
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) - daverecycles
http://adam.heroku.com/past/2008/2/26/the_legacy_of_the_selfmade/
======
samd
Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a
single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in
history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty "thinking".

Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly
tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to
believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you,
because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet
theories.

As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the
post-Teddy Roosevelt era:

Henry Ford

Alfred Sloan

Thomas Watson

Walt Disney

Will Kellogg

Warren Buffett

William Boeing

Gordon Moore

Henry Kaiser

There are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made
men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before
Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that
the general "sentiment" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see
evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just
what the national "sentiment" is, then find scientific studies of people both
before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I don't think he was trying to say there were fewer nouveau riche post-
Roosevelt, but that there were demonized in a new way, and that that stigma
didn't really fully lift until the tech boom.

He's talking about fashion and sentiment, not the actual number of
entrepreneurs.

~~~
samd
Whether they were demonized or not would require some studies as I mentioned
in the last sentences of my previous post. Who demonized them? How much of the
population demonized them? How strongly did people feel towards them? And how
did these sentiments compare with people prior to Teddy Roosevelt?

Without answering those questions we can't rightly draw any conclusions about
people's attitude towards the self-made man.

~~~
anemecek
Does it really matter? It's not like that was the point of the article.

------
gordonguthrie
> America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be
> called a meritocracy

Bit of a fail here. The word meritocracy comes from a book of the same title
written in 1958 by Michael Young (interesting fella, wrote the UK Labour
Party's manifesto in 1945, founded the Open University).

The point about meritocracy is that it is a satirical term. (The beauty of it
being that in any society the wealthy and powerful can claim they rose on
merit. In the time of the Divine Right Of Kings, merit was being chosen by
God.)

But don't take my word for it, read Michael Young on the subject in 2001.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment>

------
bl4k
_Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one
thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you
stayed in the same station of life._

Ye, this isn't really true. Lets take, for example, 18th century Naval
officers from the UK:

* Captain Cook - discovered Australia, mapped the Pacific etc. Father was a farmer

* Horatio Nelson - Defeated the French, considered greatest Naval commander of all time. Father was a minister

* Arthur Philip - Commander during American Revolution, lead colonization of Australia. Father was a teacher.

It is a very common misconception that in old society it was impossible to
move from the lower classes into the upper classes. The British Empire, the
prototypical aristocracy, was largely shaped and developed by people who were
raised in the lower classes. This is because the military, navy, their
universities (eg. Isaac Newton), and many other parts of government and
private societies were strict meritocracies.

The upper classes actually produced a very small number of notable people,
outside of royalty (Charles Darwin, Churchill, Brunel (although his
grandfather was a French farmer)

(Edit: _"America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that
could be called a meritocracy."_ \- Citation needed. See above.)

~~~
aristidb
"The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century
[...]"

Please excuse my quoting from Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution>

So using 18th century people to illustrate that hereditary factors were not
dominant pre-IR is a bit strange.

~~~
bl4k
Most of these guys were born and already famous before the steam engine patent
- let alone the real industrial boon

The Wikipedia summary isn't wrong, it is just misleading. The inventions and
innovations that lead to the industrial revolution were founded in the late
18C, but the real transformation was much later (although it did happen,
comparatively, quickly)

It is a bit like saying that the 'Internet era' is from the 1950's, because
that is when the integrated circuit was created

~~~
aristidb
The environment of 1700 seems likely to share more characteristics with 1750
than 1600. Whether these people were famous during or _just before_ the IR
does not change my point.

Steam engines were invented many times during and before the IR. What allowed
the IR to happen was more likely coal, I think.

------
ubernostrum
As I tend to point out any time someone goes on a masturbatory flight of fancy
like this: there ain't no such thing as a "self-made man". There are only
people who are too short-sighted or too narcissistic to acknowledge the others
who helped them get to where they are.

~~~
dschobel
Just because progress or achievement necessarily occurs in some social context
does not mean it comes about as a result of it.

The fact that your criticism can be levied against _any_ result in the world
should give you a hint as to just how vapid of an idea it is.

~~~
zachrose
> Just because progress or achievement necessarily occurs in some social
> context does not mean it comes about as a result of it.

But it is fair to say that progress and achievement depend on a certain level
of social support, right? How many tech entrepeneurs come from abusive homes
with no food?

------
steveklabnik
I'm from Pittsburgh. Once, on a business trip, I met an old woman. Over the
course of our conversation, our common origins became apparent. She asked me,
"Do the men still have to change their shirts after lunchtime?"[1] I said,
"no, not anymore." "Well, maybe I will go back there again one day."

Carnegie stepped on a lot of heads on his way up. [2]

1: There was so much soot in the air, your shirt would be dirty by midday, so
blue-collar workers brought spares and changed.

2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike>

~~~
axiom
You're so right. Carnegie et al. should have used the non-polluting cold
fusion technology that was widely available at the time. He didn't of course
because he was an evil bastard and loved poisoning people.

Also, as is widely acknowledged, union bosses were in no way responsible for
any violence or wrongdoing. It's all so obvious and one-sided in retrospect,
you know.

Look, on the way from a nepotist aristocracy to creating a prosperous middle
class you don't get it right the first time. Shit gets fucked up, and yes lots
of people do bad things along the way. It's trivially easy to look back and
point out how they only got it 30% right and ignore the fact that everyone
before them got it 10% right.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You're both being dogmatic. Steveklabnik is claiming that Carnegie could've
done more to be an ethical leader, Axiom is claiming that he couldn't.

The truth is, both are possible. I am baffled as to how either of you thinks
the question can be answered without looking at the specific history and the
specific choices Carnegie made and deciding whether he was willfully
destroying lives.

~~~
steveklabnik
Please see my response, which is a sibling to you. I'm being dogmatic on
purpose, responding to the tone of TFA.

I think Carnegie was kind of a jerk, but if he hadn't done it, some other jerk
probably would have. I try not to spend too much of my life casting moral
judgements on others, so I'm still not quite how sure that shakes out.

------
rue
The "status" of olden days, by the by, did not just happen. It was created at
some earlier point in time by "self-made men": warlords, robbers and so on and
then maintained by force or coercion.

------
gwern
One improvement about most technology entrepreneurs compared to the old self-
made men - they're not crushing strikes or hiring Pinkertons to assassinate
workers.

~~~
steveklabnik
I'd often argue that it's not an improvement: at least when there's a baton
hitting you in the face, it's a clear threat.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/evgeny_morozov_is_the_inte...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared.html)

------
bhoung
This is a great example of what separates entrepreneurs from other people: the
ambition and belief that precedes any action at all. Given the list of people
identified as self-made men, I would hazard a guess that there is a long way
to go.

------
rdl
I think he is right on the major premise, but wrong on fashion -- a lot of the
most revolutionary and iconoclastic people I've met dress well, in suits when
appropriate.

------
sharednothing
"Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one
thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you
stayed in the same station of life."

Status has always been based on power. Plenty of poor men grew up to be
powerful men in the pre-industrial world. In this corner of the world (West)
the routes open to the "self-made" man were the military and the clerical
orders.

(It is of course true that the nobility had de facto access to the same
spheres.)

------
axiom
Great post, and I wish more entrepreneurs were this reflective.

It would have been nice if he at least paid homage to Ayn Rand, who he has
clearly read and was influenced by (along with millions of other people.) I
know it's fashionable these days to read Ayn Rand, and then discard her by the
time you're 18, but she was a pretty important figure in helping turn the tide
he's talking about.

