Does that mean Walter White is the Ultimate Startup CEO? A man so driven by his ego that he puts his entire family in mortal danger, blackmails former business partners, alienates his co-founder and ends up dying alone as a result of his own hubris?
If you haven't seen Breaking Bad then you really need to avoid any discussion topics about it. The ending has been widely discussed pretty much everywhere (including other places in this discussion, though comically not in the article itself)
Now how about something about their relationship with the venture capitalist, Gustavo Fring? The efforts they had to go to in order to convince him that they were personally trustworthy, his nefarious plans to steal their IP and put them out of business, etc?
I would actually contrast Fring, the bootstrapper, with Heisenberg, the VC-funded startup. It's clear in the fifth season that Fring had slow growth and scaled his operations gradually, while the newcomers just keep throwing money at the problems. They were agile, but they had very little runway, and they had to keep raising rounds (from Tuco, then Fring) to keep the lights on.
Actually, it seems like Fring's bootstrapped company acqui-hires Heisenberg's, but he's not content to be a manager or COO. It's kind of like how Monty sold out to Sun, only to turn around and build the same project again. Only he didn't blow anyone up, which may have been a big misstep.
Fring acqui-hired Walt. He built a business for distribution and sales, then acquired the competing company for their brand and talent. (Fring ostensibly had a cook pre-walt, but it's never addressed). He gave Walt a salary instead of ownership. He saw that Walt was a bad cultural fit, and intended to replace him with Gale. Once Fring was gone, Walt and Jesse went back into business, selling their product to Declan, who only had a distribution and sales organization, and, unlike Fring, was not focused on vertical integration.
The metaphor doesn't work around equity, non-competes, etc., unless you know a start-up that uses violence instead of legal documents and arbitration.
Fring's cook pre-Walt was Gale. When Gale saw the quality of Walt's cook he told Fring there was no way they could compete with that level of expertise.
At risk of derailing the original article, this is a really interesting point. Both Breaking Bad and Mad Men are shows that go at lengths to depict how flawed, unhappy, and usually outright immoral their protagonists are, but both Walter White and Don Draper are the target of a lot of escapist fantasies. (Try searching on Twitter for #TeamWalt.)
It reminds me of this essay, on Breaking Bad and culture:
"But despite these cautionary endings, they don’t sell Scarface and Godfather t-shirts at every tourist shop in Manhattan because people like to remind themselves about the dangers of hubris. Stories and the characters in them are more than lessons, and a narrative’s most ideologically weighty elements don’t map onto a seventh grade worksheet about major themes. Long after we’re done watching we hold moments with us: shot angles and character dynamics, snippets of dialog and unquestioned premises. The point of critically examining cultural objects like Breaking Bad isn’t to place them in categories good or bad, to predict the ending, or even to decode what’s “really” happening; the point is to pay attention to our attention, to look at how it’s being held, on what, and how someone’s making money on it. If pop criticism is to be good for anything, it’s that."
> Lessons you "learn" from fiction tend to be unreliable.
That's true from lessons learned from fact, too, as they are more often than not drawn from non-representative, skewed samples of facts, which are each individually true in isolation, but nevertheless support faulty lessons.
Good lessons -- drawn originally from systematic, careful study of fact -- OTOH, are often illustrated with carefully constructed fiction from which more people learn them from than do directly from the facts.
Keep in mind that BB is ultimately a fiction. The bad traits WW poses does not necessary means if you follow that path you will do exactly the same bad things.
I see this story as cautionary tale for underdogs to not try to break free out of grips of existing "natural" state. Try and pay for the consequences. Just get second job and try to be happy
While there is some overlap in terms of the mechanics, I would personally refrain from taking this analogy too far. The point behind capitalism is the assumption that people are motivated by money but that the profit motive can be channeled toward ultimately being good for the public. Walt and Jesse's meth empire caused tons of addictions, murders/deaths (both on and off-screen), broke up families, required dishonesty at multiple levels, and was ultimately motivated by ego more than money. Some characters (Gale) also tried to rationalize the damage their product was doing to the world with flimsy arguments about "consenting adults wanting what they want" when each contributor made the choice to get into a business with horrifying societal consequences.
Capitalism has holes in it, and it's up to everyone to make sure they are doing things that are good for the world.
Saying capitalism has a moral component is like saying thermodynamics has a moral component.
Sadly, confusing beauty with morality has been a failing of Western thought since at least Aristotle. Just because capitalism is elegant doesn't mean it's "good" in a moral sense (or "evil" in a moral sense either).
I suspect that we agree more than disagree. What I meant was that we implement capitalism to generally get abundance of things like food and medicine that we consider good for society (to the point of calling them "goods"), but that individuals need to constantly examine and take responsibility for the morality of their actions under the system.
I don't think we "implement" capitalism. It just happens, like thermodynamics. The most brutal communist systems of the 20th century had thriving black markets. In America, we ban drugs, and marijuana becomes the biggest cash crop in several states. Capitalism happens as long as two parties can barter in a satisfactory way.
That's why I react so negatively to associating capitalism with morality. It beocmes an excuse.
Capitalism and markets are not the same thing. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned. A market is just any exchange of goods between buyers and sellers.
My understanding of Adam Smith would have him strongly disagree with you that there is a moral component, however his definition of morality may differ from yours.
> The point behind capitalism is the assumption that people are motivated by money but that the profit motive can be channeled toward ultimately being good for the public.
Uh... who makes this assumption? As far as I know, no economist has ever assumed capitalism was for the "commmon good". The problem with even mentioning the "common good" is that it's subjective. It's sounds great in theory, but exactly who decides what's "good" for everyone else?
imho, Laissez-Faire is like Democracy, except people vote with dollars. So the whole "adults will be adults" idea is actually more accurate.
