If you don’t want the conversation to be about material prosperity and standard of living increases, then I don’t think there is much of a conversation to be had here.
It is true that income inequality is measured in national income. But wealth is not income, it is instead synonymous to net worth (albeit also strongly correlated to passive income inequality).
Also, the US does have a progressive income tax, but not a progressive tax overall (including consumption tax, payroll tax, estate tax, corporate taxes, property taxes and income taxes). And while the tax rate is high on high salary earners, the lowest tax rate falls on the wealthiest[1], even including the poorest.
I do not agree that it is a desirable goal that everyone has the same material wealth. But it is certainly undesirable that wealth inequality is growing, and ideally I think the inequality should be big enough to reward innovation and hard work, but not so big that it makes a humble life unaffordable e.g. for disabled, creative or nurturing people, but I don't think my current perception of ideals are important in our discussion.
As for examples of wealthy countries with less wealth inequality, you needn't look elsewhere than the US half a century ago. That happened because it was fought for, and I would not be surprised if it will be fought for again once sufficient catastrophe happens, similarly to New Deal. But we'll see.
As for standard of living, there's plenty of statistics that demonstrate that it is fairly low compared to some less wealthy countries. E.g. LISEP demonstrates that 60% of Americans cannot afford a Minimum Quality of Life[2], i.e. basic necessities (including healthcare premiums) plus education, celebratory dinners (e.g. birthdays), sport, toys and leisure activities. Another example is United Way's ALICE program which has determined that 29%[3] of US citizens are one emergency away from poverty, and 11%[4] who already live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau.
Regardless of the disagreement about definitions and groupings, it still is very serious that such a huge portion of people in the wealthiest country of Earth cannot make ends meet - especially when it had virtually no trouble providing prosperity for virtually everyone half a century ago, when it was also the richest country.
If you consider inequality a consequence of freedom, does that also effectively mean you did not consider the US free half a century ago? And would your family that have lived those generations agree with you?
Excellent post. As a young programmer I often got the impression that "gate-keeping" is a rather bad thing (and it *can* be bad in many circumstances). But experience taught me over the years: If you care about something, be very selective about whom you give influence over it. Once I learned that I also decided that there is not point in trying to "grow" my software company (which I tried at first), but to stay small, efficient and close to the craft.
As a side question: What or how are people generally invited (for attendance) to the conference? Is it possible for somebody to attend without having personal connections to other attendees?
While personal connections sure would help, remember what was said about these people being strangers to each other. To get invited you must create something that earns you it.
"But for someone who is primarily concerned with craft, or the creation of beauty, and would rather financial gain and influence come as second order effects of that, this lust for power is detrimental to their whole purpose. [...] This is why careful selection of people is critical, and this is why it works."
I think this is an excellent summary of what we (as craftsmen) should be striving for.
It always comes back to virtue ethics in the end doesn't it :-)
This made me reflect on the various ways I have pursued "power" in my own life. I realize that I can't execute my own vision for Better Software without some amount of power. I need financial independence to carve out a meaningful block in my schedule and make software my way. I've always argued in favor of more entrepreneurship from people in Handmade Network because, practically speaking, money buys you that freedom.
It sucks to be in a position where you know you need to change your career, but you lack the power to do so and are more or less "stuck" working as a web developer until you hit retirement age. That situation will burn out people who have higher ideals for what software should be.
But perhaps where I differ with some is the means by which one acquires this relatively small amount of power, financial independence. I don't think you get there by growing a community and charging an entrance fee. Like you said, it dilutes the community and wrecks the original stated goal.
Products and businesses are a much better path, but I could also see a creeping interest in expanding the market for a product and potentially wrecking the stated vision that way too.
I think the reason we all have such admiration for Jonathan Blow is the fact that he somehow managed to do what most of us cannot. His team does work they believe in, on their own terms, and they make more than enough money to cover the expenses. It might not be a flashy existence, but you're well fed and don't have any identity friction eating at you.
