
Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy - huihuiilly
https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/nan-enstad-debunking-capitalist-cowboy
======
legitster
> Duke’s true “innovation” came not in the 1880s, when the cigarette machine
> transformed the production process, but in the 1890s, when business
> corporations shed the fetters of state regulation and radically redefined
> themselves.

This article runs off of this huge premise that there was no actual
innovation, just clever and malicious rent-seeking. But do we really buy that
inventing a cigarette rolling machine didn't actually radically reduce the
cost of cigarettes?

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater - innovation is obviously an
important part of the economy. We should not confuse it with rent-seeking
behavior. Even in this case, it was a simple Patent that allowed Duke to
establish his corporate dominance.

~~~
908087
You should try reading the entire article.

> Duke was not the first to use the cigarette machine; in fact, all of the
> major producers used it by 1887.

He was not the inventor (that was James Albert Bonsack) or even the first to
use them.

~~~
legitster
Okay, sure. But the innovation wasn't a myth or illusion. Apple didn't invent
the MP3 player either.

~~~
908087
What innovation?

------
moosey
Linux is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think innovation. Not
necessarily because it is the top of class, but because of what it's
technology and licensing allowed in the rest of the world. Or, I think of NIH
and all of the medical technology that it produces.

I don't think that corporations are particularly innovative, nor can they
necessarily be, as they are actually hamstrung by the profit requirement, and
by the fact that we externalize far too much when it comes to economics: for
example, we would probably innovate far more with battery technology, nuclear
tech and renewable energy if the true ecological costs of burning fossil fuels
were born by the industry.

I simply think that true innovation arises from the scientific method, and
that we should start applying that to the administrative and management
structures that run our corporations, as I think that people in those spaces
are overpaid to guess about how to run a company. Corporate innovations that
arise primarily from marketing and a shiny exterior are anything but, and are
a dark pattern for me.

~~~
devoply
All of Google is built on Linux. Without Linux Google would not exist. Neither
would Facebook. They would all run Microsoft stack, pay Microsoft billions for
licensing... and then probably be bought by Microsoft.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
To be fair, if there was no Linux, Google/Facebook would definitely have ran
either Sun or HP boxes.

But Sun wouldn't have been bought by Oracle, which would have been nice.

------
digitaltrees
This is one of the most important articles I have read in a long time.

------
gridlockd
In this excruciatingly long and boring article we are meant to learn that
since James B. Duke gamed the regulatory system for cigarettes over a hundred
years ago, Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" is wrong.

I'll leave that standing as it is, but it's worth noting that "libertarian"
economist Schumpeter predicted the demise of capitalism in unison with the
concept of "creative destruction":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism,_Socialism_and_Demo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism,_Socialism_and_Democracy#Part_II:_Can_Capitalism_Survive)?

------
dev_dull
> _Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most
> prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not
> because of personal brilliance._

Another week, another swipe at successful people. It’s really interesting to
see academics who have never built a business, hired employees, etc deflate
and downplay the value of hard work.

How many reports like this until everybody is ready to give the wealthy a
bath? Or better yet, hand over economic independence to our loving, caring
government? Time will tell.

~~~
sedeki
What academics are you talking about?

~~~
ccleve
Way too many to list. Read the article itself, there are links and references.

Anti-free market thinking pervades academia, despite the fact that free
markets have generated an unprecedented level of material wealth. Markets
feed, cloth, and employ academics who haven't the faintest idea where the
money comes from.

No one disputes the fact that monopolies capture an undue amount of wealth.
But to launch a general attack on entrepreneurship is fatuous and offensive.
I'm sitting here are my desk living that life right now, creating a product
that, down the road, will indirectly make that smug academic wealthier. Maybe
he should spend five minutes in the business world. He might learn something.

~~~
pcstl
I like the idea that anti-free market thought pervades academia so deeply
because people who succeed in academia tend to see the modern school with its
strict hierarchical structure as the ideal model of society, missing the fact
that they only find it such because they thrived within it.

------
ergothus
Personally, I find it highly interesting that some of the major, truly
changing innovations in my field (The common architecture standard for a PC,
the internet, the web, and the various open POSIX-ish OSs, and arguably free
software/open source) all came about because normal company controls WEREN'T
applied.

IBM did what would be considered a massive business mistake and allowed cheap
clones to be made without licensing restrictions. IBM loses, and the world
gains. But had IBM followed modern practices, the resulting surge likely
wouldn't have happened.

The Internet was a govt enterprise, but is definitely not JUST a govt
enterprise. I honestly don't know enough about the underpinnings to say much,
but it's clearly not a corporate effort looking to profit.

The Web exploded because of it's open-ness. Back when I started in the late
90s, you just hit View Source on a site and got all the info on the UI. For
all that it's cool on HN to mock know-nothing web developers, the fact that
someone with a text editor, an FTP client (!), and some persistence can still
publish a page is a huge deal. Dropping in CGI for some interactivity that can
be as complex as PRINTING TO STDOUT is remarkably accessible. I also remember
what corporate networks were like then - sysadmins HATED that you could open
up port 80 and a vast amount of basically unrestricted traffic to/from
EVERYONE would come through. (In terms of security, they were right, but in
terms of functionality, this allowed things to blossom in ways nothing before
it could). Heck, MS had locked down the browser market (I recall when they
declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE) - while other browsers
existed, none got any real traction before Firefox, and Firefox itself was
built on the decision of the defunct Netscape to open source their code.

Linux has undoubtedly changed everything - and it (arguably) only got the
chance to do so because BSD was locked down in lawsuits. And BSD only came
about because AT&T was prevented from doing what a corporation would normally
do. And BSD and Linux only prospered because the various Unix vendors all
couldn't make anything work that wasn't a nightmare of licensing restrictions.
I remember what Microsoft was like in the 90s - I believe they held back
innovation then, not that they spurred it. Where would we be if they only had
commercial Unix vendors to compete with? Or just AT&T?

I won't have to defend the impact of free/open software to this crowd, and
while there are debates as to the sustainability model for extremely large
packages without corporate sponsorship, and we do have packages nowadays being
born from corporate efforts, I think it's fair to say that the current
situation would never have come about from pure corporate efforts alone.

I think capitalism has a lot of good points when it comes to incentives...but
every time I hear someone trash a different economic system by saying that it
fails to take into account human nature, I think they are doing the same with
capitalism. Just because greed exists and can be used as an incentive doesn't
mean that's the only element to consider, nor does using greed in one way mean
that you've removed it as a concern. (See Wall Street incentives to abuse the
market)

------
fictionfuture
This article is garbage, and the believe system behind it is the most
dangerous thing to modern society.

Imagine a world where meritocracy is demolished; in favor of 'equality.' Being
'good' or making customers happy doesn't matter anymore.

Can we please unite behind things like hard-work, quality and discipline to
fight off this thinking?

~~~
Brotkrumen
Funny thing is, the author probably is for a meritocracy. He just debunks the
myth that we ever had one or that we have one today.

The prime predictor of financial success in life isn't merit or hard work, but
still is what it always was: who your parents are.

~~~
nraynaud
I have recently come to a very inconfortable truth (I mean it was always
there, but it hit my brain recently): we owe the Enlightenment to useless
parasites. Nobility and monks whose free time allowed them to tinker and
pursue intellectual curiosity.

~~~
about_help
And yet you use the phrase "useless parasites". Keep meditating!