Milton Friedman asserts in Capitalism and Freedom that capitalism results in increased product made possible by division of labor and specialization of function, and then goes on to say that freedom itself relies on capitalist society.
There's also Ayn Rand's money speech, where Francisco d'Anconia says, "And when men live by trade -- with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"
When I said "good," I meant in terms of freedom, quality of products, and diversity of products. I know those are vague terms as well, but I don't think there's much benefit to going any further into it than that.
But when you say "freedom", I guess that doesn't include "the freedom to buy and sell meth"? To clarify my position:
* I agree that specialization increases productivity.
* I agree increased productivity is good.
* I agree meth is bad.
* I agree people have moral obligations to society.
* I agree ethics should influence macroeconomic policy.
* I don't see how Capitalism (an economic system) imposes (in top-down fashion) a moral obligation on what a company can and can't sell. My issue is one of scope resolution.
I think you're confusing "good" with "demand". Per pg, Capitalism tries to supply people with what they want. But what people want isn't always the best for them. E.g. I ate a doughnut the other day. Given I could have eaten a healthier yet equally tasty apple, eating the doughnut probably wasn't the best possible decision. But I wanted it, so I ate it. When I ate that doughnut, not once did I think "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't eat it." Nor do I imagine that Dunking Donuts ever thought "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't sell it."
A subsequent comment of yours suggests you didn't intend to imply an intrinsic between capitalism and the common good. But the way you originally framed your sentence strongly suggests otherwise.
Actually capitalism has no point. It's just the natural system free and selfishly motivated societies develop overtime--it needs regulation to ensure that the utility produced is allocated towards the common good
actually, capitalism is an idealised philosophy which is easy to follow. its not especially natural as the development of society up until the popularisation of capitalist philosophy will show.
some of what we do now under capitalism is quite considerably worse than anything that came before... specifically around the treatment of unemployed, homeless and 'bottom end of the spectrum' type people where we actively harass them and stop them from surviving because... well i don't really understand that particular desire for blind law and order to the letter, so i don't know.
unemployment was never a real problem until capitalist economy became the norm. a lot of the thinkers of the time foresaw that particular change as well...
> actually, capitalism is an idealised philosophy which is easy to follow
No, its not. Its a system that evolved organically without any coherent philosophy, was criticized (and, in the process, named) by 19th Century socialists (who did have a coherent philosophy opposed to it), and since has evolved a number of different after-the-fact defenses (which often aren't even defending the same system, despite using the same name for it.)
Whenever I hear someone mention "Capitalism", there's about a 50% chance they really mean "laissez-faire" rather than "private ownership". I assume it's an artifact of the Cold War.
its probably best to simply consider it a convenient label i guess. i am not however thinking about 19th century socialists at all, even if they coined the term... it may not have had a name as such but there were people in the previous centuries who researched and promoted the philosophies. adam smith's wealth of nations comes to mind as a sort of canonical example of such work...
i'm sure it evolved organically in the sense that it happened 'naturally' but i do disagree that it is the default human position - its a recent fad. its taking natural behaviour to one extreme interpretation of it.
not being utterly self-motivated, or altruism, is a very well attested human trait and we have a lot of the vital aspects of civilisation and society as a result of that drive. the ideal of pure capitalism could utterly inhibit such things from forming at all imo...
> adam smith's wealth of nations comes to mind as a sort of canonical example of such work...
You mean, the same Wealth of Nations in which Smith urges, in government affairs, particular suspicion of the proposals of the merchant class (because their interest are not aligned with the common good) and argues that the general interest is most aligned with the interest of the landholding class, not merely reflecting, but advocating the value of the even-then fading feudal economic land-tenure structure which capitalism displaced as the capitalist class became both landholders and merchants?
Defenders of capitalism may like to quote Smith, but Smith was as much of a before-the-fact critic of capitalism (while certainly seeking change away from mercantilist protectionism) as Marx was an after-the-fact critic of it, and in many cases for similar reasons.
This ignores an incredible amount of imperialism by capitalist countries. If capitalism is so natural, why must it be forced on so many indigenous peoples?
Furthermore, appeal to nature is a fallacy. Most of human history could be viewed as us trying to do BETTER than what's natural.
I think you missed "selfishly motivated". Not all societies place emphasis on the individual. Those that do move towards capitalism; those that don't move toward communism. Obviously there are many shades of each, but indigenous societies were basically communists. They didn't believe people should be able to own the land; they lived together, used reciprocity instead of markets as the trade system.
As for why some societies are more selfish and some more communal--that's a good question. I think it comes to which religions they develop. Abrahamic religions place great emphasis on the individual whereas many polytheist and indigenous religions are the opposite.
Now as to why those religions developed, that's anyone's best guess. Probably sheer luck and climate conditions
I've seen most people declare humans are inherently selfish; if you're drawing a distinction between two, then yes, my apologies.
Capitalism came out of the industrial revolution and the process of enclosure by Britain, I'm not entirely sure that I buy it being a given, exactly, though it of course did happen.
Not only that, there were enormous amounts of risk. Although the writers had Walt and Jesse live through obscenely and overwhelmingly deadly circumstances, these types of events rarely happen. Sure, there's the one-in-a-billion Sgt. York that deftly beats impossible odds.
The real value in this particular analogy is for the author of the original article, not the reader.
How is this any different than Zuckerberg creating FB so he can get all the chicks? Startups are not created solely for money. In fact, some might argue money is just a means to an end: more or better sex
Meh, feels like a bit of a stetch. But still a better analogy then those consultants who try stretch and apply "The Art Of War" to everything in the business world.
Breaking bad had a lot to say about work in general. You have to fight for your income and to be free from enslavement by your fellow man. Also it shows the downside of being highly and uniquely skilled.
Actually that might be accurate.