We want something like that, something like being the studio that made Factorio. You let few people into your core working group, but you're okay with the consumer end product having more of a mass appeal. The product isn't entrance into the club. It's something useful to civilization, something well-built where you control the variables.
I don't think the stated aim of Handmade or BSC should be to change the software industry at large. It should be to create financial independence for the handful of people who really need to make Better Software to live with themselves.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Those redditors complaining about how "samey" everyone allegedly is are precisely the kinds of people you _don't_ want in your organization, team, or company. They inevitably will eat away at the core mission statement and goals of the organization, attempt to lodge themselves in key positions, and ideologically capture it. We've seen this happen at 37Signals and DHH wisely cleaned house, just as one example.
As a native Hawaiian myself I find it infantilizing and disingenuous that these people virtue-signal so much to care about "minorities". If anything, watching the BSC talks really expanded my awareness of what I had assumed or thought to have known and allowed me to update my paradigm (or throw it away and start from first principles!). This is the sort of excellence-seeking that should encourage and inspire others to git gud and grind out the work to literally build better software.
But if you were to just tell people like me that "no babe you're doing fine, you're not invited to their evil creepy white-man club because they subconsciously hate you for who you are, not based on your behavior or quality of work" you're lying for one thing, but also you're stunting their growth and preventing them from excelling at all! "I'm fine, everyone else is the problem".
And no amount of logic will work on these people. If they weren't logic'd into it, they won't be logic'd out of it. They're just avatars of an ideology, which if anything makes them more pitiable than the faux-pity they claim to have on other groups of people.
May you guys keep up the excellent work! I still gotta get through a lot of the talks, and they've all been quite illuminating! Cheers!
Curated conferences with homogeneous perspectives can be powerful and certainly comfortable, but it also leaves you vulnerable to blindspots. And I think the strength of Handmade Network is that it challenged the dominating consensus. So be careful to not just create a new consensus, because the best cure to blindspots is diversity and inclusion of perspectives, the very thing you credit as an issue.
The "people are not fungible" point is something I finally put into words in 2016. The company I was working for was purchased by a venture cap and was getting parted out. They were closing my site and moving all operations to the primary site, with the intent of hiring new grads to staff any positions needed.
I do not disagree with what you wrote, but the publication of the conference was... incomplete to put it kindly. I signed up on the newsletter, but did not receive any email, the bsc x (twitter) account didn't post anything till may 31, and the invite-only thing was quietly patched into the website months later since the original site version.
Thank you for your interesting talks, but the organizers certainly did not help make a good image for the conference.
As time goes on I've noticed myself also adopting a similar principle of exclusivity. I.e. there is some "spirit" of a goal I wish to accomplish, and my priority at that point is surrounding myself with like minded individuals to share that charter with.
If you've got more content along these lines, like learning how to identify individuals most likely to contribute greatly to the craft, or organizing meetups/events in a way that doesn't inhibit individuals participating, etc, that'd be great to hear.
Learning to deal with people properly feels like the final frontier for most engineers like myself.
It's really common for people to complain about gate keeping--except when they're the customer. Taylor swift gate keeps her stages from the kareoke bar singers and her concerts are better off for it. Likewise, the cockpit of the planes I fly on are rigorously gatekept. It's a good thing that the death cult of inclusiveness is finally falling out of fashion. I'm glad to have benefitted from the BSC, and really appreciate it being put out for free!
How does one get invited? I'm assuming one needs to prove themselves in a software they wrote?
Holy dooly. What an awesome post. "People are not fungible" - I'm going to start using that one.
"This phenomenon is driven by an organization’s age, and it seems to necessarily flow in one direction—towards the preference of growth, at the cost of exclusivity and cultural preservation. It’s unsurprising that companies, specifically, exhibit this effect—and ultimately regress towards the mean—because it reduces risk, and doesn’t immediately compromise profit. The longer a company is alive, the more incentive there will be to stop betting on the initial “magic” which made the company function to begin with (since it’ll inevitably die out regardless)."
Wow, I know of a major old organisation going through this right now.
You may have heard of it.
The UK.
Thanks for the wonderful post Ryan. We should treasure and protect the spirit and the culture of craftsmanship and we can’t ignore the fact that it requires conscious effort and selectivity. Without it, the quality just degrades and I have witnessed it many times in various places.
Loved this Ryan, great post!
Great post. Surprised that there was so much backlash against the exclusivity of it given that the results were high quality talks. You can be sad you didn’t get to go while also enjoying and appreciating the content.
It’s sad to see that the immediate response to exclusivity was bashing it for not being open. E.g. when I saw it was going to be invite only, I was struck with FOMO, because it sounds cool to attend. But I asked myself the fairly obvious “well what would you present on or contribute outside of a talk?” - the answer is “probably nothing…”. The fairly obvious action to take is work on something high-quality / innovative and share it!
This is a great post, enough to make me subscribe.
It reminds me of a quote from the book "Darkness at Noon" where the writer describes how organisations have chosen self-preservation at the expense of their ideals and what they believe in.
"Gletkin justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved. But what did it look like inside? No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete. The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world."
Indeed, growth is desirable until you reach the point where growth becomes cancer and maturity[1] is what's needed. It should be no revelation as it is true in our own lives as well. Addiction to growth is common, particularly with powerful people.
I wish you'd be right that the source of the problem is culture, but unfortunately I think it looks much more like a growing power distribution problem. The growth addicted 'noobs' are taking over, and I don't think it solves the root problem that a new wave of disciplined elites fight for quality at maturity in pockets of our industry. But it is a great and welcomed endeavor nevertheless.
Also, while I agree that careful curation is powerful and has benefits in worker settings, such as the ones shared here, let's not forget that exclusivity has legitimate trade-offs just like inclusion does. For one, demagogues, autocrats, and other false prophets reign in an exclusivity-dominated world - and that leads far away from well-being for broad humanity.
Inclusion is not predominately about watering down power, it is about a fundamental social need that we all have, and it's also about minimizing injustices from cognitive biases[2], logical fallacies[3] and losing touch with important stakeholders. However, the power distribution today is already very extreme and growing[4][5], so if I were you I'd be very careful dismissing the need for redistribution. Not between elite workers and underprivileged 'noob' workers, but between workers (who need to work for a living) and plutocrats (who don't need to for many generations).
This elite community understands orders of magnitude better than most, so don't forget that knowledge when examining power distribution.
Inclusion can also just mean putting effort into finding quality people who are commonly ruled out on prejudice of the times. And publicly sharing the conference is also a form of inclusion.
Last but not least, inclusion combats homophily blindspots, i.e. mistakes made from only being subject to people with a similar background and perspective as your own. Like the famous incident of the US army falsely determining to armor all the places surviving planes had been shot during WW2, and not the places that were actually needed[6]
Thus, inclusion is not the enemy of quality, just like curation and merit isn't its direct opposition.
[1] https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
[2] https://yourbias.is/
[3] https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
[4] https://wid.world/share/#0/countrytimeseries/sptinc_p0p50_z;sptinc_p50p90_992_j;sptinc_p90p99.999_992_j;sptinc_p99.999p100_992_j/US/2015/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/0/60/curve/false
[5] https://wid.world/share/#0/countrytimeseries/shweal_p50p90_z;shweal_p0p50_992_j;shweal_p90p99.999_992_j;shweal_p99.999p100_992_j/US/2015/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/-6.142/100/curve/false
[6] https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/abraham-wald-survivor-bias-ww2/
Redistributing goods from "plutocrats who don't need to work for many generations" to the working class is, simply put, a misunderstanding of economics and human behavior.
If put into practice, it would be government sanctioned theft. If wealthy people can't trust their own government to protect their wealth, you will see widespread capital flight out of that country. Rich people will leave the USA and go to places like Singapore where they feel the government is more on their side and will respect their private property rights.
The result? Many employers leave the USA and the jobs the workers held disappear. Now you have neither workers nor plutocrats, just a massive drop in everyone's standard of living. You also have a corrupt government that steals from its own population on a whim.
Anyone who respects their own freedom and property rights will have left the country the moment this happened, so you will also have a brain drain.
It doesn't work. Never will. You won't be taken seriously the moment you bring it up.
At risk of being off topic, I’ll add that centralized redistribution isn’t the only way to balance power between worker and so-called plutocrats. A better way, in my opinion, is workers freely associating / organizing, democratically deciding what their demands are of their bosses, and then collectively bargaining for those demands to be met. A central government need only protect the rights of the worker to organize.
That's an option, although my concern with unions is the way they tend to create more bureaucratic structures. Once you organize, you have to hire a mob boss to act as the go-between your union and the boss you're negotiating with, and you have to pay him to do that. It usually results in lower wages for the unionized labor than if they had never organized and simply followed economic incentives out of their current line of work.
In software, more entrepreneurship is possible because the fixed costs of starting a business are lower, although not everyone has the stomach for that.
I took the financial independence into entrepreneurship route because it was the only practical thing I could do that didn't involve fighting a battle I figured I couldn't win.
Even if you unionize and "win," you're still creating an antagonistic dynamic between you and your employers, which is a pyrrhic victory. What if you want to build a business later and need venture capital? Who will you go to if you burned your bridges?
Redistribution:
Federal taxation -> increased public goods and wages -> high marginal propensity to consume, high economic circulation, and more buyers for small business goods and services
Oligopoly/brand/financial markup[1] -> low marginal propensity to consume, increased asset prices, low economic circulation, and lower wages
Capital flight:
High income workers can work anywhere, but they are not the plutocrats in question. Plutocrats are $100M+ asset owners, who get most of their income from assets. If you own $100M worth of US assets, your income comes from rent and profits predominantly from the work of US citizens, no matter where you live in the world. Their source of income is very immobile. And plutocrats typically don't want to move[2], since being wealthy means you can afford to do whatever you want, and the wealthiest own generational estates that they have no interest in parting with.
The main reason to progressively tax assets of plutocrats is to prevent workers from losing their assets to the exponential passive incomes of plutocrats. That was also the purpose of the New Deal[3] and the Keynesian economic model, and the main reason the US economy did so well in the decades after WW2.
[1] pricing above the profit margin sufficient to motivate a trade
[2] Multi-millionaire Morris Pearl on why he will never leave with higher taxation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCLyoXT7CQ
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
I fail to see how other people getting wealthy (a.k.a. the exponential passive income of plutocrats) reduces the standards of living of other people in the same economic system, which is the point you're going to have to argue here.
Let's say I own $1,000 in shares of Apple and some plutocrat owns $1 billion in shares of Apple. Tomorrow, they release a new iPhone and the stock goes up 20%. I now have $1,200 and "evil" rich dude has $1.2 billion. We both own assets. His gaining of wealth coincided with my gaining of wealth. It did not prevent it.
If you're talking about inflation, it's a similar story. Inflation is just the price of everything going up, including the price of labor, which will be reflected in working peoples' wages. We don't want too much inflation, but a small amount is necessary to keep people spending.
There are other more subtle points to made like, "have you noticed there are no starter homes?" so people can't acquire the necessary assets to get their lives going early on, but that's a different discussion. It has nothing to do with my above point.
Your thought experiment does not capture the problem. Global asset valuations depend on supply and demand. And asset demand does indeed rise when the global share of wealth is created, but asset prices rise faster than wealth creation. A symptom of this is that asset prices has consistently outgrown GDP in the last half century. And that increased share of profits by capital owners (and decreased share for workers) is the concern in question.
It results in an upward redistribution of the wealth share. Which especially affects housing and property affordability.
Moreover, your example implies everyone can benefit from owning assets in today's economy. But if you're in the bottom 50% of adults (who averaged between -2% to 2% of the total share of wealth[1] in the last two decades), even 40 years of asset investing is unlikely to make a meaningful contribution to your wealth, if any, especially with the cost of retirement (and/or cost of bad health in countries without universal healthcare).
That means that you never see any gains if your salary is stagnant (as it mostly has been in the US), if you cannot afford assets. And effectively means that work/merit is rewarded less than inheritance.
Being a high quality worker means we've been exempt from that undesirable fate for now, but the trend is growing, and plutocrats are spending their increased wealth share on arguably undesirable efforts like hyperscaling AI, SaaS, and increasing switching costs. And AI is specifically also a tech that has shown potential to delude programmers into thinking they're replaceable[2], suppressing our wages like other industries. And if we wait to take action until we can neither afford a simple life anymore, then the rest of society will likely have little sympathy for us after all the decades we ignored (or even scapegoated) them.
[1] https://wid.world/share/#0/countrytimeseries/shweal_p0p50_z/US/2015/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/-2.114/5/curve/false/1820/2024
[2] https://hrexecutive.com/the-ai-layoff-trap-why-half-will-be-quietly-rehired/
I think I’ve done about as much as I can here. I can at least clarify where we differ.
In simple terms, I want to make this a conversation about peoples’ standard of living, and you want to make this a conversation about wealth inequality.
I concede that wealth inequality has increased, but I differ in the respect that I don’t believe the U.S.A. has an unsustainable amount of wealth inequality. I also believe we don’t measure wealth inequality accurately because the statistics use pre-tax income as the measure, not what’s left over after taxes.
In the U.S.A., we have a progressive tax system that takes less from those who make less and more from those who make more, but our statistics don’t measure that. We also redistribute tax revenue back into the population via government programs, which again are not accounted for in the statistics.
I don’t believe wealth inequality is a problem unto itself. It’s a consequence of having a free society. I think you can agree that it’s impossible to create a society where everyone has exactly the same amount of material wealth, so some inequality is inevitable.
If you don’t want the conversation to be about material prosperity and standard of living increases, then I don’t think there is much of a conversation to be had here.
It is true that income inequality is measured in national income. But wealth is not income, it is instead synonymous to net worth (albeit also strongly correlated to passive income inequality).
Also, the US does have a progressive income tax, but not a progressive tax overall (including consumption tax, payroll tax, estate tax, corporate taxes, property taxes and income taxes). And while the tax rate is high on high salary earners, the lowest tax rate falls on the wealthiest[1], even including the poorest.
I do not agree that it is a desirable goal that everyone has the same material wealth. But it is certainly undesirable that wealth inequality is growing, and ideally I think the inequality should be big enough to reward innovation and hard work, but not so big that it makes a humble life unaffordable e.g. for disabled, creative or nurturing people, but I don't think my current perception of ideals are important in our discussion.
As for examples of wealthy countries with less wealth inequality, you needn't look elsewhere than the US half a century ago. That happened because it was fought for, and I would not be surprised if it will be fought for again once sufficient catastrophe happens, similarly to New Deal. But we'll see.
As for standard of living, there's plenty of statistics that demonstrate that it is fairly low compared to some less wealthy countries. E.g. LISEP demonstrates that 60% of Americans cannot afford a Minimum Quality of Life[2], i.e. basic necessities (including healthcare premiums) plus education, celebratory dinners (e.g. birthdays), sport, toys and leisure activities. Another example is United Way's ALICE program which has determined that 29%[3] of US citizens are one emergency away from poverty, and 11%[4] who already live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau.
Regardless of the disagreement about definitions and groupings, it still is very serious that such a huge portion of people in the wealthiest country of Earth cannot make ends meet - especially when it had virtually no trouble providing prosperity for virtually everyone half a century ago, when it was also the richest country.
If you consider inequality a consequence of freedom, does that also effectively mean you did not consider the US free half a century ago? And would your family that have lived those generations agree with you?
[1] https://taxjusticenow.org/
[2] https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63ba0d84fe573c7513595d6e/68212db8d973842c02dcd1eb_MQL%20Methodology.pdf
[3] https://www.unitedforalice.org/national-overview
[4] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-month.html